Here Comes the Flood
“When the flood calls,
You have no home, you have no walls”
– Peter Gabriel
I’m glad I had a chance to visit New Orleans – albeit briefly – before it was swept away in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. When I wrote about the city last October, I was forced to mock it – me being me and this being the Reader and all – but if you’re looking for excessive drinking and acts of public lewdity – and you know I am – there’s no better place for it.
I am amused by the Religiati who have declared the Hurricane to be a sign of God’s wrath against a wicked city – a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah with andouille sausage. Michael Marcavage of Repent America issued a statement saying, "Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. … May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits, and bring us trembling before the throne of Almighty God." If this is the case, God must really hate Florida, considering what a battering He put it through last summer. Not that I can blame him.
Granted, Katrina struck New Orleans a mere two days before the annual “Southern Decadence” festival – an event that makes Mardi Gras look like a Quaker picnic – was to begin. Unfortunately for Marcavage and his ilk, Bourbon Street was one of the areas of the city least affected by the storm and floods. While the tony homes and churches of the Garden District are under feet of water and the poor neighborhoods are devastated, much of the French Quarter has remained relatively high and dry. In fact, a couple of bars on Bourbon Street have already reopened for business, and handful of hardy homos and fairy princesses celebrated Southern Decadence with a “Life Goes On?” parade.
The lesson of which is, when it comes to destruction, fags seem to be the only ones God doesn’t hate.
*****
Not to be left out, some Jewish religious leaders are also attributing the destruction in Katrina’s wake to God’s wrath. But they’re not blaming the faigelah. Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Lewin, executive director of the Rabbinic Congress for Peace, says "Katrina is a consequence of the destruction of Gush Katif [the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip] with America's urging and encouragement. The US should have discouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from implementing the Gaza evacuation rather than pushing for it and pressuring Israel into concessions."
Rabbi Joseph Garlitzky, of Chabad Lubavitch, has unearthed the sort of parallels that make conspiracy theorists tremble with glee. Among them:
* 10,000 Jews were expelled from the Gaza Strip. Katrina's death toll is expected to reach at least 10,000.
* The ratio of the population of the US to that of Israel is about 50:1. 10,000 Jews who lost their homes in Gaza is the equivalent of about 500,000 Americans who are now reported to be displaced as result of Katrina.
* Katrina, written in Hebrew, has a biblical numerical equivalent of 374. Two relevant passages in the Torah share the same numerical equivalent: "They have done you evil" (Genesis 50:17) and "The sea upon land" (Exodus 14:15).
* George Bush is from Texas and Condoleezza Rice is from Alabama. They are the Americans held most responsible for the Gaza evacuation. Hurricane Katrina hit the states in between Texas and Alabama – Louisiana and Mississippi. (One would think it would have hit Texas and Alabama, but God works in mysterious ways.)
* The day Katrina hit, Israel began disinterring bodies from the area's Jewish cemetery. Now corpses are floating in flooded areas of New Orleans.
One renowned conspiracy theorist, Israeli Barry Chamish, has been reading his Bible Code. Early this week, he sent a mass email in which he noted: "GUsh is like GUlf, and KATif is like KATrina. If you take 'KAT' from KATif and KATrina, you are left with 'IF' and 'RAIN.' If you support Gush Katif evacuation, it will rain."
That’s the kind of crazy talk even Pat Robertson would be forced to admire.
*****
Speaking of crazy, there are an estimated 10,000 citizens who are still unwilling to leave New Orleans. Hard to believe, when the government is offering each household 2,000 bucks to start over. Woo hoo! Some of these folks are actively hiding from the police who are seeking to evacuate them. You thought New Orleans was great before, just check it out now, the streets running with raw sewage and floating corpses!
As it turns out, leaving town is no guarantee of safety. A smattering of refugees have died due to vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium associated with cholera. Though uncommon under normal circumstances, the floodwaters of Louisiana are rich with the stuff. If the vulnificus doesn’t get you, the E. coli surely will. Levels in the water are at least 10 times higher than acceptable limits set by the CDC, and have been measured at a million times higher than what the EPA allows for recreational waters. Which is fine, as long as you don’t get any on your skin, especially if you have cuts or open wounds. Which never happens during a disaster.
By the way, more than 1000 sources of drinking water in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama are affected by the poisoned waters. But a quarter teaspoon of bleach will clear that right up. Skol!
Nasty as the raw sewage may be, it’s the bobbing corpses that would keep me out of the streets. (No surprise that a number of the holdouts are in the French Quarter, where the streets are free of corpses, though they still run with the traditional junkies.) News stories have focused on the newly dead, found in hospitals, nursing homes and by the side of the road. But I’m wondering how many bodies came bobbing out of those shallow graves or washed, half decayed, out of above-ground vaults. By this time, the place must look like the end of Poltergeist.
*****
Other victims of the storm include some of the 1400 animals from the city’s Audubon Zoo. The dead include two sea otters that died from stress. That would have been me.
*****
The one ray of hope in this event is that people are staying pissed off. And not just because of the political implications. Granted, the government screwed the pooch on this puppy – more about that in a minute – but I’m not enough of an idealist to believe that if the other side had been in power, they would have done much better.
No, I’m glad people are pissed off because we’ve become such a country of pantywaists who are so afraid to be angry about anything, that it pleases me that a small group have been able to hold on to their anger. Granted, they’re a bunch of Looziana hotheads, so what would you expect.
Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, blew his top on The Early Show on CBS, saying, “Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. … Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.” Love him. This is like my dad proposing voting against whoever was in office, on the grounds that he was bound to have done something illegal by now. The Fire Chief of St. Bernard, noting that a task force of police and firefighters from Canada arrived before the Feds had sent any help, said, "If you can get a Canadian team here in four days, US teams should be here faster than that. When they're paying $5 to $6 a gallon for gas, they're going to realize what this place means to America." More on that later. And an Air Force captain told the AP, "I've been in a lot of Third World countries where people were better off than the people here are right now. We've got 28 miles of coastline here that's absolutely destroyed, and the federal government, they're not here."
Norlins Mayor Ray Nagin has kept his head a bit better than those surrounding him. Early on, he was even a tad optimistic about how quickly the city could recover. Even then, though, he was predicting a death toll of 10,000. And Tuesday, when the levee was repaired enough to start pumping out the city, he warned reporters that there were untold horrors just waiting to be uncovered.
In these days when even war is sanitized for our protection, a little unvarnished truth is bracing.
*****
Don’t expect such truth from energy analysts. While a number of folks are understandably worked up about the effects the damage to Gulf energy production and processing will have on the economy, the official word is that the next storm is the one we have to worry about. I thought that was what they said about this one.
Tom Bentz, vice president of BNP Paribas Commodity Futures, says, "We certainly can't stand another storm." Tim Evans, senior oil market analyst for IFR Energy Services, adds, "If we were to see another major storm, we could have damage on damage." Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, an energy risk management company, warns that "Having one beneath Texas would be an unmitigated disaster."
This is like the impotent parent who says, “The next time you sass back at me, you’re gonna be sorry.” It’s Chicken Little in reverse. The sky is not falling, but it could fall at any minute, and the next piece of sky that falls will be really bad.
If you want to get a little paranoid about where we’re heading, perform a Google search for “peak oil.” Or check out this article. But don’t call me in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep.
*****
Of course, there’s no way we could have predicted this, right? I mean, the combination of the storm and its aftermath. Or even if we could, there’s nothing we could have done about it. Certainly, that was the take of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff. "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes [a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees] exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff told reporters early this week.
Except that FEMA, during the Clinton administration, had developed a program called Project Impact, which was designed specifically to mitigate the aftermath of such disasters. The scenario that played out in New Orleans was at the top of their list. Unfortunately, this program was cancelled at the end of February 2001.
Last year, FEMA conducted a drill to prepare for a massive hurricane hitting New Orleans. Scenarios included a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome. This year, the agency planned to fix unresolved problems as such evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens. Unfortunately, funding for that planning was cut.
Don’t get me started on the funding cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers, the group responsible for maintaining the levees. ‘Cause I could go on for an entire article. Ands nobody needs that. But as a result of these cuts, the Corps essentially stopped work on the levee system in 2004. For the first time in 37 years. Federal money for flood control in southeastern Louisiana has been cut in half since 2001, and funding for hurricane protection is about one-third of what it was is 2002.
Of course, Chertoff’s got a lot on his plate. Maybe he missed all that.
Well, in July of this year, US News & World Report ran an article about the danger of a Category 3 storm hitting New Orleans. Katrina was Category 4. The article quoted Ivor van Heerden, the director of Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, who said, "If a hurricane comes next month, New Orleans could no longer exist." The author, Dan Gilgoff, explains: “New Orleans sits below sea level and is locked in by an extensive levee network, like a giant flood-prone bowl; a modest Category 3 storm could deposit up to 27 feet of water in some neighborhoods. A few years ago, the American Red Cross ranked the prospect of a hurricane's hitting New Orleans as the country's deadliest natural disaster threat, with up to 100,000 dead.”
So US News & World Report – in addition to a number of experts Gilgoff interviewed for his article – had imagined the storm which Chertoff called "breathtaking in its surprise."
*****
Bear with me, if you will, for an extensive description of the disaster:
“It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday. “But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however – the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party. “The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level – more than eight feet below in places – so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. “Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.”
Pretty accurate, eh? This was published in National Geographic in October 2004. 11 months ago. Enough people knew enough of what was at risk nearly a year ago that an author (Joel K. Bourne, Jr.) could write a chillingly prescient account of what we’ve just seen.
It’s reason enough to be pissed off.
*****
I assume you know by now that the current head of FEMA, Michael Brown, not only has no background in disaster relief, he was fired from his last job, overseeing judges for horse shows, after a series of lawsuits which alleged failures of supervision on his part. That sentence makes at least four incredible assertions. It would tax the White Queen’s ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Brown got his current job because his college roommate was the former head of FEMA. When the roomie left FEMA to work for the president's re-election campaign, Brown took over.
Not to worry, though. Last March, Brown testified to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security that, "Our nation is prepared, as never before, to deal quickly and capably with the consequences of disasters and other domestic incidents." So we got that goin’ for us. Which is nice.
*****
Some people can always see the silver lining. And one of them, I’m happy to say, is former First Lady Barbara Bush. On touring the Astrodome complex last Monday, Bar noted that "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."
Bar’s husband has teamed up with Bill Clinton to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As you may recall, the boys teamed up earlier this year to raise money for the victims of the tsunami that devastated portions of Asia. Apparently they’re all fine now. You’d think George Bush, of all people, would know a few other guys with some connections he could call on. This seems right up Jimmy Carter’s alley. Rumor has it the slogan for the new fund is, “Fuck You Slopes, We’ve Got Trouble At Home.”
*****
In Related News …
You may not know this – I certainly didn’t – but Oregon has 4 of the 18 most active volcanoes in the nation: Mount Hood, Crater Lake, Newberry and South Sister. Well it seems there is a “bulge” which covers about 100 square miles near South Sister. That makes it about the size of Portland. The bulge is just that – a bulge in the Earth which has been rising for nearly 10 years at the rate of 1.4 inches a year. 14 inches in 10 years may not seem like much. But the cause of the bulge seems to be a pool of magma the size of a lake 1 mile across and 65 feet deep. This magma lake is rising 10 feet each year, but it’s under tremendous pressure, so it only deforms the surface 1.4 inches.
That sounds less good.
Oh, by the way, the magma is moving. Geologists know this because there was a swarm of 350 small earthquakes in the area a year and half ago. 350. The bulge could be a new volcano in the making, or it may result in nothing more than a small cinder cone that spews ash and lava.
Based on our experience in Louisiana, I say we ignore it.
*****
In Other News …
The California legislature has passed a bill which would allow gay marriage in that state. Governuhr Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Wednesday that although he "believes that gay couples are entitled to full protection under the law and should not be discriminated against based upon their relationship," he will veto the bill. He went on to say that the issue should be decided by the courts or by voters directly but not by the legislature.
Sigh.
When the courts allow gay marriage, they’re run by activist judges. When the legislature allows gay marriage, it should be left to the courts. Even Clarence Thomas, when he dissented against overturning sodomy laws in Texas, said that although he thought the law was foolish, it was up to the legislature to change the law.
You can’t win for losin’ around here.
Arnold’s complaint is that California voters approved a ballot measure five years ago defining marriage as between a man and a woman. According to his mouthpiece, Margarita Thompson, the issue of gay marriage should be put to voters in a referendum. "We cannot have a system where the people vote and the legislature derails that vote," Thompson said.
Well in fact we can. And we do. It’s called Representative Democracy. You may have heard of it. In this form of government, people elect representatives to do the day to day work of governing, rather than voting on everything themselves. If the people don’t like the decisions their representatives make, they don’t vote them back into office. I think we’re trying to set one up in Iraq.
*****
My favorite headline of the past week: “Workers Disappearing From Hay Fields.” Unfortunately, the article turned out to be about mechanization on farms.
*****
You have no home, you have no walls”
– Peter Gabriel
I’m glad I had a chance to visit New Orleans – albeit briefly – before it was swept away in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. When I wrote about the city last October, I was forced to mock it – me being me and this being the Reader and all – but if you’re looking for excessive drinking and acts of public lewdity – and you know I am – there’s no better place for it.
I am amused by the Religiati who have declared the Hurricane to be a sign of God’s wrath against a wicked city – a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah with andouille sausage. Michael Marcavage of Repent America issued a statement saying, "Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. … May this act of God cause us all to think about what we tolerate in our city limits, and bring us trembling before the throne of Almighty God." If this is the case, God must really hate Florida, considering what a battering He put it through last summer. Not that I can blame him.
Granted, Katrina struck New Orleans a mere two days before the annual “Southern Decadence” festival – an event that makes Mardi Gras look like a Quaker picnic – was to begin. Unfortunately for Marcavage and his ilk, Bourbon Street was one of the areas of the city least affected by the storm and floods. While the tony homes and churches of the Garden District are under feet of water and the poor neighborhoods are devastated, much of the French Quarter has remained relatively high and dry. In fact, a couple of bars on Bourbon Street have already reopened for business, and handful of hardy homos and fairy princesses celebrated Southern Decadence with a “Life Goes On?” parade.
The lesson of which is, when it comes to destruction, fags seem to be the only ones God doesn’t hate.
*****
Not to be left out, some Jewish religious leaders are also attributing the destruction in Katrina’s wake to God’s wrath. But they’re not blaming the faigelah. Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Lewin, executive director of the Rabbinic Congress for Peace, says "Katrina is a consequence of the destruction of Gush Katif [the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip] with America's urging and encouragement. The US should have discouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from implementing the Gaza evacuation rather than pushing for it and pressuring Israel into concessions."
Rabbi Joseph Garlitzky, of Chabad Lubavitch, has unearthed the sort of parallels that make conspiracy theorists tremble with glee. Among them:
* 10,000 Jews were expelled from the Gaza Strip. Katrina's death toll is expected to reach at least 10,000.
* The ratio of the population of the US to that of Israel is about 50:1. 10,000 Jews who lost their homes in Gaza is the equivalent of about 500,000 Americans who are now reported to be displaced as result of Katrina.
* Katrina, written in Hebrew, has a biblical numerical equivalent of 374. Two relevant passages in the Torah share the same numerical equivalent: "They have done you evil" (Genesis 50:17) and "The sea upon land" (Exodus 14:15).
* George Bush is from Texas and Condoleezza Rice is from Alabama. They are the Americans held most responsible for the Gaza evacuation. Hurricane Katrina hit the states in between Texas and Alabama – Louisiana and Mississippi. (One would think it would have hit Texas and Alabama, but God works in mysterious ways.)
* The day Katrina hit, Israel began disinterring bodies from the area's Jewish cemetery. Now corpses are floating in flooded areas of New Orleans.
One renowned conspiracy theorist, Israeli Barry Chamish, has been reading his Bible Code. Early this week, he sent a mass email in which he noted: "GUsh is like GUlf, and KATif is like KATrina. If you take 'KAT' from KATif and KATrina, you are left with 'IF' and 'RAIN.' If you support Gush Katif evacuation, it will rain."
That’s the kind of crazy talk even Pat Robertson would be forced to admire.
*****
Speaking of crazy, there are an estimated 10,000 citizens who are still unwilling to leave New Orleans. Hard to believe, when the government is offering each household 2,000 bucks to start over. Woo hoo! Some of these folks are actively hiding from the police who are seeking to evacuate them. You thought New Orleans was great before, just check it out now, the streets running with raw sewage and floating corpses!
As it turns out, leaving town is no guarantee of safety. A smattering of refugees have died due to vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium associated with cholera. Though uncommon under normal circumstances, the floodwaters of Louisiana are rich with the stuff. If the vulnificus doesn’t get you, the E. coli surely will. Levels in the water are at least 10 times higher than acceptable limits set by the CDC, and have been measured at a million times higher than what the EPA allows for recreational waters. Which is fine, as long as you don’t get any on your skin, especially if you have cuts or open wounds. Which never happens during a disaster.
By the way, more than 1000 sources of drinking water in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama are affected by the poisoned waters. But a quarter teaspoon of bleach will clear that right up. Skol!
Nasty as the raw sewage may be, it’s the bobbing corpses that would keep me out of the streets. (No surprise that a number of the holdouts are in the French Quarter, where the streets are free of corpses, though they still run with the traditional junkies.) News stories have focused on the newly dead, found in hospitals, nursing homes and by the side of the road. But I’m wondering how many bodies came bobbing out of those shallow graves or washed, half decayed, out of above-ground vaults. By this time, the place must look like the end of Poltergeist.
*****
Other victims of the storm include some of the 1400 animals from the city’s Audubon Zoo. The dead include two sea otters that died from stress. That would have been me.
*****
The one ray of hope in this event is that people are staying pissed off. And not just because of the political implications. Granted, the government screwed the pooch on this puppy – more about that in a minute – but I’m not enough of an idealist to believe that if the other side had been in power, they would have done much better.
No, I’m glad people are pissed off because we’ve become such a country of pantywaists who are so afraid to be angry about anything, that it pleases me that a small group have been able to hold on to their anger. Granted, they’re a bunch of Looziana hotheads, so what would you expect.
Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, blew his top on The Early Show on CBS, saying, “Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. … Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.” Love him. This is like my dad proposing voting against whoever was in office, on the grounds that he was bound to have done something illegal by now. The Fire Chief of St. Bernard, noting that a task force of police and firefighters from Canada arrived before the Feds had sent any help, said, "If you can get a Canadian team here in four days, US teams should be here faster than that. When they're paying $5 to $6 a gallon for gas, they're going to realize what this place means to America." More on that later. And an Air Force captain told the AP, "I've been in a lot of Third World countries where people were better off than the people here are right now. We've got 28 miles of coastline here that's absolutely destroyed, and the federal government, they're not here."
Norlins Mayor Ray Nagin has kept his head a bit better than those surrounding him. Early on, he was even a tad optimistic about how quickly the city could recover. Even then, though, he was predicting a death toll of 10,000. And Tuesday, when the levee was repaired enough to start pumping out the city, he warned reporters that there were untold horrors just waiting to be uncovered.
In these days when even war is sanitized for our protection, a little unvarnished truth is bracing.
*****
Don’t expect such truth from energy analysts. While a number of folks are understandably worked up about the effects the damage to Gulf energy production and processing will have on the economy, the official word is that the next storm is the one we have to worry about. I thought that was what they said about this one.
Tom Bentz, vice president of BNP Paribas Commodity Futures, says, "We certainly can't stand another storm." Tim Evans, senior oil market analyst for IFR Energy Services, adds, "If we were to see another major storm, we could have damage on damage." Peter Beutel, president of Cameron Hanover, an energy risk management company, warns that "Having one beneath Texas would be an unmitigated disaster."
This is like the impotent parent who says, “The next time you sass back at me, you’re gonna be sorry.” It’s Chicken Little in reverse. The sky is not falling, but it could fall at any minute, and the next piece of sky that falls will be really bad.
If you want to get a little paranoid about where we’re heading, perform a Google search for “peak oil.” Or check out this article. But don’t call me in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep.
*****
Of course, there’s no way we could have predicted this, right? I mean, the combination of the storm and its aftermath. Or even if we could, there’s nothing we could have done about it. Certainly, that was the take of Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff. "That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes [a powerful hurricane and a breach of levees] exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight," Chertoff told reporters early this week.
Except that FEMA, during the Clinton administration, had developed a program called Project Impact, which was designed specifically to mitigate the aftermath of such disasters. The scenario that played out in New Orleans was at the top of their list. Unfortunately, this program was cancelled at the end of February 2001.
Last year, FEMA conducted a drill to prepare for a massive hurricane hitting New Orleans. Scenarios included a helicopter evacuation of the Superdome. This year, the agency planned to fix unresolved problems as such evacuating sick and injured people from the Superdome and housing tens of thousands of stranded citizens. Unfortunately, funding for that planning was cut.
Don’t get me started on the funding cuts to the Army Corps of Engineers, the group responsible for maintaining the levees. ‘Cause I could go on for an entire article. Ands nobody needs that. But as a result of these cuts, the Corps essentially stopped work on the levee system in 2004. For the first time in 37 years. Federal money for flood control in southeastern Louisiana has been cut in half since 2001, and funding for hurricane protection is about one-third of what it was is 2002.
Of course, Chertoff’s got a lot on his plate. Maybe he missed all that.
Well, in July of this year, US News & World Report ran an article about the danger of a Category 3 storm hitting New Orleans. Katrina was Category 4. The article quoted Ivor van Heerden, the director of Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes, who said, "If a hurricane comes next month, New Orleans could no longer exist." The author, Dan Gilgoff, explains: “New Orleans sits below sea level and is locked in by an extensive levee network, like a giant flood-prone bowl; a modest Category 3 storm could deposit up to 27 feet of water in some neighborhoods. A few years ago, the American Red Cross ranked the prospect of a hurricane's hitting New Orleans as the country's deadliest natural disaster threat, with up to 100,000 dead.”
So US News & World Report – in addition to a number of experts Gilgoff interviewed for his article – had imagined the storm which Chertoff called "breathtaking in its surprise."
*****
Bear with me, if you will, for an extensive description of the disaster:
“It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday. “But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however – the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party. “The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level – more than eight feet below in places – so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. “Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.”
Pretty accurate, eh? This was published in National Geographic in October 2004. 11 months ago. Enough people knew enough of what was at risk nearly a year ago that an author (Joel K. Bourne, Jr.) could write a chillingly prescient account of what we’ve just seen.
It’s reason enough to be pissed off.
*****
I assume you know by now that the current head of FEMA, Michael Brown, not only has no background in disaster relief, he was fired from his last job, overseeing judges for horse shows, after a series of lawsuits which alleged failures of supervision on his part. That sentence makes at least four incredible assertions. It would tax the White Queen’s ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Brown got his current job because his college roommate was the former head of FEMA. When the roomie left FEMA to work for the president's re-election campaign, Brown took over.
Not to worry, though. Last March, Brown testified to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security that, "Our nation is prepared, as never before, to deal quickly and capably with the consequences of disasters and other domestic incidents." So we got that goin’ for us. Which is nice.
*****
Some people can always see the silver lining. And one of them, I’m happy to say, is former First Lady Barbara Bush. On touring the Astrodome complex last Monday, Bar noted that "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."
Bar’s husband has teamed up with Bill Clinton to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. As you may recall, the boys teamed up earlier this year to raise money for the victims of the tsunami that devastated portions of Asia. Apparently they’re all fine now. You’d think George Bush, of all people, would know a few other guys with some connections he could call on. This seems right up Jimmy Carter’s alley. Rumor has it the slogan for the new fund is, “Fuck You Slopes, We’ve Got Trouble At Home.”
*****
In Related News …
You may not know this – I certainly didn’t – but Oregon has 4 of the 18 most active volcanoes in the nation: Mount Hood, Crater Lake, Newberry and South Sister. Well it seems there is a “bulge” which covers about 100 square miles near South Sister. That makes it about the size of Portland. The bulge is just that – a bulge in the Earth which has been rising for nearly 10 years at the rate of 1.4 inches a year. 14 inches in 10 years may not seem like much. But the cause of the bulge seems to be a pool of magma the size of a lake 1 mile across and 65 feet deep. This magma lake is rising 10 feet each year, but it’s under tremendous pressure, so it only deforms the surface 1.4 inches.
That sounds less good.
Oh, by the way, the magma is moving. Geologists know this because there was a swarm of 350 small earthquakes in the area a year and half ago. 350. The bulge could be a new volcano in the making, or it may result in nothing more than a small cinder cone that spews ash and lava.
Based on our experience in Louisiana, I say we ignore it.
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In Other News …
The California legislature has passed a bill which would allow gay marriage in that state. Governuhr Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Wednesday that although he "believes that gay couples are entitled to full protection under the law and should not be discriminated against based upon their relationship," he will veto the bill. He went on to say that the issue should be decided by the courts or by voters directly but not by the legislature.
Sigh.
When the courts allow gay marriage, they’re run by activist judges. When the legislature allows gay marriage, it should be left to the courts. Even Clarence Thomas, when he dissented against overturning sodomy laws in Texas, said that although he thought the law was foolish, it was up to the legislature to change the law.
You can’t win for losin’ around here.
Arnold’s complaint is that California voters approved a ballot measure five years ago defining marriage as between a man and a woman. According to his mouthpiece, Margarita Thompson, the issue of gay marriage should be put to voters in a referendum. "We cannot have a system where the people vote and the legislature derails that vote," Thompson said.
Well in fact we can. And we do. It’s called Representative Democracy. You may have heard of it. In this form of government, people elect representatives to do the day to day work of governing, rather than voting on everything themselves. If the people don’t like the decisions their representatives make, they don’t vote them back into office. I think we’re trying to set one up in Iraq.
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My favorite headline of the past week: “Workers Disappearing From Hay Fields.” Unfortunately, the article turned out to be about mechanization on farms.
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posted by John Bliss at
10:29 PM
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