Healthcare for Peace

Shutting down the blog and Deja Vu in Mexico

2007-11-04T09:23:00.000-08:00

Thank you everyone who has read my blog. I am shutting it down now, will not be posting again unless something happens to make me want to restart it.

It is 2+ yrs post Katrina. The gulf coast is not up and going again yet, though much work has been done, continues to be done, continues to need to be done. It will never be like it was. Things change and a rapid reconstruction vs many many yrs slow growth means things will be different. The Big Easy is not so big, and not so easy a place to live since many of those without means to reconstruct have not been able to.

The canals have been cobbled back together, unsure how well or if they will hold for another hurricane or big flood. People are rebuilding, though many have given up and moved on. There is still a great need for help, financially and body-wise. If anyone has thought about taking a trip to MS/LA to see what is going on, perhaps to help in some way, there are lots of organizations doing good work who could use another person for even a day.

Again, thank you for reading here. Remember to vote. And have an emergency kit together because we have been shown that in time of emergency we can rely on ourselves and each other. There will be no cavalry coming to help, unless you are one of the Rich and Powerful.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, 300,000 people are trapped in their homes from flooding.

Article here.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled severe floods in the South Mexican state of Tabasco where rivers burst their banks after heavy rain. The centre of the state capital, Villahermosa, is under between 2m (6 feet) and 6m of water with only rooftops visible from the air. Some 300,000 are still trapped in their homes in Tabasco, waiting to be rescued by boat or helicopter.

Overall, the floods have claimed at least five lives in southern Mexico. Officially, one person has died in Tabasco due to the floods, and four people were killed in the neighbouring state of Chiapas, where several thousand homes have been affected. President Felipe Calderon has ordered the entire air force to help bring supplies into the region and move people out.

'Everything gone'

Villahermosa is completely overwhelmed by murky, filthy water, the BBC's Andy Gallacher reports from the city. Soldiers, first-aid workers and volunteers are scouring the streets in small boats, handing out fresh food and water, both of which are now in short supply.

The Mexican government has admitted that the scale of this disaster has taken them by surprise and for those still trapped in the remote areas of Tabasco aid is still a long way off. As the massive operation continues, there are now fears that disease could spread and forecasters say more heavy rain is on the way....(more)

Another article here.

Much of Tabasco capital remains underwater
Hundreds of rooftops rose like islands from a murky snake-infested sea of floodwater that gave this besieged city a look eerily reminiscent of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Soldiers and sailors in combat gear clutched automatic weapons to ward off looters and other criminals as rescuers worked into the night Saturday. Various media said eight people had died, one in Tabasco state and seven in neighboring Chiapas state, but state officials couldn't confirm the reports.

About 80 percent of Tabasco was underwater, but some rivers receded slightly Saturday. Villahermosa, the state's capital and largest city, remained largely flooded. Emergency crews struggled to maintain calm amid one of this country's worst-ever natural disasters. "It is catastrophic. We're never going to recover," psychologist Guadalupe Soto, 40, said as she peered across muddy, waist-high water at her submerged two-story house.

Villahermosa also was prey to horrifying rumors — that crocodiles, which normally live along the banks of some rivers, had invaded the floodwaters in the city's center, or that a dam upstream was about to burst....(more)

Looks like the coast is mostly just wet.

2007-09-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

A few tornadoes, a bunch of rain, but nothing too bad otherwise for gulf coast weather for now. Much relief amongst friends down there. As usual, there are a couple more things developing in the Atlantic. Invest 96 and 97 which may or may not do something. Reading weather stuff makes me wonder what"Invest" means. Anyone know?

Tropical storm warning issued for metro New Orleans

2007-09-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Link to article here.

The National Weather Service put metro New Orleans under a tropical storm warning at 10 a.m., as rain, strong winds and coastal flooding are predicted to hit the area starting Saturday afternoon.

The warning covers Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, St. Tammany and Tangipahoa parishes, in addition to coastal Mississippi counties.

Meteorologist Jim Vasilj of the weather service's Slidell office, said predictions call for 20 to 25 mph winds increasing to 35 mph to 40 mph during the day, with gusts topping those speeds.

About 2 to 4 inches of rain is expected to fall, with isolated downpours of up to 6 inches, Vasilj said. The storm might also cause coastal flooding in areas around Lake Pontchartrain and down Plaquemines Parish.

"It should start kicking in Saturday afternoon, then it should be weakening Saturday evening as it exits and moves toward the Baton Rouge area," he said. "By midnight, it should pretty much be past."

The service also issued an inland tropical storm warning for Washington Parish and Pearl River County.

Area emergency officials continued to make preparations Friday, just in case the bad weather over the eastern Gulf of Mexico continues to strengthen.

A contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers began the estimated eight-hour process of closing the Company Canal in Westwego to storm surge.

It marks the first closure across the waterway since the corps began emergency work to take a string of vulnerable floodwalls out of the flood protection system this summer.

Jerry Spohrer, director of the West Jefferson Levee District, said he hopes the bad weather turns out to be merely an excuse to test the new equipment.

"It's an excellent exercise to assure that we know how to close this gate," he said. "Hopefully we don't need it."

A tropical storm, maybe weak hurricane, is headed for MS/LA, FEMA trailers evacuating.

2007-09-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Looks like rain is headed to the gulf, along with some winds and 1-2 ft tide increase. Not as bad as a full fledged hurricane, but still those in trailers need to seriously consider evacuating. I heard from a friend in MS that construction is finally started on their property and they hope someday to move out of their FEMA mansion for good.

Link here.l

Harrison County recommends evacuating FEMA trailers; shelters open at 5 p.m.

The Harrison County Emergency Management Agency is gearing up after this morning's issuance of a tropical storm warning, meaning tropical storm conditions are expected to impact the area within 24 hours. It plans to open shelters at 5 p.m. today.

It is important for all residents residing in less than sturdy structures, specifically FEMA trailers or other similar structures, to actively monitor local media and be prepared to move to safe shelter if needed. Residents living in low lying areas should be prepared to move to higher ground if needed.

Currently Harrison County is expected to receive flood levels 4 to 7 feet above normal. The rising water could potentially impact dwellings located in any low lying areas that typically flood with heavy rains. The National Weather Service has advised that Harrison County can expect 2 to 4 inches of rain in the next 24 hours.

An evacuation recommendation is issued for all residents who reside in a FEMA trailer, mobile home or other similar structure. Residents are encouraged to leave the immediate area of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and seek shelter in a sturdy structure.

The Harrison County Emergency Management Agency and Coast Transit Authority are working in conjunction to provide emergency transportation assistance to residents in need of that service.

For transportation assistance residents should call 896-8080. For patients with special medical needs, please call 865-4111 or 865-1251.

Harrison County Emergency Management Agency, in conjunction with the American Red Cross, has designated the following public schools as shelters of last resort:

• Lizana Elementary School - 15341 Lizana School Road

• North Bay Elementary, Biloxi - 1825 Popps Ferry Road

• Central Elementary School, Gulfport - 1043 Pass Road

• Harrison Central High School - 15600 School Road

• Harrison Central Elementary - 15451 Dedeaux Road

• D'Iberville High School - 3320 Warrior Drive

• Saucier Elementary School - 24052 First Street

• Good Deeds Community Center - 15101 Madison Street

Residents should be prepared to provide for themselves and their family for a period of at least three (3) days.

A family shelter supply kit should include:

• Ready to eat canned meats, fruits and vegetables. No cooking will be permitted at the shelter

• One gallon of water per person per day (figure for 72 hours)

• Cooler filled with ice

• Canned juices, milk and soup.

• First Aid kit that includes your family's medications.

• Battery-powered radio, flashlight and extra batteries.

• Sanitation supplies.

• Special needs items for infants, elderly or disabled family members.

• Clothing and bedding (cot or sleeping bag).

• Extra set of car keys, credit cards or travelers checks.

• Keep important family papers in a water and fire proof container.

Please monitor sunherald.com and local television and radio stations for updates regarding these shelters.

Blackwater license being revoked in Iraq

2007-09-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

For Blackwater's license being revoked in Iraq (article below) I am reposting my Black SUV picture from NO 9/05. We saw several black SUVs, along with "private guards" that weren't Police or National Guard. The picture may not be exciting, but we tried to avoid them, not look directly at them, not give offense to be stopped. I am wondering, will the bush administration actually let the Iraqi gvt HAVE the power to deny Blackwater their license? Will the Blackwater mercs come back to the USA? This could be interesting.

Direct link to article here.

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government said Monday that it was revoking the license of an American security firm accused of involvement in the deaths of eight civilians in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion near a State Department motorcade.

The Interior Ministry said it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force in the Sunday shooting. It was the latest accusation against the U.S.-contracted firms that operate with little or no supervision and are widely disliked by Iraqis who resent their speeding motorcades and forceful behavior.

Underscoring the seriousness of the matter, the State Department said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice planned to call Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to express regret and assure him that the U.S. has launched an investigation into the matter to ensure nothing like it happens again.

Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and 13 were wounded when contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad.

"We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities," Khalaf said.

The spokesman said witness reports pointed to Blackwater involvement but said the shooting was still under investigation. It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater was intended to be temporary or permanent.

Blackwater, based in Moyock, N.C., provides security for many U.S. civilian operations in the country.

The secretive company, run by a former Navy SEAL, has an estimated 1,000 employees in Iraq and at least $800 million in government contracts. It is one of the most high-profile security firms in Iraq, with its fleet of "Little Bird" helicopters and armed door gunners swarming Baghdad and beyond. (more to article at link)

Katrina: The Gathering

2007-09-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

I found a deck of "Magic" game cards about Katrina. Good job guys. Here are a few, just for fun.

Link here.

Katrina: The Gathering
This is the combined effort of Ubiq and myself to use our mighty ubergeek powers to laugh in the face of that which cannot be explained. No offense is intended, unless offended is a Bureaucrat or Politician creature.

2 year anniversary. Here are some numbers and graphics

2007-08-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

Recovery by the numbers, link here.

Electrical permits, link here.

Demolition permists, link
here.

I downloaded them and tried to say to post graphics but photobucket seems to not be working right right now. Will try later, but they are at those links and quite interesting.

Data Archive of past Hurricanes, Cyclones, Typhoons

2007-08-25T20:35:00.000-07:00

I found this interesting website of data.
Click here, and pick your storm. There are several maps, showing wind direction and speed, pressure, route of storm and temperature of the ocean (watch how the ocean temp lowers after the storm passes, bringing colder water to the surface), and rain. There is a Help button up top which gives more info on each map, and if you click on the arrows on the third box up top it changes day/time as the storm progresses. Neat.

FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. They didn't tell anybody. Heck of a job.

2007-08-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Direct linkhere.

Greg Palast: Hurricane George: How the White House Drowned New Orleans
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 08/24/2007 - 2:13pm. Guest Contribution

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Greg Palast

[Thursday, August 23] It's been two years. And America's media is about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans. Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again. The big networks will float into the moldering corpse of the city and give you uplifting stories about rebuilding and hope.

Now, let's cut through the crybaby crap. Here's what happened two years ago -- and what's happening now. This is what an inside source told me. And it makes me sick:

"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody."

The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistleblower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

I'd come to van Heerden about another matter, but in our talks, it was clear he had something he wanted to say, and it was a big one. He charged that the White House, FEMA, and the Army Corps hid, for critical hours, their discovery that the levees surrounding New Orleans were cracking, about to burst and drown the city.

Understand that Katrina never hit New Orleans. The hurricane swung east of the city, so the state evacuation directors assumed New Orleans was now safe -- and evacuation could slow while emergency efforts moved east with the storm.

But unknown to the state, in those crucial hours on Monday, the federal government's helicopters had filmed the cracks that would become walls of death by Tuesday.

Van Heerden revealed: "FEMA knew at 11 o'clock on Monday that the levees had breeched. At 2 p.m., they flew over the 17th Street Canal and took video of the breech."

Question: "So the White House wouldn't tell you the levees had breeched?"

Dr. Van Heerden: "They didn't tell anybody."

Question: "And you're at the Emergency Center.'

Dr. Van Heerden: "I mean nobody knew. The Corps of Engineers knew. FEMA knew. None of us knew."

I could not get the White House gang to respond to the charges.

That leaves the big, big question: WHY? Why on earth would the White House not tell the state to get the remaining folks out of there?

The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God -- but a catastrophic failure of the levees is an act of Bush. Under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage -- and the deaths -- a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out, "these people must be compensated."

The federal government, by law, must build and maintain the Mississippi River levees to withstand known dangers -- or pay the price when they fail.

Indeed, that was the rule applied in the storms that hit Westhampton Dunes, New York, in 1992. There, when federal sea barriers failed, the floodwaters wiped away 190 homes. The Feds rebuilt them from the public treasury. But these were not just any homes. They are worth an average of $3 million apiece -- the summer homes of movie stars and celebrity speculators.

There were no movie stars floating face down in the Lower Ninth Ward nor in Lakeview nor in St. Bernard Parish. For the 'luvvies' of Westhampton Dunes, the federal government even trucked in sand to replace the beaches. But for New Orleans' survivors, there's the aluminum gulag of FEMA trailer parks. Today, two years later, 89,000 families still live in this mobile home Guantanamo -- with no plan whatsoever for their return.

And what was the effect of the White House's self-serving delay?

I spoke with van Heerden in his university office. The computer model of the hurricane flashed quietly as I waited for him to answer. Then he said, "Fifteen hundred people drowned. That's the bottom line."

They could have survived Hurricane Katrina. But they got no mercy from Hurricane George.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

For the rest of the story, get the DVD, "BIG EASY TO BIG EMPTY: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans," as reported by Greg Palast from Louisiana for Democracy Now - with Amy Goodman and the music of "the city that care forgot." Watch a clip at (click here).

Financing dispute stalls Katrina cottages (more red tape)

2007-08-21T22:21:00.000-07:00

Link to article and comments here.

Eight months after FEMA announced plans to distribute $388 million for alternative housing along the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast, Louisiana's $74.5 million share stands untapped because of bureaucratic haggling and, more recently, a dispute between the state housing board and a group of private contractors slated to build the structures.

Those circumstances leave the state several months away from handing any storm victims the keys to the so-called Katrina Cottages named for the killer hurricane of two summers ago.

The latest rub, said an organizer of the private consortium, is what cut the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency will take as the state's coordinating entity for the program, which Congress approved in 2006 to test alternatives for the FEMA trailers that still dot the coastline two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Ben Dupuy, a partner in the Cypress Group, the lead of four firms in Cypress Cottage Partners, said Tuesday that housing agency executives have proposed an administrative fee of as much as 10 percent, an amount that would come in addition to whatever management fee the private partnership collects as part of its contract.

Louisiana officials are aiming to build 450 to 600 structures that are designed to withstand hurricane-force winds but not necessarily serve as permanent housing. The higher the housing agency's cut, Dupuy said, the fewer units available to the thousands of Louisiana residents still living in trailers or out of state, waiting for an option to return.

Dupuy said Cypress and LHFA walked away from a daylong negotiating session late last week without an agreement. The budget outline, described by varying officials as conceptual, remains on the preliminary agenda for the agency's board meeting scheduled for today at its Baton Rouge headquarters.

"The LHFA has not yet shared what they're planning to go ahead with" at today's meeting, Dupuy said. "If it's the last thing we spoke about last week, then the two parties are not in agreement."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco selected LHFA as the coordinating agency in January, weeks after FEMA announced preliminary award amounts for the program and about the time federal authorities began budget negotiations with the four participating states.

A housing agency spokeswoman did not return messages Tuesday, though an attorney for the agency described the process in a recent interview as long but fruitful. "We are still waiting on some last-minute budget issues," said Keith Cunningham. "They are going to be resolved before (today's) board meeting."

Individual units average about $54,600, including site acquisition, construction and administrative costs estimated in the Cypress proposal submitted to the state last fall. The number of units actually built will vary according to what size families are selected as recipients. Larger families get larger, more expensive units.

Dupuy said he wants a $66 million construction budget, which he said would include a program management fee of about 7.5 percent, though he said that is not necessarily all profit. That amount assumes that the remainder of the state's $74.5 million grant would be divided this way: $3 million to LHFA; $2 million for the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps, for its role in helping identify potential recipients; and $3.5 million for research, development, environmental fees and reimbursement costs to Cypress for what the partners have already put into the program.

Any budget outline is subject next to FEMA's endorsement. Because FEMA has been involved in the negotiating loop since January, that step might ordinarily be viewed as a formality. But it is unclear whether federal officials would approve a budget if it entails terms that left the Cypress Group unwilling to sign a contract.

Diane Perry, a spokeswoman in FEMA's New Orleans office, said she could offer no details, adding that the negotiations are being handled out of the agency's national headquarters.

Also left unsettled are the qualifications and selection process for recipients and the exact locations of four planned Katrina Cottage communities. They are penciled in for Jackson Barracks, the Treme neighborhood, Abbeville and Lake Charles.

Besides portending a longer wait for potential cottage recipients, the circumstances underscore the complexities and contention that have marked the program since FEMA first invited Gulf Coast states to submit proposals to compete for a $400 million allocation.

From the outset, Louisiana officials decried FEMA's decision to make the program competitive, rather than based on need. The state's politicians ratcheted up the rhetoric after FEMA announced Dec. 22 that Mississippi was getting $281 million to Louisiana's $74.5 million and about $15 million each for Texas and Alabama.

Top FEMA executives initially defended the distribution, but later retreated, telling a congressional panel convened by U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., that the agency could have spread the awards more evenly considering Louisiana lost 3¤1/2 to four times as many residences as Mississippi.

The award amounts have stood, nonetheless, with Mississippi's budget outline winning FEMA approval in April after four months of negotiation. Mississippi placed its first home on a recipient's property in June and as of Tuesday had identified 753 potential recipients, with 108 already in new housing units.

Separately, the Cypress consortium has lost one of its members, ICF International, the private firm often hammered for its handling of the state's Road Home program for displaced homeowners. Dupuy said ICF opted out in January, about the time budget negotiations began. Asked whether ICF's public relations troubles involving Road Home contributed to its departure, Dupuy replied, "It was a mutual agreement."

Recent letters among Louisiana and FEMA officials illuminate additional frustration of recent months. Several Louisiana members of Congress urged FEMA Director David Paulison on July 12 to expedite the release of the state's grant, and they noted Mississippi's April approval in their appeal.

Paulison answered July 30 by pointing to FEMA's continued participation in talks. But he also tacitly acknowledged difficulties between Cypress and LHFA by informing the members of Congress that FEMA by law could meet only with the housing agency. Cypress, Paulison said, remained nothing more than a "potential contractor" that had yet to ink any document tying it to the deal.

Louisiana Recovery Authority Director Andy Kopplin, whose agency coordinated Louisiana's original proposal to FEMA, chimed in on Aug. 8 with a letter to Housing Agency President Milton Davis. Kopplin lamented a "lack of coordinated and constructive communications between the LHFA and Cypress and to a lesser extent FEMA regarding budgetary and programmatic issues."

Volunteers in NOLA

2007-08-21T22:18:00.000-07:00

Link here.

Volunteers worth millions as the city still recovers

$263 million worth of service given so far, report estimates

By John Pope
Staff writer

By rolling up their sleeves to perform tasks such as feeding and sheltering evacuees, tutoring youngsters and gutting and rebuilding houses, about 1.1 million volunteers have contributed services worth nearly $263 million in the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, according to a federal report released Monday.

About 600,000 men and women have donated their time in the storm-stricken area in the past year, 9 percent more than the 550,000 who came in the first year after the storm, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service. That government organization is an umbrella agency for several volunteer groups, including AmeriCorps.

"The generosity of the American people has been overwhelming," said Donald Powell, federal coordinator for rebuilding the Gulf Coast, during a news conference at Beauregard Middle School in Violet. The gathering was held not only to discuss the report, but also to give the shuttered school the temporary name of Camp Hope, a shelter for volunteers that houses about 200 people each week.

The previous Camp Hope had been at a nearby elementary school.

Because the scope of destruction was so vast, volunteer activity will have to continue at this level for at least eight more years, said Jim Pate, Habitat for Humanity's local executive director.

Calling the volunteer turnout "the bright side of the American spirit," Powell said he isn't worried about Katrina fatigue.

"I think that's evident today," he said, gesturing toward about 60 cheering volunteers in the audience.

The midday news conference was held in the un-air-conditioned cafeteria, where the temperature hovered around 90 degrees as electric fans barely stirred the hot, heavy air. Powell appeared in shirtsleeves and Pate wore shorts.

"I'm hot in here," U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said.

"You guys are cool in here," he said, pointing to the volunteers seated in front of him, "because you guys are the ones who have been working out here making a difference. By carrying the community on your backs, you are the essence of public service."

The calculations that resulted in the figures disclosed Monday were the work of the Corporation for National and Community Service. To determine how many people had come, the agency took head counts from about 40 organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity, that have dispatched volunteers to the region, spokesman Sandy Scott said.

The 1.1 million people have performed about 14 million hours of work. To find the worth of an hour of volunteer work, Scott said the agency got a figure of $18.77 from Independent Sector, a coalition of corporations, foundations and volunteer groups. Using that amount, the government reached the $262.8 million total.

As the work continues, the need for volunteers will change, Scott said. While people who could gut houses and haul away muck were important in the first wave, Scott said the call has gone out for volunteers with tutoring, construction and medical skills.

Volunteers are vital, said David Dysart, St. Bernard Parish's recovery director. "Without you, this wouldn't be possible," he told the AmeriCorps workers. "Camp Hope rocks." Two volunteers, Crystal Wells of San Diego and Patrick Semanski of the San Francisco area, received the President's Volunteer Service Awards.

Did you hear that FEMA and Texas is all prepared for Hurricane Dean?

2007-08-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Just in case it moves north or its outlying rain causes a problem. I had a question posed to me by another cynical friend. Will those people living in northern Mexico go north to escape Dean, if it heads that way? What will happen at the border?

Katrina goat puts bad days behind (Brownie moves on)

2007-08-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

Full article here.

Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed New Orleans, Michael Brown, who bore the brunt of the criticism for the federal response to the storm, has moved into a career promoting disaster-response and data-mining technology for government agencies and private customers.

Brown, who served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Katrina blasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, has not returned to New Orleans in nearly two years. His last stop was on Sept. 11, 2005, the day before he resigned under pressure.

The next time he sees New Orleans, Brown ruefully suggests, it may be in response to lawsuits resulting from Katrina, which left more than 1,000 dead and tens of thousands homeless.

But while Brown may be gone from government, some of the private companies he now represents say they stand ready to help the government cope with new storms barreling into the Gulf of Mexico, as well as other potential disasters.

Living in Boulder, Colo., Brown has become a traveling salesman for companies selling computer software, high-tech machinery and communications technology. One of the companies focuses on anti-terrorism efforts, trying to help airlines detect potentially dangerous patterns among the flying public. Others specialize in Brown's old field of disaster response, helping communities rebuild and providing technology so the military and first responders can manage casualties on the ground.

Battle over 35 deaths at St. Rita's to begin

2007-08-12T11:27:00.000-07:00

Reading about this incident up until now gave me a very strong opinion about it. As more information comes out I find I have judged too quickly. It will be very interesting to see what comes of this, who is held responsible, what really happened. I hope it will bring enough notice to perhaps go after those higher up, governmentally I mean, though that may not happen. Was there a mandatory evacuation order? Was there a way to comply with that? Who is responsible for the massive flooding and subsequent deaths?

At any rate, this incident was tragic.

Link to article
here.

ury selection starts Monday in high-profile trial of a couple accused of abandoning their nursing home to Katrina's fury

High on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, St. Francisville weathered Hurricane Katrina's initial onslaught with scattered power outages and some downed trees.

Then came the waves of evacuees, including several hundred people who took shelter in a school in the picturesque town 25 miles north of Baton Rouge and 115 feet above sea level.

"We obviously didn't have any flooding and there wasn't much wind damage, but we were bulging at the seams for weeks and weeks," West Feliciana Parish tourism director Kitty Martin said. "The town probably doubled in size overnight."

Nearly two years later, St. Francisville is about to be inundated by another Katrina-spawned wave of visitors as a West Feliciana Parish jury will be asked to render a judgment in what was perhaps the catastrophic storm's deadliest episode: the drowning of 35 residents at St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish.

The home's owners, Mabel Mangano, 64, and her husband,Sal Mangano, 67, face 35 countsof negligent homicide for not evacuating the nursing home as Katrina bore down on southeastern Louisiana in late August2005

(clip some of article)

Trapped by floodwaters

The hurricane's monstrous storm surge pounded over and through St. Bernard's levees,unleashing raging floodwaters that knocked able-bodied men off their feet. At the nursing home near Poydras, residents confined to their beds or wheelchairs were quickly overwhelmed by the rapidly rising water, which turned the single-story building into a tomb within 20 minutes.

Authorities have said the Manganos ignored a mandatory evacuation order and refused an offer of two buses to take their residents to safety the day before Katrina made landfall.

The couple's attorneys dispute that parish officials properly declared a mandatory evacuation. They said the Manganos made a reasonable decision to"shelter in place" because the home had never flooded and no one anticipated the levee failures that would leave virtually the entire parish underwater.

(more clipping)

Painting another picture

Defense attorneys have emphasized that - contrary to some erroneous reports shortly after the hurricane - the Manganos themselves did not evacuate and rode out the storm at the nursing home along with their two children, several grandchildren and about a half-dozen staff members.

"Unless you view the whole Mangano family as a pod of suicidal whales swimming up on a beach, how can you call their actions reckless?" Cobb said before the gag order was issued."They had no earthly idea this could happen. No one did."

He said the Manganos stocked up with a two-week supply of fuel, water, food and medicine, as well as making other preparations, such as buying a washing machine because the home's large commercial washers couldn't be run on a generator. About 10 residents were evacuated by relatives as thestorm approached, leaving 59residents at the nursing home.

After the hurricane passed,Sal and Mabel Mangano began preparing the home's traditional Monday lunch of red beans and rice as their adult grandson,Tanner Mangano, stepped outside under clear skies to assess the damage.

He has said he heard a noise that sounded like a freight train.Then he saw a wall of water 6feet high rushing across the highway with dogs and pigs scrambling to get out of the way.

A couple of the men swam to nearby houses to get boats. When they returned minutes later, people were already clinging to the nursing home's gutters as the water quickly rose to within inches of the ceiling.

The death toll at St. Rita's likely would have been higher if not for one fortuitous fact: Because the residents' mattresses were wrapped in plastic liners,they floated.

The extended Mangano family and staff members used the mattresses as makeshift lifeboats, ferrying residents out through broken windows and onto the roof. From there, they were taken by boats to the second floor of the nearby Beauregard Middle School and eventually to a makeshift shelter at the Chalmette port, along with more than 8,000 other parish residents rescued from the floodwaters.

The Manganos and their employees managed to save two dozen residents, a feat that Cobb characterizes as nothing short of heroic.

(more clipped)

Stone Soup:"The hurricane thing is over, but the homeless thing is not"

2007-08-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture to enlarge it enough to see.

Personal history

2007-08-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

I recently found a 50 yr old manila envelope which had newspapers, photos, a police pass and my mother's 10 page story about the F5 tornado we went through when I was 3. We were 300 ft from the center of the slow moving beast, and it helps me understand why being in post-Katrina Louisiana and Mississippi was so overwhelming to me (beyond the fact that there was massive damage I mean). It also helps make sense of a few childhood "almost" memories, like why the friends across the street had soggy carpet in their house. None of our family died or was severely injured, but it was quite something and seems to have affected me in my adulthood.

Right after the winds passed, many many many people came to help along the path of destruction. Disasters seem to bring out the best in most people. For those interested in reading more about this tornado, there is a 50 yr anniversary collection of stories, pictures, videos, news articles, online at these 2 links. Here
Here

Katrina: The Untold Story

2007-08-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

AARP magazine ran an article on the elderly since Katrina. Here are 2 links to the story.

This one has a bit of video with it: Click here

Here is the link to the story: Click here.

Katrina: The Untold Story

By Barry Yeoman, September & October 2007

When the monster hurricane ravaged New Orleans, its older residents were hit hardest. Two years later, the

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina tore its terrible path through the Gulf Coast, Shirley Thomas purchased a blue-green duplex where she planned to spend the rest of her life. The property, in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward, needed a lot of work. But there was a guest cottage in the back where the 68-year-old retired contractor planned to live while she did the repairs. The property was, she says, “in the heart of Gangsterville.” Drug dealers had taken over the front porch. They rolled dice and drank while waiting for their customers. That didn’t bother Shirley, an evangelical Christian who was used to doing outreach with some tough characters. She’d just chase the men off the porch, insist they pick up their beer cans—and then talk to them about cleaning up their lives. To her, this new home and her circumstances were all part of a divine plan. “Okay, Lord, I don’t have to wonder which corner I’m going to do my ministry on,” she prayed. “This is my ministry right here.”

Two miles away, Maurice Frisella was enjoying a quiet and genteel retirement in his meticulously kept Victorian home. The house was filled with antiques, including his collection of Blue Willow dinnerware and many original paintings of ships. Frisella, 83, had devoted most of his life to serving the parish church in his St. Roch neighborhood. “I was the oldest altar boy in captivity,” he says. “I washed the bishop’s hands, brought him the wine, put the sacred vessels on the altar, lit the candles.” After the church was closed, he and his friend Frederick “Buzz” Burkhardt, 80, whom he calls his adopted brother, developed comfortable rituals of their own. “We were just like two old monks,” Maurice says. “We’d get up; we’d have our coffee with chicory, real cream, and sugar. We’d put on the television and watch our beautiful, our wonderful, Martha Stewart. Then we’d have a little glass of wine. Four o’clock, we’d have our lime cocktail.” It was a good life for both of them.

In another New Orleans neighborhood, Althea Washington was getting used to the new circumstances of her life. She and her husband, Bertrand, had raised three children in Pontchartrain Park, with its neat brick houses and tree-lined streets. Bertrand, a retired assistant principal, loved Mardi Gras. “He rode on the floats,” recalls 75-year-old Althea, a retired teacher. “Sometimes I just sat there waiting to see him on the television, so I could record it to send it to my daughter.” In January 2005 Bertrand suffered a severe stroke. Althea shuttled him from one caregiver to another until finally she had to admit him to a suburban nursing home. (There is more story at the links above)

News from Pearlington, MS

2007-07-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

Pearlington is a small town right East of the LA/MS border, Katrina's eye went over it. They still only have a group of outdoor mailboxes, no home delivery yet. I have photos from Sept 2005 on my photobucket account of Pearlington. At the end of this article is a bit on how to help, including donating to Salvation Army (which I agree with, they are good people helping and using a large portion of the donations rightly)

Link to photo-essay here.

Link to article here.

As recovery lags in Gulf, spirits sag, too
In pockets of Mississippi's coast, Katrina survivors battle the foe of despair.
By Patrik Jonsson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Pearlington, Miss. - When he peered out of his FEMA trailer at the frame of a new house in his front yard, Tony Dixon didn't see, as others might, a symbol of progress on the battered Mississippi coast.

Instead, Mr. Dixon claims, the frame became a taunt – a daily reminder that "corrupt" recovery coordinators kept diverting building supplies from his project to rebuild homes for their buddies. The former firefighter says his frustration boiled over one day last month in a bizarre one-man protest: He used his truck to yank the wood frame off its pilings and then set fire to the rubble, standing off with police until the flames died down.

"Normally I'm an easygoing person, but it got to where I just said, 'Enough of this mess,' " says Dixon.

Officials deny any conspiracy to sideline the project, and Dixon now faces arson charges. But his bonfire suggests that hope and patience are wearing thin for some Katrina survivors on the Mississippi coast, where promising starts and glimmers of normalcy are dogged by slow federal relief, waning volunteerism, and even the quirks of residents themselves.

"There's a growing gap between the ones who have been on the road to recovery and a significant group – perhaps 20 to 30 percent – who don't see the light at the end of the tunnel," says Ray Scurfield, director of the Katrina Research Center at the University of Southern Mississippi in Long Beach. Lack of progress compared with others, he adds, is "becoming more unsettling to the group that still feels stuck."

Here in Pearlington, called Katrina's "forgotten town" by many familiar with its plight, as many as one-third of the storm's survivors are experiencing a dull sense of despair, experts say. For them, signs of progress elsewhere only add to a feeling of isolation.

By some measures, coastal Mississippi's recovery is coming along. The state has sped things along by opting to send checks directly to survivors, instead of requiring the submittal of communitywide plans for large-scale aid, as Louisiana has done. Mississippi so far has distributed $958.2 million to 26,500 storm-wrecked households located above the flood zone. Up the beach in Biloxi, the casinos have led a surging boardwalk revival. When the battered Bay Bridge between Bay St. Louis and Pass Christian reopened in May, months ahead of schedule, locals like Chuck Breath conceded he'd never seen "a chunk of concrete look so beautiful."

Uninsured in low-lying Pearlington

But for at least 7,000 uninsured Mississippi households in tucked-away spots like Pearlington – one of the poorest towns in one of the poorest states – precious little has been put back the way it was.

Pearlington, prestorm population 1,500, remains a sleepy haven of retirees, military veterans, working-class families, and others who could afford to buy a plot in the bottomlands and a small house, but not always the flood insurance. In such places, where elevation is barely above sea level, government red tape and natives not keen on changing their building standards have slowed the recovery to a crawl.

"A lot of these people ... don't know any other lifestyle. They live day to day in self-reliance, and part of that is to throw caution to the wind and hope everything is going to be OK," says Tom Dalessandri, an emergency management coordinator from Carbondale, Colo., who has worked extensively in Pearlington.

In part because Pearlington is a remote and unincorporated part of the county, residents here waited four days for rescue crews after the storm. Likewise, it is playing catch-up in the broader recovery.

Residents who did have insurance often took paltry settlements – averaging about $15,000 – to pay back storm debts. The post office washed away, and some residents still travel nearly 40 miles round trip each day to retrieve mail in Bay St. Louis, Miss.

Volunteers, working from a donation-driven recovery center nicknamed "PearlMart," have provided 85 percent of the labor to rebuild about 150 out of 500 homes. But donations, supplies, and even the volunteers themselves are dwindling, with no groups yet scheduled for August. Scraping the free-labor barrel, organizers are now often relying on 13-year-olds to swing hammers.

More darkly, locals blame several suicides on the poststorm ennui. Long waits and lack of progress have caused neighbors to raise voices against one another, as Dixon can attest. Some who have rebuilt say they feel guilty as they watch their neighbors struggle. For many survivors eking out days in trailers, there's a sense that "they've been forgotten," says Mr. Scurfield at the Katrina Research Center.

Many simply want straight answers. "Our government, if they're going to give people money, then give it to them," says Pearlington resident Rocky Pullman, chairman of the Hancock County Board of Supervisors. "If they're not, then just tell them they ain't, tough luck, it's over with."

In some ways, Mr. Dalessandri says, the government not only has failed to help residents in a timely manner, but also has undermined Pearlington, in part by mandating new building standards that are too onerous and far-sighted for the immediate needs of residents.

What's more, aloof attitudes by bureaucrats and arbitrary decisions about rebuilding requirements, especially by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have added to the human toll of the recovery, says US Rep. Gene Taylor (D) of Mississippi, who lobbied for faster funding in scathing testimony on Capitol Hill in May. A June report from Congress's Government Accountability Office faulted federal agencies for taking too long to get into long-term recovery mode. No public buildings – such as fire stations and city halls – have been rebuilt from Pass Christian to Pearlington.

"Economically and physically clobbered places like Pearlington continue to deal with [recovery managers] who don't appear to know their jobs, don't understand the ropes, and won't make decisions," says Representative Taylor in an interview.

Government officials bear some blame for the long waits and stringent demands – such as requiring Pearlington's only school to be rebuilt 30 miles away on higher ground, says Mike Womack, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. But so do many local residents, he adds. Many simply do not want to build to conform to the new storm elevations – an attitude that puts them in conflict with policymakers and taxpayers who aren't keen to bail them out again in the event of another whopper hurricane.

"One of the greatest impediments to rebuilding the Mississippi Gulf Coast are social issues, where at least 50 percent of the delay involves people who don't want to accept that they have to build in a different fashion to be safe," Mr. Womack says.

Checks mailed to some households

Still, the first 96 checks for Phase II of the Mississippi recovery effort were mailed last month, part of a multimillion-dollar aid package for at least 7,000 low-lying households, including some in Pearlington, that had no storm insurance – allowing up to $130,000 per family to rebuild to the new elevations.

"[Recovery] is never soon enough," says Donna Sanford, recovery director for the Mississippi Development Authority in Jackson. "This is a problem we've never dealt with before, so there's no road map for us to follow."

One way that townspeople have bucked up their flagging spirits is by returning some of the outpouring of charity that flooded Pearlington after the surge receded. When a tornado flattened a Kansas town this spring, people here scraped together enough blankets, clothes, and toothpaste to fill a 53-foot trailer.

They knew exactly what the Kansans would need after the storm.

How to help

Mountains to Mississippi

A charity based in Carbondale, Colo., it has raised $300,000 to help specifically in Pearlington. Contact: www.pearlingtonproject.com

Pearlington Recovery Center

It accepts donations, offers of volunteer labor, and construction materials. Contact: 6098 1st St., Pearlington, MS 39572, (228) 533-0101

Salvation Army

It provides direct aid to residents on the Gulf Coast. Contact: The Salvation Army, Hurricane Relief Fund, P.O. Box 630243, Baltimore, MD 21263-0243

I don't think I want to move to hurricane country.

2007-07-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

Every place has some sort of natural (or unnatural) disaster possibility. I am satisfied with my risks of earthquakes and windstorms, don't think I'll move to Louisiana. If anyone reading this is thinking of moving down there, make sure you have a good roof. Click on graphic to make it larger.

Levee problems, places where hurricane protection is still substandard

2007-07-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

Click on graphic to make it larger. Link to NOLA webpage with many more interesting graphics is here.

Something I hadn't thought of still needing repair: cemetaries

2007-07-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

Link to article here.
By Charlie Chapple
St. Tammany bureau

Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina, dozens of damaged graves and tombs at Porter's Cemetery east of Slidell serve as silent reminders of the hurricane's force and fury.

Burial vaults, which were carried hundreds of yards from the family cemetery by Katrina's storm surge, line the front of the graveyard awaiting a return to their original locations. Tombs are cracked and destroyed, exposing caskets. Headstones and grave markers are in disarray.

"The water came in so fast with so much force that caskets and vaults were scattered everywhere," St. Tammany Parish Councilman Ken Burkhalter said. "They floated out and were carried into the woods, into people's yards."

Burkhalter has relatives buried in the cemetery at the end of Indian Village Road near the West Pearl River. And he and his father, Sam Burkhalter, are building a new tomb for Kevin and Anita Burkhalter --- the councilman's brother and sister-in-law -- who were buried in the cemetery in 1988.

"We're bolting it down with metal rods so it won't float away," Burkhalter said. "Then, we're going to put brick around it."

The storm surge bashed in his brother's casket, Burkhalter said, and his remains, identified through DNA, are being kept by the New Orleans coroner's office until the new resting place can be built. Anita Burkhalter's remains are inside a burial vault within the couple's destroyed tomb.

Burkhalter said he is spending $4,000 to $5,000 to build the new tomb. But he wonders about the fate of other damaged graves and tombs at the cemetery.

"We have elderly people who have family members buried here, but they don't have the money or resources to put their beloved ones back to rest," Burkhalter said. "They had their homes destroyed. They're in FEMA trailers, still waiting on Road Home money to put their lives back together."

"To me, this (restoring the cemetery) should be part of the recovery process," Burkhalter said. "It should qualify for some type of assistance to put the place back together."

But so far, help hasn't been coming, he said.

"We need some kind of coordinated effort, to try to identify who's who and where they belong, so we can try to put things back like they were," Burkhalter said.

Mark Lombard, chief investigator for the St. Tammany Parish coroner's office, said his agency is more than willing to help put burial vaults and crypts back where they belong.

But the coroner's office needs someone, such as family members or cemetery caretakers, to identify the exact locations of the gravesites and where displaced vaults should be placed. "We'd be more than glad to help out in any way we can," Lombard said. "We could even get the equipment for a day or two to do what needs to be done."

About a month after Katrina, the coroner's office secured a giant government forklift with a boom to retrieve crypts, vaults and caskets washed away by Katrina in southeastern St. Tammany cemeteries.

Forty-eight vaults were retrieved by office investigators and were returned to their respective cemeteries, Lombard said. But the vaults were placed in front of the cemeteries because investigators weren't sure of the exact burial locations, he said.

Eight of the vaults had broken caskets with exposed remains, which were put into body bags and sent to the central Katrina morgue and later taken to the New Orleans coroner's office to await reclamation, he said.

They include the remains of Kevin Burkhalter and remains found in a crushed vault and casket now sitting in front of a family cemetery at the end of McManus Road east of Slidell.

Most of the cemeteries damaged by Katrina have been restored. But Porter's Cemetery and Dubuisson Cemetery in Bayou Liberty were the hardest hit and the most damaged, Lombard said.

Porter's Cemetery looks almost the way it did a month after Katrina, Burkhalter said. "We haven't had anyone buried here since the storm," he said.

The cemetery, about a quarter-mile from the West Pearl River, has at least 100 gravesites and is decades old, Burkhalter said. One grave marker shows a death date in 1912.

The cemetery survived Pearl River floods and other hurricanes with little or no damage, Burkhalter said. "Nothing came through here like Katrina," he said.

And from the Biloxi SunHerald:
Link to article here.

Board takes no action on landfill complaint

Sherry Moody of Escatawpa asked Jackson County supervisors Monday to do something about the MacLand debris landfill next to Serenity Gardens Cemetery on Mississippi 613 in Escatawpa.

Moody has family buried there and said the landfill has a 30-foot mountain of debris overshadowing the cemetery, attracting flies and creating a smell.

But supervisors told her the landfill meets state requirements and that the board allowed the height of the debris pile.

Mac McInnis, owner and manager, said the 30-foot cell is full and being capped with dirt and grass. However, another will be started farther from the cemetery on the property. McInnis said the landfill is still taking in three times the construction and other debris that it did pre-Katrina.

No Case Against Nurses in Katrina Deaths

2007-07-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

The DA dropped all the charges for the 2 nurses, I am hoping Dr. Anna Pou will soon have the charges dropped against her also. I am very glad for this outcome and hope these women can now recover and get on with their lives.
Link to story here.

DA won't charge Memorial nurses
Prosecution remains a risk, attorneys say
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
By Laura Maggi

District Attorney Eddie Jordan's office last month formally refused charges against two nurses accused by state Attorney General Charles Foti of helping a doctor kill four patients at Memorial Medical Center several days after Hurricane Katrina.

Jordan's office was expected to refuse the charges. One of his prosecutors had revealed the intentions in arguing before the Louisiana Supreme Court to force nurses Lori Budo and Cheri Landry to testify before the grand jury investigating the deaths. Assistant District Attorney Michael Morales had told attorneys for the nurses that after they testified, the second-degree murder charges would be refused, according to documents at the high court.

The "screening action forms" in the Criminal District Court file indicating the charges would be rejected were initially dated June 6, but apparently were not filed until late June. The Supreme Court ruling that effectively told the nurses they would have to testify was handed down June 13.

When a witness is reluctant to testify before a grand jury, prosecutors can compel testimony by granting immunity, essentially making moot a person's need to invoke the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The immunity grant means any statements they make will not be used against them in future legal proceedings, although cases can be built using independent evidence. This is what Morales was able to do with Budo and Landry, whose attorneys expressed reservations that the immunity offer wouldn't really protect their clients from future prosecution.

Ordered to testify

The nurses' attorneys took their fears first to Criminal District Judge Calvin Johnson, then to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal and, finally, to the Supreme Court. At every court, the attorneys' objections were rejected and the nurses were ordered to testify.

Budo and Landry were arrested on July 17, 2006, along with Dr. Anna Pou, the surgeon whom they were accused of helping to kill four patients with injections of morphine and sedatives. All three women have denied the allegations made by Foti's office, saying they were attempting to provide comfort and aid to very ill patients in a sweltering hospital surrounded by Katrina's floodwaters.

Though Foti's office conducted the investigation, along with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general, the case has since been handed over to Jordan to prosecute.

Attorneys for Budo and Landry noted in court filings that several agencies have been involved in the case, saying the promise from Jordan that he will not use the information in a prosecution doesn't mean that Foti or the federal government won't try to press charges independently.

Attorney general preview

The attorneys, John DiGiulio and Edward Castaing Jr., also wrote that they understand that a representative of Foti's office would be sitting in the grand jury room hearing the testimony, which means that when the women testify, the attorney general essentially gets a preview of the nurses' defense.

In the filings at the Supreme Court, the lawyers, along with an attorney for another nurse identified as Witness No. 3, expressed concern that the attorney general and district attorney weren't on the same page about how to proceed with the grand jury investigation. To them, this meant at some point the state agency could try to step in and prosecute the case itself.

The state criminal code says the attorney general supervises every district attorney in the state and can intervene in proceedings. However, it specifically says that in a homicide case the state agency can "investigate, prosecute or intervene" with the district attorney's consent.

The attorneys also expressed concern that the DA was being untruthful about the intention to not prosecute the nurses.

They noted that Jordan's office in a recent case indicted three police officers who testified before a grand jury about the Danziger Bridge police shootings. Though these officers also were compelled to testify -- and given immunity -- they were subsequently indicted with four other NOPD officers in connection with the incident, which left two men dead and four people wounded. Whether that action was proper is now being hashed out in court.

ABC news article link here. It gives a little more information about the case.

The Road Home program

2007-06-30T16:09:00.000-07:00

A NOLA article on the Road Home program led me to check out their website, information and stats again. Applications must be received by July 30, 2007.

First the article, saying they are going to close some grants.

Direct link here.

Hundreds wait Saturday on Road Home closings
Posted by The Times-Picayune June 30, 2007 1:41PM

Hundreds of Road Home applicants found themselves in a winding line outside a Metairie hotel Saturday, waiting out an apparent bottleneck in a marathon effort by a state contractor to close 900 grants in a single day.

Though a spokeswoman for the state contractor managing the Road Home program said appointments only were running about one hour late around noon, scores of applicants, including elderly people in wheelchairs and parents with young children, lingered outside the New Orleans Marriott Metairie at Lakeway under a beating sun.

Some said they had been queued up for several hours in a line that, once inside the hotel, snaked around the lobby and through several corridors before culminating at a ballroom where closings were being held.

"I never expected so many people. This is very unorganized. It's gotten out of hand," said Rose Woods, who with her husband drove three hours from Lake Charles to close on a grant to cover the family's uninsured losses from Hurricane Rita.

Gentry Brann, a spokeswoman for ICF International, which runs the grant program, said delays owed in part to the fact that Saturday marked the first attempt by subcontractor HGI Catastrophe Services LLC to conduct "large group closings."

Unlike individual closings in which applicants meet one-on-one with grant managers, group closings convene as many as 50 applicants in one room to review aspects of the transaction in a classroom setting, she said. Applicants then meet separately with notaries to sign their documents and handle specific issues.

Brann also said some applicants had arrived Saturday hours before their schedule meeting time, and some showed up without any appointment at all. She said all applicants slated for closings Saturday would be served.

"We've got a whole lot of extra people, which is creating a whole lot of chaos," she said. "When you have 900 people trying to do the same thing, you may not run like clockwork."

By 1 p.m., employees with the Road Home vendor were making their way through the line, apparently ushering some of the most fragile residents inside the hotel. Within several minutes, the outdoor line had been moved entirely inside the building.

ICF is slated to earn as much as $756 million to administer the $7.5 billion aid program. Brann declined to disclose the value of HGI's subcontract.

Now off to The Road Home website and stats:
Link

Using Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data, The Road Home has established that homes meeting one or more of the following criteria based on FEMA inspections have suffered at least “substantial” damage:

* 601 square feet or greater of roof damage and associated interior damage to ceilings, floor coverings, etc.
* Damage that has a major effect on the structural integrity of the dwelling
* Flood waters of one foot or greater on the first occupied floor

The Road Home program is taking applications from homeowners through July 31, 2007. July 31, 2007 is a deadline to apply, not a deadline for the entire program.

Latest Statistics as of June 25, 2007

Total applications received and recorded to date: 149,193

Appointments held:130,500
Initial Appointments Held: 117,235
Advisory Services Appointments Held:13,265

Benefits calculated: 89,227

Total Benefit Options Selected:55,666

Option 1:47,529 (Stay in your home)
Option 2: 6,438 (Purchase another home in Louisiana)
Option 3: 1,699 (Sell your home and choose not to remain a homeowner in LA)

Amount of benefits calculated: $6.55 billion
Average benefit calculation: $73,473
Average award disbursed: $74,715
Total award disbursed : $1.96 billion
Closings scheduled: 2,651 (This number represents all closings currently scheduled to occur in the future.)
Closings held: 30,305

2007-06-29T09:33:00.000-07:00

Browsing through the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) magazine of May 2007, I found an article about some photographers from Pennsylvania who traveled to the coast this spring to take family portraits for people.

"When Hurricane Katrina roared thourgh the Mississippi coast some 19 months ago, people soon discovered they had lost most of their worldly possessions. As the water receded, they realized their loss included a fragile connection to the past: family photographs. Most things are replaceable, most pictures are not."

Link to their blog is here.

Link to another article about them is here.

Newspaper Photographers Use Skills To Help Katrina Victims

A trio of Pennsylvania newspaper photographers are using their skills to help Katrina victims. On Friday, the photographers - Rich Kennedy, Bill Johnson and Art Gentile - took free portraits of Hancock County families, many of whom lost all their pictures in the storm.

When Rich Kennedy came to Mississippi back in August, it was as a photojournalist covering Katrina. Kennedy says by the time he left, he knew he wanted to do something more. Now he's back with two other photographers to help.

Frances and Troy Rutledge have been married for nearly 60 years. They have many wonderful memories, but few photographs.

"I had the pictures of children down the hall,"said Frances Rutledge. "The graduation pictures with the large frames, real wide. I lost every one of them."

The three photographers want to ease the pain of families who lost their precious photos to Katrina with a gift of a new family portrait. Rich Kennedy says while he was on assignment here, he heard a story that touched his heart.

"The only photo she had of her deceased brother was a photocopy of his obituary, and it dawned on me at that time that we were too busy doing our job as journalists," he said. "It dawned on me then that a lot of people lost photographs."

The Pennsylvania photographers say it's nice to be using their skills in a different way.

Bill Johnson said, "We're usually at crimes scenes or newspaper related fires and stuff like that. It's nice to turn it around and do this other portion of photography where you're giving something back to people. Using the skills that you earn money with all your life, but doing it in a different way now."

Barbara Powell and her family just moved back into their Bay St. Louis home. And they've already picked a place to hang their new photo.

Powell said, "It was an opportunity and a good thought for these people to come and give us back something."

The photographers say 150 families signed up to have their photos taken over the next three days. The project is part of the Bucks-Mont Katrina Relief Program.

Census can’t count four cities’ losses (Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian and Long Beach)

2007-06-28T16:34:00.000-07:00

Been watching to see what population in these places was. This article has a link to an Excel chart, showing Hancock Co down 13+% (where Waveland and Bay St Louis are), Harrison down 11% (where Biloxi, D'lberville, Gulfport, Longbeach, Pass Christian are).

Link to article here.

Census can’t count four cities’ losses
By RYAN LaFONTAINE
rlafontaine@sunherald.com

o City population changes

New population estimates are being released today for every incorporated city in America, except Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian and Long Beach.

In the other Coast cities, where researchers were able to gather sound data, the results show a sizeable population drop from July 2005 to July 2006.

Gulfport, the state’s secondlargest city, and Biloxi each saw an 11 percent loss in population. D’Iberville’s population fell 13 percent, the largest drop of any Coast city.

For the first time in recent memory, since the Census B u r e a u began publ i s h i n g annual citypopulation e s t i m a t e s , researchers were unable to gather reliable numbers in four U.S. cities.

Hurricane Katrina flattened hundreds of homes and scattered thousands of Coast residents. Entire neighborhoods — thousands of acres — from Waveland to Long Beach are still vacant and tracking down the people who live in those areas was impossible.

“The U.S. Census Bureau is the most sophisticated population surveyor on the planet and I can’t ever remember seeing this,” said Barbara Logue of the Mississippi Institute of Higher Learning.

In addition to Katrina, Bay St. Louis and Waveland settled an annexation dispute last year, giving Waveland a new chunk of land and nearly doubling the size of the Bay. The annexed land along a dismal stretch of highway mostly filled with skeletal pilings that once held homes and fishing camps may have added to the difficulty.

“Although we spent considerable time researching how to estimate the population for these four places, in the end we were not able to produce estimates that we felt were reliable enough to release to the public,” Greg Harper, a Census Bureau demographer, said in an e-mail to Logue.

Earlier this year the Census Bureau released numbers on U.S. counties, which listed Pearl River County as one of the nation’s top 10 fastest growing counties between July 2005 and July 2006.

Experts say thousands left storm-battered communities behind in southeast Louisiana and Hancock and Harrison counties for higher ground.

This week’s results from the city survey show Picayune’s population has increased by 9 percent and Poplarville by 7 percent.

In July 2005 more than 450,000 people called New Orleans home. One year later the population of New Orleans had dropped to 223,388, a loss of more than 50 percent.

An estimated 11,000 cars damaged by Hurricane Katrina wait to be crushed

2007-06-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

Link to article here.

DEQ's car-crushing promotes recycling
Vehicles lined up for safe disposal
Thursday, June 28, 2007
By Michelle Nealy

Fifteen rows of abandoned vehicles, branded with numbers, like cows to the slaughter, line the massive slab of concrete on Almonaster Boulevard, waiting to be crammed into the mouth of the colossal crusher.

Chomp.

The yellow enforcer, which applies a force of more than 100 tons, pays no particular mind to make or model. A 2005 Mitsubishi Eclipse enters the mouth. Chomp. The Mercedes Benz waiting next in line will suffer the same fate.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and its contractor DRC Inc., a vessel recovery company, crushed more than a hundred vehicles Wednesday as part of a major recycling initiative organized by the state. Since April of 2006, DRC has recovered more than 11,000 vehicles damaged, displaced or abandoned by Hurricane Katrina, said Bruce Hamatt, administrator and technical adviser for the project. Wrecked police cars, school buses, cars left on lawns, Coast Guard boats. Whatever.

"This one of the largest recycling efforts ever undertaken," said DEQ spokesperson Darin Mann. "We are recycling all the materials and all of the fluids from all the cars and boats we recover. The steel is auctioned off, and the profits go back to the state."

The DEQ project aims to ensure hazardous materials and fluids get disposed of safely, Mann said. Illegal car-crushing operations are common, and they don't bother with the extra work. If a few vehicles bleed hazardous material into the ground, they pose a minor threat. But 11,000 improperly disposed vehicles, Mann said, could pose a serious danger.

DRC's 50-acre lot is the final resting place for unclaimed vehicles, which undergo the mechanical version of embalming.

Workers remove mercury switches that control a car's automatic lights, and send them out for recycling. The switches are the fourth-largest source of mercury pollution in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. If inhaled, the metal can build up in living tissues and damage the nervous system.

Next, the vehicle is elevated 7 feet on the remediation rack, a vehicular operating table. It is drained of any Freon, a hazardous chemical used by air conditioners, oil and gasoline. The fuel, oil and Freon are held in containers and later recycled.

Last, the car's battery, housing acid and lead, is yanked out of its compartment and grouped with the other batteries destined for recycling.

The department has retrieved cars from all over the region since the flood, and seeks to give owners ample notice to rescue them from a grim fate in the crusher.

Vehicles are tagged with an orange notice. The owner has approximately two days to move the vehicle. If the owner fails to respond, the contractor tows the vehicle to the nearest demolition site. State Police then notify the owners, giving them another 30 days to retrieve the car.

Most don't bother.

"Since April, almost every car that came here, stayed here," Hammatt said.

According to DRC reports, less than 10 residents opted to retrieve their car or boat. Pointing to a blue Corvette resting idly on the lot, Hammatt said, "We get a lot of nice cars here."

Lessons from Katrina: How to Destroy an African American City in 33 Steps

2007-06-28T16:19:00.000-07:00

Direct link to whole article here.

Lessons from Katrina
How to Destroy an African American City in 33 Steps

By BILL QUIGLEY

Step One. Delay. If there is one word that sums up the way to destroy an African-American city after a disaster, that word is DELAY. If you are in doubt about any of the following steps--just remember to delay and you will probably be doing the right thing.

Step Two. When a disaster is coming, do not arrange a public evacuation. Rely only on individual resources. People with cars and money for hotels will leave. The elderly, the disabled and the poor will not be able to leave. Most of those without cars--25% of households of New Orleans, overwhelmingly African-Americans--will not be able to leave. Most of the working poor, overwhelmingly African-American, will not be able to leave. Many will then permanently accuse the victims who were left behind of creating their own human disaster because of their own poor planning. It is critical to start by having people blame the victims for their own problems.

Step Three. When the disaster hits make certain the national response is overseen by someone who has no experience at all handling anything on a large scale, particularly disasters. In fact, you can even inject some humor into the response--have the disaster coordinator be someone whose last job was the head of a dancing horse association.

Step Four. Make sure that the President and national leaders remain aloof and only slightly concerned. This sends an important message to the rest of the country.

Step Five. Make certain the local, state, and national governments do not respond in a coordinated effective way. This will create more chaos on the ground.

Step Six. Do not bring in food or water or communications right away. This will make everyone left behind more frantic and create incredible scenes for the media.

Blog shut down for a bit.

2007-06-04T22:04:00.001-07:00

Sorry, I am sick, have been busy reading and doing other stuff for a bit, also a bit overwhelmed at the little bits that have happened in the gulf coast this last year. I am taking a bit of time to figure out where to go next with this blog, hoping to be up and going again soon. Thank you everyone who has checked in, keep reading, helping as you can. I am hoping to be publishing again, adding new stuff, by mid June, so please check back then. Thank you again.

Googlemaps reverts to pre-Katrina maps. It's official, not just me.

2007-03-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that googlemaps showed some pre and some post Katrina landscapes, while mapquest showed post. The closest I can get mapquest is a yr ago, since the barge that blasted into New Orleans Lower 9th Ward is removed, yet the Emergency Communities food and distribution dome is up in Chalmette. Here's an AP article on this.

CAIN BURDEAU | AP | March 29, 2007
NEW ORLEANS — Google's popular map portal has replaced post-Hurricane Katrina satellite imagery with pictures taken before the storm, leaving locals feeling like they're in a time loop and even fueling suspicions of a conspiracy.

Scroll across the city and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and everything is back to normal: Marinas are filled with boats, bridges are intact and parks are filled with healthy, full-bodied trees.

"Come on," said an incredulous Ruston Henry, president of the economic development association in New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward. "Just put in big bold this: 'Google, don't pull the wool over the world's eyes. Let the truth shine.'"

Chikai Ohazama, a Google Inc. product manager for satellite imagery, said the maps now available are the best the company can offer. Numerous factors decide what goes into the databases, "everything from resolution, to quality, to when the actual imagery was acquired."

He said he was not sure when the current images replaced views of the city taken after Katrina struck Aug. 29, 2005, flooding an estimated 80 percent of New Orleans.

In the images available Thursday, the cranes working to fix the breach of the 17th Street Canal are gone. Blue tarps that covered roofless homes are replaced by shingles. Homes wiped off their foundations are miraculously back in place in the Lower 9th. So, too, is the historic lighthouse on Lake Pontchartrain.

But in the Lower 9th Ward, the truth isn't as pretty, 19 months after Katrina.

"Everything is missing. The people are missing. Nobody is there," Henry said.

After Katrina, Google's satellite images were in high demand among exiles and hurricane victims anxious to see whether their homes were damaged.

The new, virtual Potemkin village is fueling the imagination of locals frustrated with the slow pace of recovery and what they see as attempts by political leaders to paint a rosier picture.

Pete Gerica, a fisherman who lives in eastern New Orleans, said he printed pictures of his waterside homestead from Google to use in his arguments with insurance adjusters.

"I think a lot of stuff they're doing right now is smoke and mirrors because tourism is so off," Gerica said. "It might be somebody's weird spin on things looking better."

Henry also wondered whether Google's motives might be less than pure.

"Is Google part of the conspiracy?" he said. "Why these images of pre-Katrina? Seems mighty curious."

Ceeon Quiett, spokeswoman for Mayor Ray Nagin, said that as far as she knew, the city did not request the map change.

"My first reaction was, that's a bit problematic," she said.

Ohazama, the Google product manager, said he "personally" was not asked by city or state officials to change the imagery, but he added that Google gets many requests from users and governments to update and change its imagery.

Google has become a go-to service for people looking for up-close satellite imagery.

"I use it on a regular basis in my class," said Craig Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University who has written extensively on New Orleans. He called Google's switch "unbelievable."

"I'm sure the mayor is thrilled," he quipped.

Hurricane Track videos from pre/during/post Katrina

2007-03-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Link to second of 3 videos is here. This video was taken in Gulfport, MS during Katrina and shortly after. It is long but amazing. A bit of Mobile, Alabama being flooded is shown also.

The first video, pre-landfall is located here. The third, 47 days post Katrina, is here. People may think skydiving is crazy, but anyone who chases storms, whether they be tornadoes or hurricanes, is nuts.

The Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic Opens To Serve The Medical Needs Of The Community

2007-03-07T23:25:00.000-08:00

Link to Health Clinic here.
Press release from Common Ground here.
Congratulations!

Press Advisory for:
March 1, 2007

For More Information:
Alice Craft-Kerney: 504-259-8279

The Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic Opens To Serve The Medical Needs Of The Community

NEW ORLEANS, LA – On Thursday, March 1, 2007, in response to the lack of medical services available to returning families, Lower 9th Ward residents are finally opening the doors to their new medical clinic located in the home of Patricia Berryhill, a registered nurse and former resident of the Lower 9 th Ward and will host a press conference.

What: Opening of the Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic

When: 10:30 am – 11:30 am, March 1st

Where: 5228 St. Claude Ave. at the corner of Egania St.

The Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic, a newly established primary care medical clinic, serving residents of the Lower 9 th Ward neighborhood in New Orleans, will host its opening on March 1, 2007.

The clinic will be the only health care provider for the Lower 9th Ward, and will also accept patients from surrounding neighborhoods. Since the storm, New Orleans has been struggling to reopen hospitals and critical healthcare services, leaving thousands of families with either no access to medical care or up to a fourteen-hour wait in an emergency room across town.

The Lower 9th Ward is one of the areas most heavily devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and its survival is dependent upon the return of essential services such as convenient access to quality health care providers for all residents, regardless of their ability to pay. Resident organizers supported by grassroots organizations and individuals from around the country have created strong and impacting solutions and are working on others projects all designed to ensure that the historic Lower 9th Ward enjoys a long and prosperous future.

Resident health care providers, Common Ground Lower 9th Ward Project and Leaders Creating Change Through Contribution have come together to provide medical services that are not accessible to the residents of the Lower 9th Ward and surrounding areas. The clinic is collaborating and partnering with St. Margaret's Daughters, California Nurse's Association, AARP, Tulane's New Orleans Children's Health Project and others, and has received invaluable legal and accounting assistance from McGlinchey Stafford, PLLC and Postlethwaite & Netterville, respectively. The clinic will fill many unmet needs of the communities it serves: volunteer healthcare professionals will augment staffing needs to provide high quality health care to all who need it, treating disaster related and chronic illnesses and mental health issues that otherwise would go untreated. For the present situation, the clinic will serve the returning residents of this community who would otherwise go without access to care.

"It is amazing what we can accomplish when we put all our talents and God-given gifts together for the betterment of our community. This is a time of reflection, but also a time of rebuilding. In the words of the prophet Nehemiah, "Let us rise up and build," said Alice Craft-Kerney, R.N., Executive Director of the Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic.

Despite the level of destruction, more and more residents are returning to their damaged or destroyed homes everyday, but they are struggling to survive and rebuild. Surrounded by flood debris, collapsed houses and toppled cars, parts of the neighborhood are still without electricity.

The Lower 9th Ward Health Clinic will be an anchor in rebuilding and relief efforts, working to strengthen the sense of community, with residents providing basic medical care to their fellow neighbors. The clinic will serve as the medical hub of the area, disseminating information and referrals, and well as, providing basic healthcare to the residents.

Specifically, the Lower 9th Ward Clinic aims to offer health support to treat a range of ailments including, but not limited to hypertension, stress, diabetes, cardiac conditions, minor trauma, plus treating respiratory illness and infections related to exposure to toxins from the flood. Soon, immunizations, help in registering for government programs (i.e., Medicaid, Medicare, SCHIP, etc.), and pharmaceutical assistance for persons suffering from chronic illnesses will be provided through the clinic.

Available for interview:
Alice Craft-Kerney, R.N., a New Orleans resident with strong family and community ties to the Lower 9th Ward, lives in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans. Prior to receiving the trailer, she was living in the Lower 9th Ward on the second floor of her brother's flood-damaged home. Craft-Kerney, a nurse with 21 years' experience, led the effort to build a health clinic in her neighborhood, and will work there full-time as the executive director. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Craft-Kerney worked for 20 years as a registered nurse at Charity Hospital, which for generations served the city's poor until the floodwaters tore it apart. Although University Hospital has reopened, it has not expanded to full capacity to treat ambulatory patients.

State Farm has a perverse sense of humor.

2007-03-05T18:18:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth Lynch, 91, a postmaster of Pearlington for more than 40 years, always paid her State Farm insurance policy a year in advance and followed suggested guidelines for coverage.

When Hurricane Katrina struck, her roof collapsed, and she looked to her policy for help.

Her claim was denied.

Instead, the insurance company sent over a small teddy bear wearing a red and white State Farm shirt, saying it would be comforting to "hug the little fellow" in her time of need.

The back of the shirt read "Good Neigh Bear."

"Now there are words to describe my feelings at that moment, but being a lady, I don't use that kind of language," Patricia Cole Wilson, who had power of attorney for Lynch, wrote in a letter. Lynch died in November 2005.

Link to article here. Entire article not copied due to complying with copyright things.

McDonalds. Now hiring! Endless Opportunities!

2007-03-04T21:54:00.000-08:00

Link to all collected pictures here./ Updated as I find more.

If you have others to add to the display, please let me know.

Lawyer: Deadline looms for Katrina litigation (Now)

2007-02-24T14:36:00.000-08:00

Direct link to AP article here.

Many residents affected by flooding from the failure of levees and flood walls following Hurricane Katrina must file their court claims by Wednesday or risk exclusion from a class-action case, lawyers involved in the litigation said Friday.

Joe Bruno, an attorney representing thousands of such plaintiffs, accused federal officials of reneging on an agreement to set Aug. 29, 2007 — the two-year anniversary of Katrina — as the deadline for potentially tens of thousands of claims to be filed.

Bruno said the U.S. Department of Justice stunned his legal team this week by informing them that certain claims must be filed by Wednesday, 18 months after the storm. The Justice Department's legal ruling also forces at least 30,000 residents who already have filed claims to refile the necessary paperwork by Wednesday's deadline, according to Bruno.

"As lawyers, the bane of our existence is deadlines," Bruno said. "If you miss a deadline, you lose an opportunity to make a claim."

Bruno said he and other attorneys are awaiting a ruling by a federal judge that could clarify whether claims filed after Wednesday, but before Aug. 29, are valid. In the meantime, he is urging would-be plaintiffs to mail in their claims by Sunday so they can be filed by Wednesday.

"It's better to be safe than sorry," he added. "We're anxious to make sure everybody is protected."

Department of Justice spokesman Charles Miller declined to respond to Bruno's comments, but he said the department will address the matter in court papers it plans to file early next week.

Earlier this month, a legal team led by Bruno sued the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in a lawsuit that alleges flooding during Katrina was the fault of a corps decision to allow dredging of the 17th Street Canal.

Also this month, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval allowed to go forward a suit charging the corps with liability for flooding of eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet. The ship channel, maintained by the corps, connects New Orleans' inner harbor with the Gulf of Mexico.

New Orleans and Iraq

2007-02-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

Thank you for sending me this cartoon.

First homes rebuilt in Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans

2007-02-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

Incredible, 18 months. 2 homes. Congratulations!

Residents get keys for 1st new houses
in Lower 9th Ward
2/22/2007 By Becky Bohrer AP

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two residents got the keys Thursday to what are believed to be the first homes built in the Lower 9th Ward since Hurricane Katrina hit 18 months ago, and officials hope the houses — elevated against floodwaters and designed to withstand 160 mph winds — will help spark a revival in the devastated neighborhood.

"It's overwhelming," said one of the new homeowners, Gwendolyn Guice, who found the design of her house "kind of strange" but all right. "I went and got my Kleenex to wipe my eyes."

The homes resemble the wood-frame shotgun style prevalent in many New Orleans neighborhoods, in which rooms are built in a straight line from front to back. But instead of the traditional cypress wood exterior, they are covered with mold- and termite-resistant siding.
A community group called ACORN Housing lined up financing for the two houses, valued at about $125,000 each, and the homeowners will have to repay the organization, perhaps through the insurance proceeds on their destroyed houses.
The houses were designed by Louisiana State University architecture students and built with a combination of paid labor and volunteers.

Reminders of Katrina are still abundant in the Lower 9th Ward, where Katrina's storm surge broke the levee at the Industrial Canal, flooding hundreds of homes. Street signs are missing. Many businesses and houses stand empty.

The view from the back porch of the new home built for Josephine Butler, who lost the house her husband and brother built decades ago, is one of mudholes, a debris pile, crumpled or vacant buildings and tangles of vines.

ACORN Housing has lined up $500,000 for interest-free loans and acquired about 100 blighted properties in the Lower 9th, with plans to build houses there, too.

The project comes as a $14 billion blueprint for rebuilding New Orleans slowly makes its way through city government.

From ACORN:
Link here.
On Feb. 22, longtime lower 9th Ward residents Josephine Butler and Gwendolyn Guice became the first to move into new homes constructed in the area, among the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. They were greeted by a host of city officials, community leaders and dignitaries like Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congressman Al Green and Congressman William Jefferson at the dedication ceremony where they received keys to their new homes.

Butler and Guice, both ACORN members, have been next-door neighbors for 25 years and are moving into two storm-resistant homes thanks to a project coordinated by ACORN Housing with financing underwritten by Countrywide Bank. Professors at LSU School of Architecture developed the new hurricane-resistant, energy-efficient design for affordable housing and worked with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to make the Delery Street a demonstration project.

Butler’s home was completely destroyed by floodwaters in the aftermath of Katrina, while Guice’s home received more than 50 percent damage and was later demolished. The two women were emotional as they lead tours of their new homes that can withstand 160 mph wind velocity. "I can’t stop boohooing," said Guice, who added she was "overwhelmed" by the support and final outcome.

This project is the first step toward larger rebuilding efforts being undertaken by ACORN Housing which is planning to renovate 150 adjudicated properties awarded by the City of New Orleans into affordable housing.

"Josephine and Gwendolyn are just two of the many longtime residents of the Lower 9th Ward who plan to rebuild their homes there. I've heard from many evacuees who say they want to return to the neighborhood where they raised their children and an area they are proud to call home," said Ken Bacon, Fannie Mae's Executive Vice President of Housing and Community Development.

LSU spokesperson Marsha R. Cuddeback, said, "The project represents an extraordinary tale of grassroots reconstruction, collaborative learning among diverse stakeholders, the capacity of partnerships to serve as a catalyst for positive change."

Volunteers from the Delta Corps, Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge and the Canadian Auto Workers union helped build the two homes. Other organizations that contributed JPMorgan Chase Bank, Fannie Mae, and ARC Construction.

The Rev. Leonard Lucas Jr. conducted the blessing of the homes at this landmark event.

Lucas said, "ACORN took a stand initially to say, ‘stay in your homes. You can come back to the lower 9th Ward.’ ACORN made the city bring in water, turn on the lights and made the city say ‘yes’ when the city said, ‘no.’ "

Our local Unitarian Universalist Youth Group is in Mississippi

2007-02-18T17:33:00.000-08:00

A group of teens, kids and adults are in MS working with Habitat for Humanity reconstructing homes. They will return in the next few days and I am hoping to put a report up here next weekend. Good job all who have helped in any manner! Read on the news this week that a bunch of WA counties have been declared disaster areas after this winters storms, people can get FEMA and other help which is good. A cousin had 4 trees on their house, trying to get through the red tape to get working on it, trying to not get too frustrated after only 2 months. Best of luck to those on the gulf coast 1 1/2 yrs later also.

New Orleans - 18 Months After Katrina (video)

2007-02-18T17:29:00.000-08:00

Link to 10 minute video here. Tour the inside of a FEMA mansion! Summary by videographer:

This is a perfect example of what New Orleans is today. There are new homes, sparse but their there. Most of New Orleans is trashed just as it was the day after the storm, this is video proof of that. The Administration would have you think everything is OK and come on down, take a look! The French Quarter is in perfect shape by day, night you run a 70% chance of being mugged or evenkilled for a couple bucks. They would have you think everything is ok, its not OK! I am still waiting for my little money for all that I lost. Compared what I lost and what other have is insane so I have a hard time complaining about my problems. I do like people to know that its impossible to find work here, all the illegals have driven the wages so low that its impossible to live off of. The tech work is gone, every position filled - leaves me out. The Law Enforcement positions for what I can do is not worth it, I rather be on the street, my medical problems put a damper on that. Its impossible, just the illegals here alone are making this a horrible place to be, considering the murder rate is higher then it was when the City was populated and you have for one sick City. NOW - I DO BELIEVE WITH THE CORRECT PEOPLE IN CHARGE - THIS WILL BE A GREAT PLACE AGAIN!

All we need here is honesty and intregrity in Government, Louisiana and New Orleans are amazing places to live, nothing is the world can top it - when things are decent of course. The Media would have you to believe everything is ok, the reality is here, in this video shot for LiveLeak.com, a real media outlet that tells how it really is, for the people BY the people!

What does a FEMA Mansion (trailer) look like after a tornado hits it?

2007-02-13T15:52:00.000-08:00

Tornado hit New Orleans early this morning, 1 person died. FEMA trailers are not good in a tornado.

A.P article: Eighteen months after Hurricane Katrina, Stella Chambers' modest red-brick house had finally been repaired, and she was waiting for one last utility hookup to move back in. But the 85-year-old woman never made it. A tornado tore through her neighborhood in the city's Gentilly neighborhood before daybreak Tuesday, flattening her house, ripping apart the front-yard FEMA trailer in which she was living, and killing the elderly woman.

Then there is the home of Raymond Simoneaux, 90% reconstructed after Katrina, collapsed by the tornado. I don't know what to say.

Army Corps of Engineers can be sued over flooded New Orleans

2007-02-03T22:00:00.000-08:00

MRGO is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a canal that runs directly from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. It has been under contention for quite some time, many people wanted it blocked or closed because they feared what happened would happen. Rather than having to navigate a fair chunk of miles down the MS river, boats could take this more direct route to the gulf. Unfortunately, the storm surge came up it, topping levees and flooding New Orleans. I think this was in the National Geo article a couple yrs ago, predicting the flood that happened.

Link here
Judge: Corps can be sued over flood
MR-GO negligence case can proceed
Saturday, February 03, 2007
By Susan Finch

The Army Corps of Engineers can't assert immunity in a lawsuit over the catastrophic flooding following Hurricane Katrina, because of the plaintiffs' claim that flooding stemmed from the agency's negligence in fixing defects in the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet navigation project that it had known of for years, a New Orleans federal court judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval's ruling cleared the way for WDSU-TV anchorman Norman Robinson, a Lower 9th Ward couple and two St. Bernard Parish residents to press for trial of a lawsuit blaming Army Corps of Engineers negligence for the flooding that destroyed their homes in Hurricane Katrina.

The plaintiffs' legal team said the case could go to trial by early next year, after Duval rejected corps arguments that the case should be tossed out because federal law makes the agency immune from lawsuits over its flood control projects and policy decisions.

Duval said the suit brought by Robinson and his fellow plaintiffs targets not a flood control project but what it calls the corps' negligent failure to fix defects in a navigation project it built years ago, the 70-plus-mile-long Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet shipping channel. (more@link above)

Same thing from Biloxi paper: Link here.
NEW ORLEANS - Residents of the three areas flooded worst by Hurricane Katrina can sue the Army Corps of Engineers over claims that a poorly designed navigation channel caused catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The Corps of Engineers and federal government had argued they were immune from claims the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet caused the damage to the Lower 9th Ward, eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

But U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval refused to throw out a suit claiming floods in those areas were caused by defects the Corps of Engineers had known about for decades. (more@ link above)

FEMA announces $29 million in public assistance grants to Mississippi

2007-01-29T20:10:00.000-08:00

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved four Hurricane Katrina-related projects in Mississippi totaling over $29 million, officials said Monday.

The largest public assistance grant - $18,399,744 - goes to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency to pay for some of the help Mississippi received from Florida in the immediate aftermath of the Aug. 29, 2005 hurricane.

The $18 million grant, along with $15 million previously awarded, represents funding for the labor, equipment and material expenses for 18 mission assignments handled by Florida.

FEMA said it had provided 100 percent funding for a total of $48,849,131 to MEMA to reimburse states that came to Mississippi's aid.

The agency also approved $5.9 million to the city of Waveland to make permanent repairs to roads damaged as sewer lines are replaced south of the railroad tracks.

Other grants went to Jackson County, for a new precast concrete fishing pier to replace the Ocean Springs pier that was destroyed, and for repairs to St. Stanislaus College Preparatory School's Student Union Building in Bay St. Louis. The two-story structure serves as a nonreligious education center for students from grades six to twelve.

These grants come from FEMAs Public Assistance program, which provides financial assistance to state and federal governments and eligible nonprofit organizations for disaster-related cleanup and rebuilding to pre-disaster condition. The state of Mississippi pays a cost share for these projects and administers the Public Assistance grant program funds.

Weeklong Health Fair in New Orleans, by City Health Dept and 400+ medical volunteers

2007-01-29T20:07:00.000-08:00

Optometrist working.
700 people got care, waiting in line to be seen.

Link to full article here.

The sun had barely risen Sunday when the health fair stopped taking patients for the day. The last of 700 patients came through the gate of Joe Brown Park off Read Boulevard less than two hours after registration began, at 6 a.m.

It was all the doctors and dentists could handle. "If we had taken in anyone else, they might have gone through the entire process and left at the end of the day without care," said Bill Horan, president of Operation Blessing International, which is spending $500,000 for the weeklong fair, billed as "The 2nd Annual Greater New Orleans Medical Recovery Week."

Dr. Kevin Stephens, head of the city's Health Department, which is co-sponsoring the event, began making phone calls in November asking for help from faith-based groups and other charitable providers. He said he wanted a health fair that could build on the work of a similar fair held last February at the Audubon Zoo.

Stephens got responses from the International Medical Alliance, the Remote Area Medical Volunteers Corps and Operation Blessing. Organizers originally hoped for 200 volunteer doctors, said Jody Herrington, Operation Blessing's director for U.S. disaster relief. They got 400 doctors and dentists, who flew in from across the country and likely will treat at least 5,000 patients over seven days. (much more to article at link.)

10 years of federal commitment needed to rebuild New Orleans and Gulf Coast

2007-01-29T20:01:00.000-08:00

Senators grill officials on slow pace of recovery
By David Hammer
Staff writer, NOLA.com

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, said at a hearing Monday that it will take at least 10 years of federal commitment to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from the 2005 hurricanes.

A panel of three Democratic senators, meeting at the Lousiana Supreme Court building on Royal Street, expressed dismay that federal laws don’t recognize the leap from immediate disaster aid to larger-scale issues arising months later from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, which they called a “catastrophe.”

Sens. Lieberman, I-Conn., Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. — a presidential candidate — asked witnesses who appeared from federal, state and local agencies why so few of the applicants to the state’s Road Home program have received rebuilding grants and why federal agencies are requiring local governments to make match payments that have been waived for past disasters.

They also questioned officials for failing to deliver billions of taxpayer dollars to hurricane victims, and discussed possible reforms to laws blamed for slowing the pace.

The senators suggested changes could be made to the Stafford Act, which directs the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s expenditures. The panel also created a new subcommittee for disaster recovery, to be chaired by Landrieu.

The senators recieved assurances from a FEMA official that an “end run” could be made to lift a $26,200 cap on temporary disaster assistance now that the agency’s Feb. 28 deadline has been extended six months.

“Senator, I’m the Reggie Bush of New Orleans with end runs,” said FEMA Deputy Director for Gulf Coast recovery, Gil Jamieson.

In an later interview, as he and other officials toured the ruins of New Orleans, Obama again echoed the theme of the meeting, that most of the blame for the delayed recovery lay with the flawed federal policies and processes. He said Gulf Coast recovery czar Donald Powell "doesn't appear to have the clout he needs to make things move the way they need to move."

At the meeting earlier, Obama seemed unsatisfied with many of the answers given by Powell, who testified before the panel. Asked why the federal government had not waived the requirement of a 10 percent matching payment from local governments, Powell said it didn't need to because the state could pay the match using federal funds.

In the interview, Obama said he didn't see the wisdom in having the state use federal block grant funds, which are intended for other purposes, to pay the required match on other federal aid.

Mississippi system helping homeowners battle State Farm

2007-01-29T19:58:00.000-08:00

From NOLA.com, link here

Mississippi system helping homeowners battle State Farm
By Rebecca Mowbray and Mary Judice

Bernard Smith, who lost his Mandeville home to Hurricane Katrina, wasn't surprised to learn last week that State Farm had settled thousands of disputed Mississippi storm claims in mass.

In his own battles with State Farm, Smith says he's gotten no help from public officials in Louisiana. "I have tried from day one to get the Commissioner of Insurance and the Attorney General to do something," Smith said. "Neither of them has done anything to assist the citizens of Louisiana."

But in Mississippi, public officials have gotten involved on citizens' behalf, Smith said.

And though a portion of last week's multi-million dollar Mississippi settlement failed to win the endorsement of a judge, Smith and others are asking why there have been no similar attempts at mass settlements in Louisiana.

The answer, legal experts and consumer advocates say, can be traced to Mississippi's high-profile plaintiff pool and ample legal arsenal.

Mississippi suffered its greatest damage from Katrina in well-heeled sections of coastal communities where residents were most equipped to fight back. Sen. Trent Lott and Rep. Gene Taylor were among the plaintiffs in Mississippi, pushing Congress to repeal insurers' federal anti-trust exemption and investigate their claims practices after the storms before a national audience. Mississippi's legal system also allowed high-profile tobacco lawyer Dickie Scruggs, Sen. Trent Lott's brother in law, to threaten punitive damages, and allowed Attorney General Jim Hood to hire extra lawyers on contingency to press his criminal investigation.

The result was a well-coordinated assault in Mississippi, while home owners were left to their own devices in Louisiana, advocates say.

"The insurers have a much bigger hammer over their heads in Mississippi," said Amy Bach, executive director of the California advocacy group United Policyholders, because Mississippi lawyers can threaten punitive damages and the attorney general can call for back-up with a criminal investigation. "You don't have a Hood in Louisiana, you don't have a high-ranking enforcement official going after the insurance industry. They did in Mississippi. That's the difference."

In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood opened a grand jury criminal investigation into insurers' claims handling practices just a few weeks after the storm. His probe focused on the wind versus flood debate in which some property owners were denied homeowners insurance payouts because insurers chalked the damage up to flood, which is covered by a separate flood insurance policy that often pays out less.

Hood's efforts were aided by Cori and Kerri Rigsby, two sisters from Ocean Springs, Miss., who worked for a State Farm contractor that managed teams of adjusters. The whistleblowers bolted with 150,000 pages of documents that they say shows that State Farm defrauded policyholders by manipulating engineering reports to deny claims, and turned them over to Scruggs, Hood and Dunn Lampton, the U.S. Attorney in Mississippi. There has been no similar smoking gun in Louisiana.

Especially in a situation where there are lots of poor people who are victims, such as in New Orleans, leadership of elected officials like Hood really matters, said Bob Hunter, head of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. Hunter grew up in New Orleans, served as insurance commissioner in Texas and director of the National Flood Insurance Program.

"When I deal with low-income groups, you find a number of people who are afraid to take on the system and be their own advocate. It's unfortunate, but it's true. That's why it's important for the Attorney General's office to get involved," Hunter said, adding that the progress in Mississippi should be an embarrassment to Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti. "If I were an Attorney General in a neighboring state that suffered damage, I might be in a rush to play catch up."

So far, Foti's only action against the insurance industry has involved filing a lawsuit to extend the deadline for making insurance claims. A bill passed by the state Legislature required him to file the suit.

In his defense, Foti has taken action on a host of other Katrina-related issues. He's brought charges against a doctor and several nurses at Memorial Hospital over possible mercy killings during the storm, and is prosecuting the owners of the St. Rita nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, where elderly residents died during the storm. He has cracked down on price-gouging for lodging and for electrical repairs after the storm, investigated American Red Cross volunteers for theft, prosecuted a Donaldsonville woman for making fraudulent disaster sales tax claims, and arrested three contractors for fraud and theft, according to press releases.

Asked last spring if he would get involved in any of the disputes surrounding insurance claims or allocating wind damage and water damage, Foti spokeswoman Kris Wartelle said insurance was the purview of the insurance commissioner.

And Isabel Wingerter, director of the public protection unit in the Louisiana Attorney General's Office, said Monday that the unfair trade practices allegation Hood used in going after insurance companies in Mississippi can not even be applied to insurers in Louisiana.

"Our law exempts anything regulated by the Commissioner of Insurance from the Unfair Trade Practices Act," Wingerter said.

The attorney general is meeting with State Farm and with attorneys handling class action lawsuits, but is limited by law in what he can do, she said.

"We are trying to find out what we can do to help out," Wingerter said. "We are involved in meetings with insurers and attorneys involved in class actions."

Still, some prominent Louisiana attorneys in the consolidated litigation over the levee breaches say that's not enough, and they plan to try to change Foti's mind.

"The lawyers in the Chehardy (levee breach) litigation are going to see the attorney general. We're asking our attorney general to come on board and take a look at these people and their practices," lawyer Joe Bruno said.

Allan Kanner, head of the insurance section at the Louisiana Association for Justice, formerly the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association, says it's not fair to blame Foti.

In Mississippi, Hood was allowed to hire dozens of attorneys on contingency to help build the criminal investigation. But Louisiana is one of only two states in the nation, Kanner said, in which the attorney general can't hire outside help without the approval of the Legislature. Foti went to the Legislature last year for permission to hire contingent attorneys - though it's not known what it was for - but was denied. That means he's restricted to battles he has the resources to fight, Kanner said.

Other attorneys say the lack of punitive damages in Louisiana makes it much harder to force an insurance company to the settlement table. "The thing we don't have here is punitive damage. Punitive damage is a big incentive toward resolution," said Calvin Fayard, another New Orleans attorney working on the levee breach cases.

Fayard also notes that legal proceedings in Louisiana were slow to take shape because the standing water in New Orleans slowed initial claims adjustments.

Randy Maniloff, an attorney with White and Williams in Philadelphia, a firm that represents insurance companies, said those are all significant factors. While the parties to cases in Louisiana continue to bicker and delay, Mississippi Judge L.T. Senter, who handled the State Farm case, has sent a clear signal that the parties needed to come to the table.

Tulane Law School Professor Ed Sherman noted that unlike in Mississippi, there's been no test case in Louisiana that's found insurance companies unreasonable in their claims handling and put pressure on them to settle.

"Louisiana people were too taken up with the overall problem of the disaster that trying to pursue an insurance class action suit was not as high on the agenda as in Mississippi," Sherman said.

But Kanner said that while the Mississippi State Farm decision may make it seem like litigation is moving slowly in Louisiana, homeowner suits are indeed progressing.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman held a meeting with State Farm, Allstate and the lawyers who oppose them to try to draft ground rules to make the cases go faster. One idea up for consideration, Kanner said, is to make both sides freely share information - including adjustment reports. Other federal judges in New Orleans are holding similar meetings to set ground rules, Kanner said.

And what is believed to be the first individual Katrina homeowner claims suit against an insurer is set for trial in U.S. District Court in New Orleans on Feb. 12 in Feldman's courtroom. The Marrero case, Tomlinson et al v. Allstate Indemnity Co., alleges arbitrary, capricious and bad-faith claims-handling.

Others reserve their venom for Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon.

Kanner doesn't think the Mississippi State Farm settlement is a great deal - and notes that a Cameron Parish attorney with a bunch of State Farm cases balked at a similar offer. He also thinks that the State Farm Mississippi deal may only be useful in forcing settlements in Louisiana "slab cases," where the houses were wiped clean off of their foundations, but would be of limited use to policyholders left with remnants of damaged homes.

Many of the settlements in Mississppi involved homes in which only the slab was left, and the judge held that State Farm had not done a valid examination of the damage. In Louisiana, the issue claims disputes have more often involved flooding due to levee breaches.

Kanner is angry that before Donelon knew any details of the Mississippi settlement, he said he'd press State Farm to offer the same consideration to Louisiana residents.

"I think Donelon is being grossly irresponsible," Kanner said. "This is a guy who's had like 17 months to get it right, and he hasn't. The moment somebody else does something - the attorney general in Mississippi - he says, 'Me too.' "

"It's part of his capitulate-to-the-insurance-industry mentality," Kanner added.

Donelon disputes the notion that he hasn't done anything for consumers.

Immediately after the storm, he set up a toll-free complaint hotline and brought insurance company representatives into the department so that they could immediately solve problems. He analyzed the 6,500 formal complaints that were filed and ranked the insurance companies with highest number of complaints per marketshare.

Donelon also notes that he launched an insurance education outreach program and set up Louisiana's mediation program, which has served 10,000 policyholders and solved 75 percent of the cases.

"I'm the regulator. I'm not the judiciary," Donelon said. "We're there to see that there's fair and balanced regulation of this very complex and very important part of the economy."

Still, Smith thinks that Donelon could have signaled a firmer regulatory hand from the beginning. He could have set deadlines for the insurance companies on when they needed to complete inspections and when they had to pay, and he could have limited their ability to re-inspect properties.

Donelon said he did provide Smith a letter to help with his case when he was asked to do so, but has not seen the need to intervene on the consumer level on a wider basis. Donelon also notes that Hood was the only Attorney General in the five states affected by Katrina, Rita and the 2004 hurricanes to initiate legal action. Foti didn't, and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist didn't when he was attorney general.

"I accept it as a difference of opinion in what role I should play in the process," Donelon said. "I understand why those on the plaintiffs' side would want them to do as Attorney General Hood did. I think that Gov. Crist and Attorney General Foti did the right thing in letting private litigation work this out."

Donelon also finds a defender in Hunter, the consumer advocate, who says that he thinks Donelon has done more for the people of Louisiana than Insurance Commissioner George Dale has done for Mississippi.

Meanwhile, questions are growing over whether the proposed State Farm settlement in Mississippi is a good deal, because while Lott's group could come out whole, other people in a second class could get very little.

The settlement covered 35,000 State Farm policyholders who now have the option or choosing to accept the settlement or rejecting the offer to pursue their own lawsuits. Under the settlement offer worked out with by the Scruggs legal team, home owners with only a slab or pilings left will get at least 35 percent of the value of their policy for structural damage, but those who have homes left standing but who suffered more than 60 percent damage will only receive 11 percent on their structure. Percentages decline from there.

The firm also represented 639 State Farm policyholders who settled individually and whose agreements are being held confidential according to the terms of the suits. Congressmen Taylor and Lott are in this group.

On Friday, Judge Senter refused to sign endorse part of the settlement, saying there was no evidence that State Farm would evaluate class members' claims differently than they had been in the past, and there was not enough information to know if policyholders' rights were being protected. Senter's rejection was "without prejudice," meaning that attorneys can address his concerns.

But Bach is is encouraged by the fact that Reps. Taylor and Bennie Thompson have requested Hood's documents and plan to continue his investigations in Congress. "I don't think any door is closing on State Farm being held accountable here," she said.

While so far, insurance companies in both Louisiana and Mississippi say that the State Farm decision has no influence on their thoughts on settlement, Maniloff, the Philadelphia insurance attorney, thinks otherwise. "I think in the back room they have to be at least giving some consideration to whether this is something they want to do," Maniloff said.

But regardless what happens with the State Farm settlement in Mississippi, Hunter said the moral of the story is that public officials such as Mississippi's Hood are folk heroes, and that elected officials should work to protect their constituents when crisis hits.

"The big message that I think should come out of these things, is that politicians who are able to take on the industry a bit rather than shy away from them come out well," Hunter said.

State Farm settles in return for dismissal of civil and criminal suits against it by Jim Hood

2007-01-24T13:19:00.000-08:00

Link to article here.

$150M or more may come to Coast
By ANITA LEE
calee@sunherald.com

GULFPORT - Conceding no wrongdoing, State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. has agreed to pay policyholders $150 million or more in three Coast counties for Hurricane Katrina damage.

U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. is reviewing the 41-page agreement signed by attorneys Richard "Dickie" Scruggs and Don Barrett of Oxford for policyholders and Sheila L. Birnbaum of New York for State Farm.

Earlier in the day, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood dismissed the civil lawsuit he had filed shortly after Katrina to seek full coverage from State Farm for policyholders' losses. That suit named other major insurers, as well; Hood is no longer pursuing action against them, either. Hood also has agreed to drop a criminal investigation of State Farm's claim practices.

The settlement, he said, "is just an option" for policyholders. "It will get some money on the ground quick," Hood said. "It will stabilize the insurance market and it will help in our economic development. We've got to rebuild our homes and people's lives."

Time was a key reason for the settlement, Scruggs agreed.

"This is a very one-sided settlement in favor of the policyholder," he said outside the federal courthouse in Gulfport, where attorneys for both sides talked to the media after presenting the agreement to Senter. "The fact is, this could inject hundreds of millions into the Coast economy by the end of the summer or the end of the year at the latest."

The agreement is considered a compromise, not a concession by State Farm.

"They handled their claims properly pursuant to the terms of the policy," said Birnbaum, State Farm's attorney. "The problem is, people didn't buy flood insurance. People don't want to pay for the risks that are out there because they don't think it's going to happen to them.

Insurers maintain they owed only for Katrina's wind damage. But State Farm also denied claims unless the company could find "separate" and "independent" destruction by wind. State Farm officials have since conceded the company could not determine the cause of damage in many cases in which Katrina's surge left only slabs or pilings.

In denying those claims for wind damage, State Farm relied on policy language Senter has since ruled "ambiguous" and "unenforceable." It purports to say wind damage is not covered when water contributes.

State Farm is appealing Senter's decision. The settlement, if approved, does not change the company's stance.

However, State Farm has agreed it will not deny claims in the settlement process because water contributed to the loss. In order to deny a claim, the agreement says, State Farm must show "by a preponderance of the evidence" that water caused the loss.

The negotiated settlement with Hood and policyholders who want to participate came only after Senter's recent ruling that State Farm breached its contract with a Biloxi couple by denying coverage for a slab without proving water caused the damage.

Senter ordered State Farm to pay policy limits of more than $200,000. A jury subsequently awarded the couple $2.5 million in punitive damages, designed to deter future bad behavior. An appeal of the case, however, could take years.

The settlement affects two groups of policyholders. A lump sum of $80 million has been set aside to pay more than 600 clients signed up with the Scruggs Katrina Group. Scruggs said agreements will be taken individually to each client.

State Farm also has agreed to review the claims of policyholders Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties who want to opt into the settlement. The company, by its own count, had about 32,000 Coast Katrina claims filed as of February 2006.

If the agreement is approved, State Farm will notify policyholders within 15 days. They will be able to opt out of the settlement by returning a signed form. Anyone who does not opt out of the settlement will be considered part of the settlement group.

State Farm has set aside a minimum of $50 million to pay policyholder claims. Policyholders will submit what they feel is the amount State Farm owes them, then State Farm will offer a settlement amount. If the two sides can't agree, the claim would then go to court-supervised arbitration.

State Farm would pay expenses associated with the settlement program, plus attorneys' fees. Attorneys' fees and expenses could be up to $10 million on a total settlement of $100 million, plus an additional $5 million if the total exceeds $150 million.

Policyholders with their own attorneys would be expected to pay those expenses.

Policyholders can't participate in the settlement if they have already resolved their claim through mediation and signed a release. They are also ineligible if they are among more than 200 policyholders who have already filed their own lawsuits against State Farm.

Scruggs saw why comparisons would be drawn Tuesday with the multibillion-dollar concessions he and former Attorney General Mike Moore won from the tobacco industry in the 1990s. But the insurance settlement, he said, is different.

"It's a helluva lot more personal," said Scruggs, who lost his own home in Pascagoula to Katrina.

Scruggs' brother-in-law, U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, was happy to hear about the settlement. Both he and U.S. Rep. Gene Taylor are State Farm policyholders represented by Scruggs.

"The insurance problem has perhaps been the major impediment to rebuilding Mississippi and making it whole again," Lott said. "This decision removes a large part of that uncertainty, and it will greatly accelerate Mississippi's recovery."

Some policyholders and attorneys not involved in the settlement were disappointed Hood gave up his civil suit and a criminal investigation of State Farm, although the company will have to pay Hood's office $5 million for investigative expenses.

"We just expect State Farm to pay 100 percent of what they owe," said Clyde H. "Buddy" Gunn III, a Biloxi attorney, who will continue to pursue his firm's cases against the company. "From the beginning, all we've wanted is for our people to be made whole."

Struggling New Orleans schools have trouble finding teachers

2007-01-24T13:14:00.000-08:00

Link to article here

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Wanted: Idealistic teachers looking for a Peace Corps-style adventure in a city in distress.

Some of New Orleans' most desperate, run-down schools are beset with a severe shortage of teachers, and they are struggling mightily to attract candidates by appealing to their sense of adventure and desire to make a difference. Education officials are even offering to help new teachers find housing.

"There's been an incredible outpouring of sympathy toward New Orleans. We feel we're trying to say, `Here's a clear path to go down if you want to act on that emotion,'" said Matthew Candler, chief executive of the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans, which is trying to recruit teachers.

The school system in New Orleans was in desperate condition even before Hurricane Katrina struck 17 months ago, with crumbling buildings, low test scores and high dropout rates.

After the storm, some of the worst of the worst public schools were put under state control, and those are the ones finding it particularly hard to attract teachers. The 19 schools in the state-run Recovery School District have 8,580 students and about 540 teachers, or about 50 fewer than they need — a shortage so severe that about 300 students who want to enroll have been put on a waiting list.

"Recruiting is a challenge," said Kevin George, principal of Rabouin High School in downtown New Orleans. "The housing market is terrible. The area has a poor image due to the violence. ... And then there's just coming into a place that historically had just a terrible track record of education."

In hopes of finding at least 150 new teachers for the state-run district in the 2007-08 school year, when more schools are expected to open, education officials are trying to recruit candidates at job fairs, on the Web or through newspaper ads that show the raised hands of students and read plaintively: "We need you ... so do they."

The Recovery School District is also working with a real estate agent to help candidates find affordable housing. In addition, it plans to collaborate with Teach for America, which pairs college graduates with a school-in-need for two years.

Norman Smith III, recruited to Rabouin High, said he wanted to make a difference in the lives of kids wary of authority and uncertain of their potential. It has been tough at times, he said.

"I wasn't used to proving myself to kids. But before you teach kids, they have to trust you," said Smith, an English teacher who writes lessons in dusty chalk in his stuffy, second-floor classroom while wearing a pinstriped suit and cufflinks.

"I think the kids are starting to realize, `I can learn,'" he said. "They're looking at the reality, which is, they have something to believe in: themselves."

The state-run district is faced not only with a shortage of teachers, but with a shortage of well-qualified teachers. The district requires prospective teachers to pass a basic skills exam. But over the past two months, half the test-takers have failed. About one-third of the district's teachers are not certified.

Salaries for elementary and high school teachers in the Recovery School District begin at $36,900 a year.

n a reorganization that followed Katrina, the New Orleans school board got to keep a few of the city's best-performing public schools, while those that did relatively poorly academically went to the state or to private groups that turned them into charter schools.

In all, 55 public schools are now open in the city, with about 27,400 students, or less than half the pre-Katrina enrollment. But a group that monitors the charter schools said it was unaware of any widespread teaching vacancies among the charters. And the superintendent of the Orleans Parish schools recently reported only one teaching vacancy.

Many of the schools inherited by the state were run down even before Katrina, plagued by leaky roofs, lead paint or poor heating systems. Many of the students are indifferent to learning or are far behind, with some freshmen unable to read and some teenagers disappearing for days. Some have been arrested for fighting with each other or beating up security guards. Some schools lack classroom supplies.

"This is inexcusable," said Brenda Mitchell, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans. "The persons being hurt the most are the children of the city of New Orleans. I am appalled."

At Rabouin High, which has about 600 students, the halls echo with the shouts of teenagers who should be in class. Many have to share textbooks, if they have them at all. Doors lack knobs or, in the case of a girls' bathroom, don't close completely. Students have to pass through a metal detector to get inside, and guards patrol the halls.

About half of Rabouin's 34 teachers are first-year educators or new to Louisiana. Some, like David Sneed, 46, commute an hour or more to work each day. The principal said he praises his teachers constantly for fear some will leave.

Sneed, a first-year teacher and former restaurant manager, said he is committed to Rabouin for at least four years.

"The future of our state lies in the education of our students," he said. "I don't want to leave. You'd have to pry me out."

___

On the Net:

http://www.teachnola.org

Did you hear what Mr.Bush said about Katrina relief in last night's State of the Union speech?

2007-01-24T13:09:00.000-08:00

Neither did I.

State Farm to settle Katrina insurance lawsuits, pay thousands of disputed claims

2007-01-24T13:06:00.000-08:00

A.P. article.

State Farm Fire & Casualty Co. agreed Tuesday to settle hundreds of lawsuits by policy holders and reopen and pay thousands of other disputed claims, a landmark deal potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars for Mississippi homeowners devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

The settlement calls for State Farm to pay about $80 million to more than 600 policy holders who sued the company for refusing to cover damage from the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. State Farm also agreed to pay at least $50 million - but possibly hundreds of millions more - to thousands of Mississippi policy holders whose claims were denied but didn't sue the company.

State Farm's agreement with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and lawyers for the more than 600 policy holders resolves a civil lawsuit that Hood filed against the company for refusing to cover damage from Katrina's storm surge.

The accord also resolves Hood's criminal probe of allegations that the Bloomington, Ill.-based insurer fraudulently denied claims after the August 2005 storm.

"It's been like a death roll with an alligator for the last two months in these negotiations," Hood said Tuesday.

Mississippi's mass settlement - the first of its kind since Katrina spawned hundreds of lawsuits against State Farm and other major insurers - does not involve any claims in other states.

The deal was expected to be presented to U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. in Gulfport on Tuesday afternoon. Senter must sign off on the settlement.

"The agreement greatly reduces the time, the risk and the expense of defending multiple claims in individual litigation," said State Farm spokesman Phil Supple.

State Farm, the state's largest home insurer, says it already has paid roughly $1.1 billion for about 84,000 property claims in the state. State Farm and other insurers paid for Katrina's wind damage, but Hood and hundreds of policy holders sued the companies over their refusal to pay for more than $2 billion in damage from the storm's wind-driven surge.

The settlement resolves the lawsuits that high-profile attorney Richard "Dickie" Scruggs filed on behalf of 639 policy holders, including Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. Each of these policy holders will receive an average of about $125,000.

A "class action" component of the deal requires the company to reopen and review claims filed by roughly 35,000 policy holders who live in Mississippi's three coastal counties but didn't file lawsuits against State Farm.

After reviewing those claims, the company will be required to make new offers. Any disputes will be heard by an arbitrator whose decision would be binding.

Hood said State Farm must pay a minimum of $50 million to these policy holders after their claims are reviewed. However, depending on how many policy holders qualify, the company could end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars more than that because there isn't a cap on the amount.

The money for the settlement will come from State Farm's assets, Supple said.

Senter was presented Tuesday with the portion of the agreement that benefits the thousands of policy holders who didn't sue State Farm. He hasn't been asked to sign off on the deal with Scruggs' clients.

The settlement comes less than two weeks after a federal jury in Gulfport awarded $2.5 million in punitive damages to a couple who sued State Farm for denying their claim after Katrina. A judge took part of that case out of jurors' hands, ruling that State Farm is liable for $223,292 in storm damage to the Biloxi home of Norman and Genevieve Broussard.

The settlement with Hood and Scruggs' clients leaves about 200 other lawsuits against State Farm pending in a federal court in Mississippi.

Scruggs, a Gulf Coast native whose own home in Pascagoula was destroyed by Katrina, rose to national prominence when he helped negotiate a multibillion dollar settlement with tobacco companies in the mid-1990s.

"In my 30-year legal career, there has never been a more personal case or one that required a resolution of such thorny legal issues," Scruggs said.

After Katrina, his legal team sued several major insurers on behalf of hundreds of Gulf Coast policy holders, including Lott, his brother-in-law, whose Pascagoula home was demolished by the storm.

Scruggs' legal team also sued Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co., Allstate Corp.'s Allstate Insurance Co., Metropolitan Property and Casualty Insurance Co. and United Services Automobile Association. Besides State Farm, Hood sued Allstate, Mississippi Farm Bureau Insurance Co., USAA and Nationwide.

In addition, Hood has investigated allegations that State Farm and other insurers have fraudulently denied claims after Katrina. A grand jury in Pascagoula began hearing testimony on those allegations, but Hood said the settlement ends his investigation.

He said if an insurance executive had been convicted, sent to prison and fined, any fine money collected would've gone to the county. With a settlement, he said homeowners should benefit. Hood said the settlement should provide "quick flow of capital at a critical time."

"Many of us have friends or who have had homes and businesses on the coast that have been hammered," Hood said. "I just pray that this will work quickly and efficiently to stabilize our insurance markets and to stabilize the economic development down on the coast."

State Farm attorneys, however, have said that a federal grand jury has been probing similar allegations.

Scruggs and other attorneys have accused State Farm of pressuring its engineers to alter reports and change their conclusions on whether Katrina's wind or water was responsible for damage to homes.

But the civil cases against State Farm were weakened by a series of court rulings that favored the insurance industry, including a landmark decision in the first trial for a Katrina insurance case. Senter Jr., who presided over the first trial without a jury, ruled in August that Nationwide's homeowner policies cover damage from wind but not storm surge.

Senter has ordered dozens of policy holders who sued their insurers to participate in an experimental mediation program. Hundreds of other homeowners who haven't filed lawsuits already have settled their disputes through a mediation program sponsored by Mississippi Insurance Commissioner George Dale.

Report from Plenty volunteer in New Orleans

2007-01-20T10:06:00.000-08:00

1/19/2007
Good Morning,

I am sitting in an RV outside of 715 Le Beau in old Arabi outside the 9th ward in what used to be New Orleans. We have an extension cord running from the neighbors 3 doors down; but have no gas, heat, nor hot water. I've already boiled water to brush my teeth and make java and am getting a slow start to the day. I have been in NOLA for 6 days now and give tremendous respect to the volunteers that have given up their personal lives to help their fellow man. Many have been here for a year or more and the wear and tear of hope - or lack there of, is visible in their eyes, on their skin, and has begun to penetrate their beliefs. Where is the help? It has been 16 months since Katrina leveled ! the Big Easy and still elderly sit in gutted decay without the necessities so many of us take for granted - food, water, shelter.

I've come down here with Plenty International, (www.plenty.org) whose motto
rings true - 'In all fairness there is enough for everyone.' We are turning 715 Le Beau into a community house to offer hot showers, food, housing, and a place to gather after a long days work. A home base. This is work itself. Already I am physically exhausted. The south, east, and north side of the house have exterior walls, but the west is lacking. This house was in standing flood water of 5 ft for 2 days. The flooring, pipes, ceilings, walls, appliances, etc.. need to be replaced. We've focused on the bathroom and should have a place to shower by Monday. We are dealing with mold, asbestos, toxic water, and lead paint. Violence and ! crime are widespread. We jump at the smallest noise at night and investigate whether or not someone is trying to break in and take what very little we have.

But it's not all bad. Humanity is still alive. There is no government, there is no corporate contractors that have the money and man power to make quick progress; but there are individuals from all walks who care. Nonprofits and church groups make up the majority of volunteers and labor, and we work for each other for trade. We work all day and then attend Camp Liberty, Camp Hope, Common Grounds, or an EC to get fed at night. I went to the French Quarter and was surprised. The residents there received more then enough compensation for the storm and have been able to buy NEW things with insurance and Red Cross money. But what about 83 year old life resident Mr. Robinson who hasn't had a roof on half his house since Katrina gobbled it up? ! ; He lives outside of the Quarter and is not needed to generate state tourism revenue.

Neighborhoods after neighborhoods are empty, dark and hollow. This is far from
over. Help is needed. Bands, perhaps swing through and energize the volunteers.
Venues, perhaps hold a Katrina relief night and donate the door. Individuals, perhaps
take a portion of your tax return and donate to Plenty so we can put a roof on Mr.
Robinson's house. The smallest gift can go the farthest. I can help direct in which ever way you feel inspired. We're all in this together.

I've included you in this email either because you've expressed interest or I
want you to be interested. I will be sending updates weekly. If you'd rather not be included, let me know and I will gladly remove your name.

I hope this finds you well, safe and warm.

Much love,
Sarah Firth

St. Bernard Residents Go through Fence, Clean Out Apartments

2007-01-13T21:37:00.000-08:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - January 15, 2007

Media contact: Endesha Juakali / survivorsvillage@gmail.com / 504.239.2907 or 504.284.6975
Stephanie Mingo / vmingo@bellsouth.net / 504.529.3171

St. Bernard Residents Go through Fence, Clean Out Apartments

MLK Day: St. Bernard Residents Go through Fence, Clean Out Apartments
New Orleans, LA (January 15, 2007) –With mops and buckets in hand, displaced residents of the St. Bernard Public Housing Project will go through the barbed wire fence surrounding their homes to clean and rehabilitate them. On Monday, January 15, Martin Luther King Day, the residents will rally at 12:00pm at Bynum Drugs Store, 3838 St. Bernard Ave, and then enter the property to restore their homes at 12:30.

“Our homes are livable, and we are cleaning them out so that we can live in them,” says Sharon Seans Jasper, a St. Bernard resident and organizer. “We will not let the city destroy them.”

“The residents who will be cleaning their apartments have current leases and therefore have a legal right to enter their homes,” says rally organizer Endesha Juakali of Survivors Village. “However, the police may not honor this right. Therefore public housing residents will be evoking the spirit of Dr. King on this Martin Luther King Day.”

HANO and HUD plan to demolish over 5000 units of affordable public housing, housing that is desperately needed for families that wish to move back to New Orleans. In a market where rents have increased between 70 and 300 percent since Katrina, inflated rents and the lack of subsidized housing has been a major factor in preventing evacuees from returning to their homes. Finding private landlords that accept housing vouchers is extremely difficult, and finding affordable housing without subsidization is nearly impossible for public housing recipients.

HUD’s own cost analysis reveals that their plan to demolish and rebuild will waste taxpayers’ money. A recent motion for summary judgment filed in a current suit to reopen the development (available at: http://justiceforneworleans.org) cites HUD documents that show the demolition and redevelopment of public housing “will end up costing over $175 million more than extensively modernizing the developments, and upwards of $450 million more than simply repairing them would cost.” The motion also argues that the demolitions have racial implications. “Prior to Katrina over 5,100 African-American families lived in New Orleans’ public housing. Nearly 14 months later, only approximately 1,000 have been allowed to return. HANO’s actions clearly have disproportionately harmed African-Americans and have lead to the overall decline in the city’s African American population since Katrina.”

Despite overwhelming support for the re-opening of public housing, HANO and HUD have consistently ignored public opinion and advocated for its demolition. HANO has received a resounding and unquestionable "NO!" to their plans from public housing residents at their recent court-mandated ‘resident consultation meeting’. Angry residents accused HANO of "ethnic cleansing," and told them "being poor is not a crime."

2.5 million in punitive damages against State Farm Fire and Casualty Co.

2007-01-11T18:57:00.000-08:00

(AP story, easily found if you do a search)
A jury awarded $2.5 million in punitive damages against State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. for a Mississippi couple for denying their Hurricane Katrina claim. The decision could benefit hundreds of other homeowners challenging insurers for refusing to cover billions of dollars in storm damage.

State Farm said it will likely appeal.

Earlier Thursday, U.S. District Judge L.T. Senter Jr. had taken part of the case out of jurors' hands before they awarded punitive damages to State Farm policyholders Norman and Genevieve Broussard of Biloxi.

Senter ruled Thursday morning that State Farm is liable for $223,292 in damage caused by Hurricane Katrina to the Broussards' home. Senter left the punitive damages to the jury.

Senter's decision to make a directed verdict rather than let the jury decide the entire case appeared to surprise everyone in the courtroom. After he explained his ruling, Senter ordered a recess to give attorneys time "to get over the shock."

After the jury announced its award, the Broussards left the courthouse arm in arm.

"It's a great day for south Mississippi," Norman Broussard said.

Some of Senter's earlier rulings in other Katrina cases have favored the insurance industry, but his decision Thursday calls into question the companies' refusal to cover billions of dollars in damage from Katrina's storm surge.

The judge's decision and the jury's award also are likely to impact recent settlement talks between State Farm, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and other plaintiffs' attorneys.

Earlier this week, people with direct knowledge of the settlement talks told The Associated Press that State Farm, Mississippi's largest home insurer, is considering paying hundreds of millions of dollars to settle more than 600 lawsuits and resolve thousands of other disputed claims.

advertising
The Broussards' case wasn't directly part of those negotiations, but Hood said Thursday the verdicts only strengthen his position in the ongoing settlement talks.

"Hopefully they will come to their senses and realize that the American people are not going to stand for robber baron companies, like the insurance companies, running over people," the attorney general said.

However, Hood conceded that a company as large as State Farm isn't likely to "blink very much" in the face of a single jury award.

"I'm sure they're in shock, but that can't hurt them," said Hood, who declined to elaborate on the status of the settlement talks with State Farm.

Randy Maniloff, a Philadelphia-based lawyer who represents insurers and has closely followed the Katrina litigation, said Senter's ruling was a "huge verdict" for homeowners even if the jury hadn't awarded punitive damages.

"That settlement is looking awfully good for State Farm now," he added.

The Broussards sued State Farm for refusing to pay for any damage to their home, which Katrina reduced to a slab. The couple wanted State Farm to pay for the full insured value of their home plus $5 million in punitive damages. The Broussards claimed a tornado during the hurricane destroyed their home. State Farm blamed all the damage on Katrina's storm surge.

State Farm and other insurers say their homeowner policies cover damage from wind but not from water, and that the policies exclude damage that could have been caused by a combination of both, even if hurricane-force winds preceded a storm's rising water.

Senter, however, ruled that State Farm couldn't prove that Katrina's storm surge was responsible for all of the damage to the Broussards' home. The judge also said the testimony failed to establish how much damage was caused by wind and how much resulted from storm surge.

State Farm spokesman Phil Supple said after the jury's verdict that the company is likely to appeal the decision.

"We are surprised and disappointed by both the judge's ruling on the coverage issues and the amount awarded by the jury for punitive damages," he said in a written statement. "We believe the expert testimony supported a different result."

Jack Denton, one of the couple's attorneys, said they are "very pleased" with the jury's verdict but declined further comment.

"Obviously we have other trials coming up and don't want to jeopardize those cases," he added.

Thursday's verdict follows another federal judge's ruling that favored policyholders in Louisiana. In November, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. sided with New Orleans homeowners who argued that the language excluding water damage from some insurance policies was ambiguous.

Duval allowed a lawsuit against The Allstate Corp., The St. Paul Travelers Companies Inc. and other insurers to proceed, but said the issue of "flood exclusion" could be appealed immediately by the companies.

In his closing argument Thursday, one of the Broussards' attorneys, William Walker, said State Farm had breached their contract "in a bad way" by denying their claim. State Farm "acted like a chiseler," he said, adding, "The pocketbook is what they listen to."

State Farm attorney John Banahan urged jurors to "use your head and your heart" in deciding on punitive damages and to reject an attempt by the Broussards' attorney to demonize the company as an "evil empire."

Robert Hartwig, chief economist for the Insurance Information Institute in New York, said before the jury announced its decision that a punitive damage award would be "distressing" for insurers.

"It adds even more cost and more uncertainty to the other problems that already exist in the Mississippi homeowners insurance market," he said.

Hurricane Women (video from Rita)

2007-01-08T23:25:00.000-08:00

Link here.

A video compilation showing the devastation of hurricane Rita on the 24th of September, 2005. This hurricane completed destroyed dozens of small towns along the gulf coast of Louisiana. These towns have not received the media attention because of the damage done to New Orleans as a result of hurricane Katrina a few weeks earlier. The cajun way of life in Grand Chenier, Cameron, Creole, Holly Beach and dozens of other small towns has been completely destroyed along with every home in this area. This video features the music of a local live group headed by musician Abe Manuel. The group, Honky Tonk Band, plays live music and most members hail from Grand Chenier. They still play live music and their album is available at stores in the area (like Chessons store near Grand Lake).

KatrinaAction.org has lots of links for stuff you can do

2007-01-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

People to contact in general, including about legislative stuff, as well as volunteer opportunities.

Click here.

Or on this banner link graphic thing:

Nice picture of Canal St lit up for holidays this yr.

2007-01-01T21:36:00.000-08:00

From the balcony of the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel, Mayor Nagin waves to an appreciative crowd after ceremoniously plugging in the lights along Canal Street. Notice the partially lit highrise in the background. This looks really good to me. Happy holidays.

Homeowners in 3 more states will find it harder to be in "Good Hands". Or, Legalized gambling

2006-12-11T15:52:00.000-08:00

Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware. Allstate will no longer write new policies for homeowners in these 3 states. Insurance is legalized gambling. They are betting you pay them more than they ever have to pay you. In cases like these Atlantic states, Allstate has decided the stakes are too high.

A.P. Article says today:

Allstate said it wants to control its exposure to areas at risk of hurricanes. So in mid-February it'll stop writing new homeowner policies in Connecticut.

The insurance giant is taking similar steps in New Jersey and Delaware. It earlier announced plans to stop writing policies in some coastal counties in New York.

An Allstate official says there's a dramatic increase in the risk of what he calls a "catastrophic event" occurring in New England. The company is arranging for agents in Connecticut to offer homeowner policies from six other insurers.

Antitrust or Legal action? Off to Connecticut. Link to Reuters article here

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said on Friday he was expanding his probe of Allstate Corp., a day after the insurer said it would stop writing new homeowners' policies in his state....
(clip)

Blumenthal said in a statement he expanded that investigation to include Allstate's announcement it would stop writing new homeowner policies in his state and increase premiums on existing ones.

"Even if Allstate may be within its legal rights to cease doing business in Connecticut, its decision may be the result of other anti-competitive or antitrust practices," said Blumenthal.

What responsibility do insurance carriers have to continue to provide their service of insurance? At what point does it become anti-competitive or antitrust? I'll be watching.

Mississippi’s Phase II Grant Program Guidelines, looking for public comments by tomorrow

2006-12-07T11:57:00.000-08:00

I received this from an online friend working on the gulf coast. Sent off my comments which were increase cap, increase % and include wind/tornado damage as these are what I saw my first read-through.
--------------------------------------------------------
Mississippi’s Phase II Grant Program Guidelines

Who qualifies for the grant?
A homeowner who
• suffered hurricane flood surge damage
• to their primary home (not second homes or rentals)
• located inside or outside the federal 100 year flood zone
• with or without insurance on the home
• a 2006 household income at or below 120% of Area Median Income (about $63,300 for a family of 4).

What conditions must the homeowner accept in exchange for the grant?
• a covenant on their property that establishes building code,
• homeowner insurance,
• elevation requirements for them or any future owner of the land, and
• remain at that site for 3 years or relocate in the lower 6 counties
• use grant to repay SBA loan intended for use.

How much is the grant?
• up to $50,000 to pay 70% of the cost to repair or rebuild the structure
• plus up to $30,000 to help rebuild to elevation requirements
• plus up to $25,000 for a “special needs” homeowner who
• is 65 years old or more
• has a physical or mental disability
• has 2006 household income below 60% of Area Median Income (about $28,000 for a family of 4).
• The MDA is also developing a loan program to help people finance the gap between the grant and the cost to rebuild.

What are the problems?

The plan has some really good parts, like that it targets our most vulnerable neighbors – the poorest families, our elderly and our disabled - but there are also some serious problems, including:

* No grants for homeowners with wind damage.
* The $50,000 cap is low – only a third of what was available for people in Phase 1. On top of that, there is a 30% penalty subtracted from the needed amount to rebuild. People may not be able to afford to rebuild if the leftover costs mean they have to take out a big mortgage and then pay for high insur-ance costs.

Submit Your Phase II Comments to:

MDA, Post Office Box 849, Jackson, MS 39205 or send via facsimile to (601)359-9280, or online to hoacomments@mississippi.org .

Comments must be received no later than December 8, 2006.

Please include your name and full address.

Please note if you want Phase II to include wind damaged homeowners and/or an increased cap to $100,000, and any of your own comments or recommendations.

Thinking about what is needed for a good life, found this blog & video by New Orleans resident

2006-12-07T11:42:00.000-08:00

This family lived/will live in one of the areas we volunteered at last spring. The video was made about the same time we were there, though I did not have the priveledge of meeting them. Please check them out.

Tim's Nameless Blog, link here.

Janet's Video Diary 26 March 2006, "A 9-year-old girl gives a tour of her soon-to-be demolished house in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans." link here.

Grass-roots group goes to work on Meraux family's home

2006-12-03T13:04:00.000-08:00

And the work goes on! Thank you anyone and everyone who is still working on helping people get their lives back together. This area is east of Chalmette which is east of Lower 9th Ward. It was flooded from levee breaks and from the storm surge.

Link to the grassroots non-profit organization St. Bernard Project
To volunteer, apply for assistance or donate to the St. Bernard Project, call 208-7756.

Link to article here.

Sunday, December 03, 2006
By Karen Turni Bazile

Deanna Bienemy could only shake her head in amazement and gratitude, tears welling in her eyes as she stroked the hair of her daughter Diamond, who watched quietly from her wheelchair.

Before them, a group of volunteers worked feverishly Saturday, the first day of a planned eight-day reconstruction of Bienemy's modest, Hurricane Katrina-damaged brick home on Bartolo Drive in Meraux.

The workers hung insulation and Sheetrock. They removed stud walls. They relocated her utility room. They even tore off the roof joists on an addition made years ago because they plan to rebuild it at a better angle.

That was all in the first four hours.

"My heart is overjoyed," said Bienemy, 36, a single mother who has been living in a nearby trailer park in a FEMA trailer with her four daughters: 9-year-old twins, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old. "I can't believe this is happening to me -- that someone is taking time out of their life to come fix this for me. This is God's angels at work. That's all I can say."

'It's not rocket science'

The group of eight skilled workers led by 49-year-old Wisconsin homebuilder Guy Lamberg drove straight to St. Bernard Parish after their plane landed Saturday, even though they got a late start because a snowstorm delayed their flight from the North.

With luggage in tow, the group began working around 2:30 p.m. and continued past dusk using portable lights.

Liz McCartney and Zack Rosenburg, co-founders of the St. Bernard Project, had all the needed building equipment and supplies, including wood, insulation, tools, generators and lights, on the site when the group arrived.

"We remove barriers for families that are trying to move back home," said McCartney, who ran a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., before she and her boyfriend, Rosenburg, decided to move to New Orleans to help residents after a visit to St. Bernard in February.
Their group gets money from several sources, including the United Way and Southern Mutual Help. The group recruits volunteers, raises money for supplies, and puts the volunteers and supplies together to help. "We like to say, 'It's not rocket science,' " McCartney said.

Back with a mission

Lamberg met Rosenburg and McCartney when he was in town in September working with another group helping storm victims. He liked the couple's grass-roots approach to getting people back into their homes.

Coming down to help is "something I've wanted to do since the storm," Lamberg said. "But like 99 percent of the rest of the country who said they wanted to help, it's easy to find reasons not to come."

When Lamberg left New Orleans in September, he promised to return with money and skilled buddies because he wanted to adopt a family and completely renovate their house. He asked Rosenburg and McCartney to choose the family, and they chose Bienemy's because of the special needs of Diamond, one of the twins.

"We knew this was going to be a big project that a group like Guy's could handle and be able to make the necessary modifications for her disabled daughter," McCartney said.

Although the St. Bernard Project has helped about 30 families with home repairs, the assistance has been limited mostly to providing residents with insulation and drywall installation. The group lacked the money and skilled volunteers to do more.

Lamberg said he raised $10,000 in less than two months to pay for supplies, and he brought friends with enough skills so that when they leave Dec. 10, he hopes all Bienemy will have to do is install countertops and carpet. His volunteers are paying for their own airfare and meals, and a volunteer with the St. Bernard Project got the Queen and Crescent Hotel to provide free rooms....(more @ story link).

Another body found in Lower 9th Ward

2006-12-03T12:54:00.000-08:00

Direct link to articlehere.
Mapquest shows this location to be about 0.7 miles from the levee break into the Lower 9th Ward. Of note are the parts that say this is an area where houses have not been entered in the last 16 months (telling areas that need to be searched) and that the coroner does not want this to be like the recent discovery in New York of bone bits from 911 recently being found. About time the comparison is being made between the aftermath of these 2 disasters.

Finally,another family might finally know what happened to their missing loved one. RIP.

9th Ward body thought to be Katrina victim
Workers demolishing house find remains
Sunday, December 03, 2006
From staff reports

Workers demolishing damaged houses in the Katrina-devastated Lower 9th Ward have discovered a body thought to be that of a hurricane victim, the Orleans Parish coroner's office said Saturday.

The body is thought to be that of an adult, but the gender and identity are unknown. The body was found Wednesday night in a yard at St. Maurice Avenue and North Robertson Street, chief coroner's investigator John Gagliano said.

He said the body will be examined by a pathologist and an anthropologist, and the coroner's office will consult records to see whether anyone was reported missing at that location.

Gagliano also said coroner's officials found houses in that neighborhood that did not appear ever to have been entered since the storm flooded the neighborhood.

The coroner's office has arranged to have volunteers from several city agencies search areas that have not been entered since Katrina, Gagliano said. The St. Tammany Parish search and rescue squad also will assist.

Coroner Frank Minyard told the City Council last month that the Michoud area of eastern New Orleans had never been searched for bodies since Katrina and should be investigated as soon as possible.

Minyard said he did not want a repetition in New Orleans of what happened in New York, where in October the bones of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were pulled out of a manhole near the World Trade Center that apparently had never been searched.

Firefighters on July 31 discovered one of the last Katrina bodies found in the city when they broke into a house in eastern New Orleans and removed skeletal remains. The house flooded after the storm.

It was the 28th Katrina body found in New Orleans since March, when a federal mortuary service shut down and turned the collection of bodies over to the coroner's office.

Commercial insurer to pull out of area

2006-12-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

More on insurance companies pulling out of LA.

Link to article Here
Businesses fear Travelers' move will put the brakes on recovery
Saturday, December 02, 2006
By Rebecca Mowbray

St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc., Louisiana's largest commercial insurance provider, plans to cancel all its commercial property policies in the New Orleans area next year, sparking fears that other insurers will follow and slow the region's economic recovery.

While the St. Paul, Minn., company refused to say how many commercial policies will be affected or specify where the cuts will be in South Louisiana, two insurance brokers who were briefed by the company this week say Travelers will not renew any property insurance for businesses in Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and eastern St. Tammany parishes. Cuts will also affect individual businesses in other parts of South Louisiana, including St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes.

"I said, 'May I tell anybody who asks that Travelers is withdrawing from the commercial property insurance market in southeast Louisiana?' " said Anderson Baker, president of the New Orleans agency Gillis, Ellis & Baker, who met with the company Wednesday. "The answer was, 'Yes.' " Travelers spokeswoman Jennifer Wislocki said the company has "a high concentration of commercial policies in the hurricane-prone areas of Louisiana" and will not renew many commercial policies when they expire.

"To keep future losses to a more acceptable level for continued financial stability, we are reducing our exposure in some of these areas by non-renewing a number of small to mid-sized commercial properties," Wislocki said.

Crisis summit called

State Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon, who was tipped off about Travelers' plans Wednesday night by the Business Council of New Orleans and the River Region, said he was stunned by the news. When he met with Travelers on Thursday, he was equally stunned by the stated reason for the company's retrenchment.

"They cited the state of the rebuilding of our levee system as the primary reason for their decision," Donelon said.

In conjunction with Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Louisiana Department of Natural Resources Secretary Scott Angelle, Donelon quickly convened a summit of commercial property insurers for Tuesday. At the meeting, the three hope to advise commercial property insurance providers about the efforts to restore the Louisiana coast and improve the levee system to stave off other defections.

"I have lived in the New Orleans metropolitan area for 61 years, and I can personally vouch for the fact that the levee system is better and stronger than it ever has been, and is getting stronger as every day goes by," Donelon said. "We need to let Travelers and the rest of the commercial property writers know of that effort." ...(more@link)

State's largest commercial insurer to stop renewing policies

2006-12-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

Will other insurance companies follow Travelers example? How about allocating a portion of the $9 Billion/month that is being used in the Iraq occupation and putting it towards helping the gulf coast recover?
-------------------------------------------------------------

Michael Kunzelman / Associated Press Dec 1, 2006

St. Paul Travelers said Friday that the company will stop renewing many commercial insurance policies in the New Orleans area next year, stoking fears that other insurers are prepared to pull out of the market after Hurricane Katrina.

Travelers will stop renewing property business policies for an undisclosed number of small- and mid-sized businesses, mostly in Orleans Parish, starting in March, a spokeswoman for the St. Paul, Minn.-based company said.

It wasn't immediately clear how many businesses would be affected, but Travelers is Louisiana's largest commercial insurer, writing around 14 percent of the state's policies.

The company is the first insurer to announce that it will stop renewing commercial policies in Louisiana in the wake of Katrina, which destroyed tens of thousands of homes in Mississippi and Louisiana, according to the state's insurance department.

Travelers spokeswoman Jennifer Wislocki said the company "will continue to be an important part of the insurance market in Louisiana" and has no immediate plans to stop renewing other types of policies, including those for homeowners.

"St. Paul Travelers has a high concentration of insured commercial property in hurricane-prone areas in the state," she said. "We are reducing our exposure in some of those areas, by non-renewing a number of small- to mid-sized commercial properties.

Mark Drennen, president and CEO of the Greater New Orleans Inc. economic development group, estimates the company's decision will result in $3 billion in lost coverage for businesses in the New Orleans area.

Drennen said it would be "catastrophic" if other major insurers join Travelers in no longer renewing commercial policies in the region.

"We believe it's a crisis that can totally thwart any kind of economic recovery down here," he said. State Farm Insurance Group accounts for 12.6 percent of the state's commercial policies, followed by Zurich Insurance Group at 10.3 percent and Allstate Insurance Group at 5.9 percent, according to insurance department spokeswoman Amy Whittington.

Refuge of Last Resort, DVD to be released 12/05/06

2006-11-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

Filmmaker, James L. Bills, tells a harrowing story of how he took his family to a "Hurricane Proof" building in the heart of New Orleans to save them from the ravaging effects of Hurricane Katrina.

They survive one of the most powerful storms in recorded history, but JAMES, his wife TRACEY, their seven year old son and two year old daughter soon find themselves in a horrible dilemma. With only 3 days minimal supplies in hand, they, including close friends GABRIEL, his wife MELISSA, and good friend ARIEL, are trapped in downtown New Orleans when the levees break and quickly flood the city.

On the second day they faced the harsh reality that no help was on the way. They're running out of food, there is no drinkable water, no gas and no electricity. They find themselves having to survive by whatever means necessary - and are in the same situation as tens of thousands of others.

Anarchy breaks out in the city when looters take to the streets searching first for food and water, then in a complete frenzy, turn animalistic and begin to assault and rob anyone who appears helpless. On Wednesday (August 31) James helped carry a young man who had been beaten and robbed to the Convention Center. Many radio announcements had stated EMTs and NOPD officers would be there along with National Guard troops and supplies - that turned out to be complete misinformation as there was no food, not one EMT and only 3 New Orleans police officers there. The event opened James eyes to the very real fact that no help was available - for anyone. There was no visible government security, James and Gabriel took matters into their own hands and did whatever they had to in order to secure the hotel and save their families. Six days of hell... with no help from the government, local, state, or federal... no help from the outside world as they realize they are completely on their own.

Link here.

Refuge of Last Resort - The only Hi Definition Katrina documentary filmed, edited and experienced by the filmmaker.

It was difficult to just shoot this film. Life threatening to be exact. The Press photographers who made their way around the city after Katrina were exceptionally tough and brave - and like us, they had to contend with life and death horrors every moment. Click HERE to read an article of their experiences for yourself. Be prepared to get mad.

"Contrary to popular belief, this is not a political film, it is the story of what my family endured in the wake of Katrina. It takes no side - it only shows through the camera's eye what we saw happening in New Orleans that fateful week in 2005" - James L. Bills, Director "Refuge of Last Resort"

Faith in the Face of Disaster: UU Response to Hurricane Katrina

2006-11-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

Link to main UUA relief page here
Link to volunteer page here.

How to Volunteer

The UUA and UUSC are committed to providing volunteer opportunities in the Gulf Coast for Unitarian Universalist congregations from around the country.
YOUR HELP IS MUCH NEEDED!

Please contact one of the following volunteer programs to organize your congregation's visit. Please DO NOT contact the congregations directly affected in the New Orleans or Mississippi areas. You may direct inquiries regarding volunteering to uukatrina@bellsouth.net. Please direct general inquires regarding the Gulf Coast Relief Fund to gulfcoastrelief@uua.org.

* The Hurricane Relief and Social Justice Project of the Unitarian Church of Baton Rouge(HRJSP) link here , under the Direction of Rev. Marilee Baccich and Volunteer Coordinator Cheré Cohen, places volunteers from churches all over the country in work projects in the Greater New Orleans area. This office also receives requests for volunteering in Mississippi, coordinating with Jinni Trabulsi, Community Minister and Volunteer Coordinator for that area of the Gulf Coast.

You may email requests to the Hurricane Relief and Social Justice Project (uukatrina@bellsouth.net) to help with relief efforts or to report special needs for assistance. You may also call the office at 225-926-2283, 225-223-3203 or 225-223-2876.

* Volunteer Project Coordinator:
o Mississippi Gulf Coast: Jinnie Trabulsi (also serves as community minister to the Gulf Port Fellowship External Site: link will open a new window)

* For details on volunteering in the Gulf Coast, download the Hurricane Relief Project's Volunteer Booklet click here. Print booklet double-sided and fold in half and staple for 8 page booklet. Hard copies and accompanying DVDs are available by emailing the Hurricane Relief and Social Justice Project.

* The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee has organized two Work Camps in the Gulf Coast. Stay tuned to the UUSC JustWorks website click here for updates on future camps in 2006.

Work Camps provide an educational and spiritual experience for your congregation, Youth Group or Campus Ministry Group.

For more information or to request an application, please contact any UUSC JustWorks staff member at 800-388-3920. Anna Bartlett can be reached at ext. 227, Nguyen Weeks at ext. 201, and Kim McDonald at ext. 217. You may email staff at justworks@uusc.org.

* Please share stories and photos from your volunteer experience in the Gulf Coast with the UUA/UUSC Gulf Coast Relief project by email at gulfcoastrelief@uua.org. Please indicate if we have your permission to display your photos and/or words on the www.uua.org and www.uusc. org websites. Thank you.

What's the name of that hurricane again Laura?

2006-11-19T16:46:00.000-08:00

Ms. Bush, it is Hurricane Katrina, NOT Hurricane Corrina. I wonder if she has learned the real name since this clip from Sept 2005?
Link Here

Katrina's Aftermath, amazing collection of pictures, videos, stories.

2006-11-12T19:09:00.000-08:00

Link Here. Many links to many other sites of pictures and stories.

Including the always popular Slidell Tech Institute sign.

USGS releases Katrina impact studies, pictures pre and post

2006-11-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Link Here

One of the big problems is the wetland and islands that protect southern Louisiana have been further destroyed, leaving less protection for places inland.

Rocket is back home!

2006-11-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Adopted dog returns to N.O. after suit filed

PHILADELPHIA - Rocket, a dog that survived Katrina and ended up in a Pennsylvania home, is back with its owner in New Orleans after a custody fight that went to court.

The Philadelphia couple who adopted the dog returned it to previous owner Sheila Combs, lawyers for both sides said.

Combs agreed to drop a lawsuit she filed last month against Lynne and Joseph Welsh and the kennels that handled the dog before the Welshes adopted him. The attorneys would not comment further on the settlement.

Similar animal-custody battles have cropped up in states including Florida and Maryland over pets left behind during the Aug. 29, 2005 storm and the mass evacuations afterward.

Six things not to say to a Katrina survivor

2006-11-08T22:49:00.000-08:00

Not too long ago, a well-intentioned fellow from somewhere else began to tell me what he thought we should do to return our city to "normal." I stopped listening immediately.

Processing the encounter later, I realized that I have reached my limit on helpful suggestions from well-meaning advisers. Outsiders may not realize how familiar residents of New Orleans are with our own failures -- before and since the storm. This list is crafted to help family members and friends avoid blunders that can kill a conversation or incite civil unrest. I've heard all of these questions and comments in one form or another over the last few months.

"Hey, why don't you guys clean up this mess?"

We're working as hard as we can. The implication that we have not been working is an insult and does not recognize the amazing expenditure of energy and time and resources in the flood zone this past year. I calculate that if every barge and train and sea-going vessel that visits the Port of New Orleans were to haul nothing but debris, it would take 18 months to clean up the destruction of our city. And that's if the debris were all neatly packaged and ready for containers. Just the ruined mattresses, lined up, would stretch from here to Chicago.

We've made a lot of progress in the first year. We fight the discouragement of knowing that we have just begun. This is going to take years.

"When my neighbor's roof sprung a leak, we all pitched in and fixed it."

No situation you have experienced in your past is anything close to the scale of this destruction. No neighbors are left to pitch in. Everyone's hammers and kitchens and garages and vehicles are gone. In fact, the neighborhood itself is gone, along with all its landmarks and stores.

"If you think this is bad, you should have seen Blanktown after the tornado."

You may believe that it will comfort us to know that you have seen worse. We just don't believe it. Multiply your tornado damage by 10,000 and you might get close to what happened to us. Every day I struggle again to fully comprehend the breadth and depth of this tragedy. It's the hardest thing I do -- experiencing the devastation visually and relationally every day.

"It's been a year. You need to get over it."

The problem is -- it's not over. Just yesterday my good friend announced his departure to Texas. An elderly couple decided they were too old to be part of this task and will move to Mississippi.

My insurance bill just arrived, and it's 80 percent more than last year. The countertops won't be here until October.

My child's friend lost her dad to suicide. Thieves stole my air conditioning unit. The parish clerk cannot find my marriage license.

No lawyer is left to render defense in a court system that's almost shut down. And 80 percent of the psychiatrists have departed permanently -- just when we needed them the most.

We are living in a continuing urban disaster of unprecedented proportions. It's living in emergency mode as a way of life. It's 12 hours of commuting and working, two hours of repairing bathrooms and kitchens, and six hours of "rest" in a FEMA trailer with the wife and kids.

I can't get over it, and I won't. What I have to do is somehow stay healthy spiritually as I integrate this into my heart and soul. So I am mustering all my faith and love and hope trying to stay positive in my upside-down world.

"God's not through. He's gonna wipe y'all out next time."

The Book of Job records that Job's friends came to see him after the disaster. They sat in silence for seven days and did not say one word. (That would be a good start for the person who made this remark.)

Then Job's friends made a mistake -- they spoke. Everybody would have been a lot happier if they had just sat in silence for seven more days -- or years.

Maybe God aimed Katrina at New Orleans. Maybe the Devil did it. Maybe it was highs and lows and prevailing winds and water temperatures in the Gulf. But one thing is for sure -- you don't know. So don't tell me you do. I don't want to hear it.

"Say, could I get your picture standing on what's left of your house?"

We're still a little sensitive about our stuff, even if it is piled out on the street. Maybe especially then. This debris represents the material accumulation of many years of hard work. It's junk now. We know that. But we're not too eager to pose with our pain yet. We haven't put on our makeup, and we look a mess. This may have been the most photographed city in America before the storm, and maybe that's still the case. But for now, I'll pass on the picture.

. . . . . . .

David Crosby is the pastor of First Baptist Church in New Orleans. His e-mail address is david@firstbaptistneworleans.com.

Link to article here

Democratically run House and Senate, investigations coming

2006-11-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to all who worked or voted to help make this happen. Nancy Pelosi, soon to be Speaker of the House, has said she intends on investigating the actions and policies of the Bush administration from Iraq to Katrina to many other things. While this is only the beginning, the ability to slow down the harm and pain caused by the indifference, stupidity and arrogance of this administration, still it is good.

Thank you again for voting, for caring, for sticking up for right.

I will be gone the rest of October

2006-10-07T23:48:00.000-07:00

Taking a trip, not to the gulf coast but elsewhere, so please check back in November since I won't be posting anything until then. Thank you for your continuing interest and please feel free to puruse the archives in the meantime.

Picture of The Guys, just for fun.

2006-10-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

Michael Brown, George Bush and Mark Foley.

How to find a good place to volunteer

2006-09-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

There are many groups and places to volunteer your time, energy and money. There is still a huge need for people volunteering their time, energy and money. There are church groups/camps, community groups/camps, hippy groups/camps, etc etc etc of all sizes. Not being on the gulf coast, it can be difficult to tell who is worthwhile working with, and who is a waste of your time, energy and money. Yes, there are scammers, unfortunately, and some of them sound really good so you need to be careful. You do not want to waste your time, energies, money and there is so much continuing need for all of those.

Here is some simple advice on finding a good place to volunteer:

Talk with people who have been down to the gulf coast. Find out about their experiences and get as much information as you can about wherever they went, whoever they worked with.

Most volunteer groups/camps ask you to pay your own transportation costs to get to the coast, but will feed you and provide a place to stay once you arrive. This is pretty standard as money is tight and is better used to feed volunteers and buy building materials. Most will ask you to bring your own tent, some have a covered area to camp in so you are out of the rain, a few have cabins or housing available so make sure you check before you go.

I would be leary of any organization that asked me to pay for room and board while I was volunteering, as this is usually provided free of cost and there are enough good groups where this is available.

There are volunteer opportunities for many different tasks, not just mucking/ gutting/ rebuilding. Good volunteer groups will be able to help you get in touch with a situation that suits you best, whether it is with them or not. Good volunteer groups understand that it doesn't matter where you go, what you do, so long as you are doing something because while they could use you, so can so many other places and groups.

Please contact me if you would like more information on groups I have worked with, and thank you for your continuing interest in helping recovery.

Bayou Liberty Relief Camp closes

2006-09-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

My Good Friends,

I have sat down several times to write you this note. It has been difficult adjusting to being Home in Oklahoma after being Home in Louisiana for so long. I miss the mornings on the Bayou, the chatter of the Vollies as they get ready to go to the job sites and when they return in the evenings telling of the days adventures. The Wonderful feeling of Community and Commitment in all the Camps we worked in and with. I loved visiting with Residents, hearing their stories of survival..... their hopes for the future. I miss the surprise Crawfish Feasts Keven would bring us--the faces of the Vollies as they tried this Cajun cuisine for the first time. I can still feel the breeze coming across the Mississippi as we admired the peaceful beauty of the Crescent Bridge lighting the evening sky of New Orleans. Louisiana will always be Home to me as I long for the Bayou.

The Camp is closed. Ken and I had decided in late June that because of the lack of Volunteers, we were going to close the Camp and go home ( our other Home). We contacted Plenty International as we knew they were looking for a place to base their efforts. We decided to keep the Camp open combing our resources. This was successful for the next several weeks. Together we put up sheetrock and bathroom fixtures in Mr. Russel's home in Slidell. We helped Common Ground put on a roof in the Lower Ninth. We also worked extensively on a Community Center in Chalmette, St Bernard Parish. This was all done with only 6 Vollies. For two weeks only 3 Vollies were left, they did a tremendous job completing Mr. Russel's project before going home last week.

I feel sad, frustrated and disappointed when I think of having to close the Camp. But I feel pride when I think of all the work we accomplished with the help of so many good people who came to the aid of the folks so affected by this Disaster. With out the many Volunteers who came, with out folks like Keven Curley and Pete Wilson who donated so much to us, first United Peace Relief, then Bayou Liberty Relief, we could not have done it. I smile every time I think about Mobile and all the Friends we made, the work we got done there. What an adventure it was early on in Covington working with Veterans for Peace!

The Good News is that Plenty and Bayou Liberty are working together on individual projects for the future. We are putting together a group to assist a Day Care in Pass Christian and an Art Center in New Orleans. We would like to take groups in for two weeks at a time. We are also looking into continuing our work with individual residents. Still, this means Vollies are needed! Do you remember the saying "It ain't over 'till the Fat Lady sings"? We may have had to Close the Camp, But I still don't here that 'Lady"! So put out that Positive Energy to the Universe---let's continue one project at a time......

In Peace and Caring, Niki

Judge Says Katrina Cases Can't Be Joined (against insurance companies)

2006-09-08T22:34:00.000-07:00

Background:insurance companies are denying claims after Katrina, saying that the damage was caused by water, not winds and so what if the water was caused by the hurricane.
--------------------------------------------------------

Homeowners suing insurance companies for denying their claims after Hurricane Katrina must file their lawsuits individually, a federal judge ruled.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Walker said that allowing hundreds of policyholders to consolidate their cases against several major insurers would amount to a "quasi class-action lawsuit but without regard for the rigid requirements for class certification."

Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, whose firm is suing several insurers on behalf of hundreds of policyholders, said his legal team is weighing its options, including refiling the cases in state court.

"It does seem to indicate that the federal courts are not going to respond in an effective manner to this disaster," he said Friday.

Thousands of lawsuits were filed in the wake of Katrina by angry policyholders who said insurance companies offered them far too little to cover their losses. Insurers say their standard policies cover damage from wind but not from water, including storm surge.

Scruggs had asked Walker to consolidate his clients' cases against State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. and Allstate Property and Casualty Insurance Co. into a joint trial against each insurer.

Although Walker ruled Wednesday that each claim on a storm-damaged property must be severed into separate lawsuits the judge did not rule out that the cases could be consolidated before they are tried.

Spokesmen for State Farm and Allstate said they were pleased with the decision.

"Judge Walker rightly points out that each case should be heard on its own unique merits, because storm damage affects each property differently," said State Farm spokesman Fraser Engerman.

Nationwide spokesman Joe Case said he hadn't seen the judge's ruling and couldn't immediately comment on it, but added, "We adjust claims on an individual basis, and the adjustments are based on the facts unique to each claim."

The first of the Katrina lawsuits was tried this summer. A federal district judge ruled that a Pascagoula couple cannot collect damages from Katrina's storm surge because Nationwide's policies do not cover wind-driven water damage.

Boat owner drops lawsuit, Man took it to rescue victims of Katrina

2006-09-08T22:31:00.000-07:00

I am very glad this lawsuit is being dropped. Here
is more information on Mark Morice's actions.

Link to story here

John Lyons Jr. has decided not to pursue his lawsuit against a Broadmoor man who said he rescued more than 200 residents from post-Katrina floodwaters after commandeering Lyons' boat.

On Tuesday, Lyons' attorney, E. Ronald Mills, filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit seeking payment for direct and indirect costs "attributable to the actual conversion of the boat and motor," as well as for "grief, mental anguish, embarrassment and suffering of the petitioner due to the removal of the boat and motor."

In a written statement, Lyons referenced the "media frenzy" surrounding the lawsuit against Mark Morice and explained that the turnabout will allow Lyons "to redirect my energy back to rebuilding my home and my neighborhood."

"The big issue here is not the monetary damages that I incurred from the loss of the boat," he wrote. "It is about holding people responsible for their actions.

"Does a natural disaster give an individual the right to break into private property, take possessions of others, not return them and then have no responsibility to the rightful owner? If this becomes a precedent, then we, the citizens, will ultimately pay the price."

Lyons said he too was a victim of Hurricane Katrina and that he evacuated 10 people from a flooded home, including several elderly women and a young child.

"To complete this evacuation, I borrowed a pirogue and personally paddled these people eight blocks through fallen trees to dry ground. After numerous trips back and forth, when everyone was out and safe, I waded back through chest-deep floodwater to return the pirogue to the owner's home."

Morice welcomed Lyons' change of heart.

"I feel relieved," Morice said Thursday. "I'm sorry he lost his boat, but I felt blessed that it was available to me when I needed it."

Morice said he didn't return the boat when he could no longer use it because he turned it over to others "at the water's edge, so they could go save more lives."

Morice, who said he never saw the 18-foot Fiberglas T-hull boat again, said he later told Lyons' wife that he took their boat and explained why. Lyons said Thursday that Morice's encounter with his wife was accidental, and he did not purposefully seek out his wife to explain why he had taken their boat.

"I felt horrible when I was taking the boat," Morice said, "but I realized I had to have it to save lives."

Big, Easy Money ;Disaster Profiteering on the American Gulf Coast

2006-09-03T20:16:00.000-07:00

One of my pictures is in this report, cadavar dog and handler.
Link CorpWatch page is here

Disaster profiteers make millions while local companies and laborers in New Orleans and the rest of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast region are systematically getting the short end of the stick, according to a major new report from the nonprofit CorpWatch.

A CorpWatch analysis of FEMA's records shows that "fully 90 percent of the first wave of (the post-Katrina reconstruction) contracts awarded - including some of the biggest no-bid contracts to date -- went to companies from outside the three worst-affected states. As of July 2006, after months of controversy and Congressional hearings, companies from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had increased their share of the total contracts to a combined 16.6 percent." The CorpWatch analysis shows that more federal reconstruction contracts have gone to Virginia and Indiana - usually large, politically connected corporations -- than to any of the three Katrina-devastated states.

The CorpWatch report also exposes abusive "contracting charge pyramids" where the companies doing the actual reconstruction work often get only a tiny (and insufficient) fraction of the taxpayer money awarded for projects and widespread non-payment of local companies and laborers, including what has been alleged to be the deliberate and systematic exploitation of immigrant workers, including undocumented individuals.

“One year after disaster struck, the slow-motion rebuilding of the Gulf Coast region looks identical to what has happened to date in Afghanistan and Iraq. We see a pattern of profiteering, waste and failure - due to the same flawed contracting system and even many of the same players" says CorpWatch Director Pratap Chatterjee. "The process of getting Katrina-stricken areas back on their feet is needlessly behind schedule, in part, due to the shunning of local business people in favor of politically connected corporations from elsewhere in the U.S. that have used their clout to win lucrative no-bid contracts with little or no accountability and who have done little or no work while ripping off the taxpayer."

“Big, Easy Money” report author Rita J. King said: "The devastation of the Gulf Coast is tragic enough, but the scope of the corporate greed that followed, facilitated by government incompetence and complicity, is downright criminal. Sadly, disaster profiteering has become commonplace in America. Well connected corporations are growing rich off of no-bid contracts while the sub-contractors - the people who actually perform the work - often do so for peanuts, if they get paid at all."

Click here to read the report (text version), to see key findings click here, or to download it as a PDF (1.75 MB) with pictures click here.

(From the Introduction)

When bloated bodies floating down the streets of New Orleans were broadcast live on national television days after Hurricana Katrina, a frazzled federal government put the call into Kenyon International Emergency Services for help.

Kenyon is a wholly owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), a funeral-services firm based in Texas helmed by Robert Waltrip, a close family friend of the Bush clan and a major donor to President George W. Bush’s gubernatorial and presidential campaigns. SCI was at the center of “FuneralGate,” one of the biggest scandals in Bush’s gubernatorial career.

In the two months Kenyon worked in New Orleans, Kenyon recovered 535 bodies (about one third the total number of confirmed Katrina casualties in Louisiana) and billed the state of Louisiana well over $6 million for its services (1); or about $12,500 per victim. In the months since, dozens of bodies that Kenyon missed continue to be found by local authorities and in some cases, family members. Meanwhile, local black morticians volunteered their services to help in recovery and processing of bodies, but were turned away by Federal Emergency Management Agency. (2)

Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.

2006-09-01T18:04:00.000-07:00

In an event with echoes of his prime-time speech in Jackson Square here last September, Mr. Bush spoke in a working-class neighborhood in Biloxi against a backdrop of neatly reconstructed homes. But just a few feet away, outside the scene captured by the camera, stood gutted houses with wires dangling from ceilings. A tattered piece of crime-scene tape hung from a tree in the field where Mr. Bush spoke. A toilet sat on its side in the grass.

(part of article clipped)
Speaking to reporters Monday after visiting United States Marine Inc., a company in Gulfport that builds military boats, Mr. Bush predicted that the rebuilding effort would take “years, not months.”

“There will be a momentum, momentum will be gathered,” the president said. “Houses will begat jobs, jobs will begat houses.”

But, he continued: “It’s hard to describe the devastation down here. It was massive in its destruction, and it spared nobody. United States Senator Trent Lott had a fantastic house overlooking the bay. I know because I sat in it with he and his wife. And now it’s completely obliterated. There’s nothing.”

Link to entire story here

Houses begat jobs and jobs begat houses? Okay. Remember this come election time.

Mark Morice, rescued hundreds of survivors in NOLA, is being sued

2006-08-31T11:51:00.000-07:00

Link Here
There is a link on this page to an interview which includes pictures and video of when Katrina hit, and the weeks afterwards when they resuced people. A neighbor has received some insurance compensation for a boat Mark took to rescue people, but not for the full value of the boat. This neighbor has sued Mark for the remainder.

Mark Morice: Screams for help led to rescue of hundreds, lawsuit

By Jon Donley
NOLA.com Multimedia

The screams on the videotape, followed by loud echoing bangs - as of victims trying to hammer their way to safety - bring back the horrors of Katrina.

In the afternoon after the storm passed, those screams sent Broadmoor resident Mark Morice and his two companions in search of boats to save lives. Over seven days, Morice and his crew reportedly rescued hundreds of stranded residents, and helped with the evacuation of patients from horrific conditions at Memorial hospital.

Nearly a year later, Morice has been sued by a neighbor - the owner of a boat Morice took to rescue storm victims.

Read the Times-Picayune report on the suit.

Top 10 Stupid Quotes

2006-08-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

1) “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” — President Bush, on “Good Morning America,” Sept. 1, 2005, six days after repeated warnings from experts about the scope of damage expected from Hurricane Katrina

2) “What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this (chuckle) – this is working very well for them.” — Former First Lady Barbara Bush, on the hurricane evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 5, 2005

3) “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” — President Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown, while touring hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, Sept. 2, 2005

4) “Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.” — FEMA Director Michael Brown, Sept. 1, 2005

5) “Now tell me the truth boys, is this kind of fun?” – House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Texas), to three young hurricane evacuees from New Orleans at the Astrodome in Houston, Sept. 9, 2005

6) “We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do … The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like
it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the
porch.” (Laughter) — President Bush, touring hurricane damage, Mobile, Ala., Sept. 2, 2005

7) “Well, I think if you look at what actually happened, I remember on Tuesday morning picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, ‘New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.’ Because if you recall, the storm moved to the east and then continued on and appeared to pass with considerable damage but nothing worse.” – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, blaming media coverage for the government’s failings, “Meet the Press,” Sept. 4, 2005

8) “What didn’t go right?’” –President Bush, as quoted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), after she urged him to fire FEMA Director Michael Brown “because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right” in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort

9) “I mean, you have people who don’t heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.” – Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Sept. 6, 2005

10) “You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals…many of these people, almost all of them that we see are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people who are watching this story unfold.” – CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, on New Orleans’ hurricane evacuees, Sept. 1, 2005

More stupid quotes atTHIS link including one of my favorites: 15) "I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water." –Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, on NPR's "All Things Considered," Sept. 1, 2005

Report from a friend on MS coast on money allocation, red tape, rebuilding

2006-08-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

For those of us trying to "see" the money that has been allocated the red tape we have to fight through and the circles we have to run in are exhausting.

First there was the FEMA monies, limited in amount and not as forth coming as the government and the media would have the public belief. To obtain more than just the initial $2000, you had to go down to the FEMA offices (during working hours, so you lose time from work, work you need to try to survive to rebuild). You go through the interview process, then a claim's representative comes out and inspects your damage or remains, asks you if you owned a vaccuum cleaner and other assorted household items, then they process that back at their office somewhere between here and DC, and then you wait.

In the meantime, you learn that there is the offer of low interest SBA loans (SBA is the agency doing the paperwork and lending chores for home owners, in addition to businesses). So you go to them and you apply. You find out that if you get the SBA loan, you aren't entitled to the monies from FEMA and FEMA tells you that if you are denied the SBA loan, to come back to them so they can see if you are entitled to the rest of the FEMA monies.

You chase your tail from one agency to the next and you keep apply and keep trying. You interview with the SBA people, you fill out the application, again, another claim's adjuster visits your lot and the wheels are in motion.

Now imagine, being out of work due to your business or the business you worked for being destroyed. Your insurance company denies your claim because it was the storm surge that destroyed your house and not the wind (or for some with flood and not wind insurance, it is the reverse.) So you apply to SBA and one of the provisions they require is that you have insurance, both wind and flood, on your home. Well, you have no home, but you still have to have insurance. And of course, there are the zoning restrictions in the newly designated flood zones that require you build your home at a certain height before you can get flood insurance, thus since you have no home, you can't even buy the flood insurance that you have to have to be approved for an SBA loan.

So, let's say you do have a job, but it doesn't pay what you had before the storm and your credit is stretched because you were given a 6 month deferment, but yet it wasn't really a deferment, it was more like a balloon note, and you are paying for insurance for nothing, but yet, you are finally able to convince the SBA that you can swing it. Part of that loan are the monies to pay back FEMA, so you are paying interest on the money FEMA "gave" you.

In addition to signing all the paperwork and the liens on your property, all that you have left from the storm, you also sign papers promising that any monies you recover if you win your suit against your insurance company that has failed to pay the claim that would have alleviated the need for the SBA loan in the first place.

Then they offer the grant monies and you go through the paperwork, application process all over again. You have already given the information to a government agency at some point, either FEMA or the SBA or both know more about you and your losses and your financial status than you know yourself, yet you have to go to yet another governmental agency and complete the interview and application process all over again. Once you have done that, yet another "claims adjuster" contacts you to make an appointment to come inspect your home to determine your damage.

If you are like me, you repeat for the brazillionth time that you have no home, their records should reflect that, but they are more than welcome to come out to inspect your lot and photograph your dirt and weeds.

And again, you sign papers stating that the grant monies you may be awarded will be first used to pay off the SBA loan and whatever money you may recover after suing your insurance company will go to pay back someone, at this point you can't remember which agency, but you know they get paid back.

So you wait and you wait. I had my interview with the grant folks and made my application in June. I have yet to hear from them. I have been sort of approved by the SBA, but I'm trying to get that paperwork complete and there is a question about my paying for the title report they require and then I'm not sure about the last packet they sent me, so I'm still trying to do what I can to get something that can help me get somewhere.

Once I have been approved for the loan or the grant, the struggles continue. I have to find a house plan and a contractor that is available, won't gouge me and will complete the job. Electricians, plumbers, brick layers, flooring laborers and sheet rock hangers are in high demand, the contractor has to be able to find these specialists that can fit the job in their schedule. The costs of building supplies have gone up tremendously from a year ago and continue to go up (cost of gas and availability add to the costs), so my project may be estimated at X, but at the end of the job, should I be so fortunate, it may end up costing X plus yyyyyy.

Nothing is easy in this "new norm" and limbo is no longer a concept for the after life, between heaven and hell, it is a reality.

Some times you have to wonder if folks just want you to give up and go away. It definitely is an option you consider, but then again, where would you go and how would you get there?

The group doing the CDBG state grant application work, interview, application process, review and award, is a private corporation hired by the state to do the job. The private group hired private claims adjusters to review the damage to determine the extent of same.

The SBA is doing the loans for Home Land Security/FEMA, yet FEMA didn't share it's information with the SBA until the loan is approved and only then to determine the dollar amount of monies given so that the money can be recouped.

It's a fine kettle of fish, the sad thing is, the fish are rotting before they can be given to feed those in need.

Feds to begin cutting off rental aid to thousands

2006-08-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

Link to article here

FEMA promises to consider each case
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
By Robert Travis Scott

Thousands of families receiving free rent from the federal government after evacuating homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina could lose that help and be out on the street as early as this week as a series of deadlines approaches stirring a mounting anxiety about the future of the multibillion-dollar housing program.

Katrina dislodged so many people from their homes that shelter and housing assistance offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency expanded to an unprecedented scope. Those programs are winding down in stages, creating a balancing act between the needs of the displaced beneficiaries and the desire of the federal government to return them to unsubsidized housing.

A FEMA-supported program operating mainly in Texas came under fire Tuesday from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN. The housing advocacy group filed suit against FEMA in federal district court in the District of Columbia, claiming the agency has failed to adequately explain to hurricane evacuees why their housing benefits are being terminated.

"They are trying to deter people" from staying in the program, said Jerome Wesevich with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, a nonprofit legal group assisting ACORN. "It's amazing some of the things they are trying to do."

FEMA spokesman Ronnie Simpson did not respond to the allegations in the lawsuit, but he said the agency wants to work with each and every beneficiary who needs help.

"If folks have issues, give us a call," Simpson said. "We're here for you. We'll be happy to talk to you."

FEMA provides rent to evacuees at market rates anywhere in the country for up to 18 months. To qualify, beneficiaries must have been displaced by Katrina or Rita and their homes must be uninhabitable. The rental assistance counts toward a $26,200 cap for applicants receiving FEMA disaster benefits. FEMA has asked beneficiaries to demonstrate they are fixing their homes or working toward returning to a self-sustaining living arrangement.

That rental assistance program has helped 604,511 families at a cost of $3.7 billion, and does not include long-term sheltering and travel trailers.

Participants in the program must periodically weigh in with FEMA to keep their certification active. Those who fail to do so will no longer receive the rental assistance as of Oct. 31. Beyond that, the program will reach the 18-month point at the end of February, when thousands of families could find themselves in the lurch if they face rental expenses while they are continuing to pay for their damaged homes in the New Orleans area. For people who rented before Katrina, they may not be able to afford the new rates in their former communities.

Simpson acknowledged that the Feb. 28 deadline is looming, but said the federal government will evaluate the consequences of ending the program and could may it.

"You're not going to end a program if there is nowhere for people to go," Simpson said.

In the meantime, people using the program should be "taking personal responsibility toward returning to normalcy," he said. FEMA is willing to look at each family's situation, and the agency's evaluation of whether they continue to qualify for rental assistance "goes down to the micro-level, and that person's situation."

After sheltering tens of thousands of people after Katrina, Houston decided to move many of them into apartments and rounded up 34,630 units, said Cindy Gabriel, communications director of the Joint Hurricane Housing Task Force, a city-run housing group. As a shelter program, the money for their rent has not counted against the FEMA cap of $26,200 for agency disaster benefits.

But that shelter program runs out Aug. 31, so city officials have been trying to move recipients into the regular rental assistance program or off the dole. Gabriel said about 22,000 successfully transitioned to the regular rent program, but about 12,000 were found ineligible.

Facing the potential for a massive number of people facing homelessness, Houston Mayor Bill White worked with FEMA and the residents to pare down the list. As of Tuesday, 2,792 families in Houston apartments were not eligible for the rental assistance and face a rent crunch Friday, Gabriel said.

ACORN complained that FEMA has been providing too little information to those people about why they have been deemed ineligible. For example, FEMA explains denial of benefits with computer codes instead of explanations, Wesevich said. Applicants become embroiled in bureaucracy and poorly informed FEMA representatives, he said.

"It's a complete black box," Wesevich said.

ACORN maintains that federal agencies are required to clearly explain their reason for denying benefits so that applicants can have adequate time to appeal.

Gabriel said another problematic deadline is FEMA's cancellation of paying apartment utilities. FEMA extended its period for paying utilities for subsidized renters to one year, and as renters reach their 12-month anniversaries they will be cut off from the federal help and have to pay for the service themselves, she said.

Happy Anniversary

2006-08-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

Remembering Katrina
Landfall Buras. 6:10 a.m. Monday, August 29, 2005
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
By Bruce Nolan
Staff writer

Two hours before dawn, at the threshold of the darkest week in the history of New Orleans, a hand shook Cyril Crutchfield awake in lower Plaquemines Parish, 45 miles southeast of the city.

"Wake up. Wake up! Water's comin' in."

Crutchfield sat up on the hard table that had been his makeshift bed in the darkened cafeteria of Port Sulphur High School. He could hear Hurricane Katrina in the night, its wind keening and moaning with unnerving power, much stronger than when he had fallen asleep two hours earlier.

It sounded like a beast. A living thing.

The floor of the high school's sturdy cafeteria stood 3 feet above ground. But water was seeping under the door.

A flashlight beam cut the darkness.

"We got to move, man."

Katrina was still 1 ½ hours from landfall over Buras, 15 miles south. It had weakened hours earlier, yet remained a Category 3 monster with peak winds of 127 mph across a 70-mile front.

Worse, Katrina was packing a 27-foot storm surge, far higher than the surge before Camille, the vicious but more compact 1969 hurricane that stood unchallenged in living memory as the gold standard of lethal storms.

Even to a storm-savvy population, Katrina seemed to sneak up on the city. Around the region more than a million people awoke Saturday, Aug. 27, to begin their usual weekend routines. Then came the alarming news: The hurricane's expected northeastern bend into the central Mississippi Gulf Coast had not materialized overnight.

The storm instead drifted west, barreling right at New Orleans.

Alerted, the city in 24 hours completed the largest mass exodus in its history. About two-thirds of the metro area's citizens drove to safety, to upstate Louisiana or to higher ground in such states as Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia.

But hundreds of thousands remained behind, too poor, too frail or too isolated to leave.

Many others, Crutchfield among them, elected to stay. They remained because they did not believe Katrina would be a mass killer. In particular, they did not think Katrina could kill them, that it could kill them in neighborhoods that had never flooded, inside a modern American city ringed by large-scale flood defenses fashioned by the Army Corps of Engineers.

They were confident, and they stayed.

In the course of a morning, Katrina would envelope them in arguably the largest natural disaster in U.S. history -- and certainly American civil engineering's greatest failure, as levees and floodwalls failed across the metro area.

The toll: 1,464 Louisianians dead, almost all of them in the New Orleans area. One hundred and forty square miles of a major city flooded for six weeks; St. Bernard Parish demolished, wall to wall; lower Plaquemines Parish devastated; southern Slidell and much of Metairie north of Interstate 10 flooded. In all, 160,000 homes destroyed or substantially damaged across five parishes.

And a more enduring tragedy: the forced relocation of about 240,000 New Orleanians who may never return.

Katrina would prove a three-stage disaster.

First would come the hell of flood and fire and thousands of isolated fights for survival that befell the city that first day, Aug. 29 -- followed by the wholly unanticipated but unspeakably cruel aftermath of official sluggishness and incompetence that left Katrina's weakened survivors abandoned, exposed and dehydrated for days before the last could be evacuated.

And finally, the unrelenting heartbreak Katrina has inflicted every day since then: the misery of impoverishment, separation and uncertainty as tens of thousands rebuild broken lives and restore neighborhoods rendered into bleak moonscapes of flood damage. Tens of thousands more have found themselves effectively exiled in another city, another state, indefinitely cut off from New Orleans in a place arbitrarily picked a year ago by the flight schedule of an evacuation team.

But at dawn Aug. 29, neither Crutchfield nor anyone else who stayed to ride out the storm grasped the enormity of what lay ahead.

As Crutchfield suddenly confronted his peril, thousands of others were about to face similar life-and-death struggles as Katrina enveloped the New Orleans area from east to west. They included tax preparer Robert Green, his brother, his ailing mother, his three grandchildren and his mentally disabled cousin, all soon to be trapped on a disintegrating roof in the Lower 9th Ward; commercial fisherman Pete Gerica and his family, waiting on Chef Menteur Highway in eastern New Orleans; the Rev. Dennis Hayes bunkered in a faculty office on the second floor of St. Louise de Marillac Catholic School in Arabi; teacher Graylin Miller and his elderly neighbors, Earl and Gloria Balthazar, waiting in their eastern New Orleans neighborhood just south of Lakefront Airport; and Vincent Tusa, 82, a retired restaurateur living alone in Lakeview, one block from the 17th Street Canal.

Not all of them would survive the storm.

Early morning, Port Sulphur

Cyril Crutchfield

It was Cobb who awakened Crutchfield to warn him about the water. Crutchfield didn't know Cobb's first name. He was one of only six or seven people who had taken refuge with Crutchfield at Port Sulphur High School the night before.

Nearly everyone else had fled. The day before and all afternoon Saturday, Crutchfield, Port Sulphur's head football coach, had watched the people of lower Plaquemines secure their homes and boats, pack their cars and head upriver.

A native of piney Covington, Crutchfield knew hurricanes primarily as dangerous windstorms that in his 38 years always frightened New Orleans before veering into land somewhere nearby. He expected only tree destruction, maybe some building damage, and two or three days of lost power. In short, a major inconvenience -- particularly inasmuch as fate had kissed him this year with a strong football team that on the previous Friday night had pummeled local rival Buras, 21-0, in the season opener.

Crutchfield was looking forward to playing Belle Chasse the following weekend. Katrina irritated him, forcing him to cut short Saturday's team meeting and dismiss his players into their families' care.

He wanted them focused.

"Y'all believe it: We're going to play Belle Chasse next weekend," he told his players before they parted.

Now the flooding cafeteria had rendered the game a ludicrously distant notion. As the water continued to rise, the men climbed the stairs to a second-floor classroom. Someone suggested they make for the gymnasium, a taller building.

Trooping downstairs in the dark, the men waded through waist-deep water into the gym. On his right, Crutchfield could see the stage for school events framed in heavy purple drapes with the school's initials, PSHS, embroidered in gold on the valance; the purple and gold banners hanging from the ceiling celebrating the Bronchos' athletic championships.

Across the hardwood basketball court a rack of bleachers stood along the opposite wall, with a few windows high along the ceiling line. Crutchfield and the others climbed into the bleachers nearest the ceiling.

Now, no more retreat. The storm's winds shrieked at their angriest in the weak morning light, violently slamming debris into the exterior walls.

Inside, the Gulf of Mexico sloshed and roiled, steadily filling the gym.

The water began to climb the rows of bleachers one by one.

Crutchfield pondered an escape through the window, out into the storm. The thought chilled him. To drop into the churning water, in that wind, would be to surrender to fate.

From his vantage point it appeared that the Gulf had swallowed the entire town. Outside the gym, it seemed the whole ocean heaved, weirdly studded here and there with the upper floors of buildings and treetops. The wind drove everything before it. If you were outside and missed a treetop, he thought, you were in trouble.

"I'm looking at the water, and I'm looking at the window. I'm looking at the water, and I'm looking at the window. Pretty soon we started to pray. We prayed about it together, and then I started my own private prayer.

"That's when I start thinking I should've left. I should've left. How am I going to get out of this?"

Early morning, the Lower 9th Ward

Robert Green Sr. and family

While Crutchfield found himself trapped by a steadily rising Gulf storm surge, families who had bunkered down in the shotgun homes in the Lower 9th Ward quickly found themselves neck-deep in a torrent.

A wall of water loosed by the collapse of the Industrial Canal's eastern floodwall gushed into Robert Green's neighborhood with such force that it bulldozed sturdy old wood-frame houses off their foundations: in Green's case, sending his mother's house drifting down the middle of the street, not serenely, but in a grinding, splintering ride that broke the house apart.

Green, his brother, Jonathan, their elderly mother, three toddlers and a mentally disabled cousin frantically gripped the roof.

Green and his family never intended to ride out Katrina. At 50, Green was the chief caregiver for his mother and other members of his extended family, a tightly connected multigenerational community centered on his mother's house at 1826 Tennessee St.

Green lived there and cared for Joyce Green, his elderly mother who was stricken with advanced Parkinson's disease. He also looked after his mentally disabled cousin, Hyman Sheppard, and his own granddaughter, Shanai Green -- and frequently Shanai's two sisters and assorted aunts, siblings, children, friends and visitors.

They had tried to get out during the weekend but turned back when it became clear his mother could not tolerate hours in the car.

They also had tried the Superdome, but it was too early. They were told to come back later, when officials promised to accept people with special needs.

Their ride back to the Dome on Sunday afternoon never arrived. So Monday morning, Aug. 29, found seven people at 1826 Tennessee St.: Robert; his younger brother, Jonathan, 44; as well as Joyce Green, 74; Sheppard, 60; and the children, Shanai, 3, and her sisters, Shaniya Thomas, 4 and Shamiya Thomas, 2.

Just before dawn, water began to course into the raised house. Peril quickly mounted; Jonathan Green returned from a quick reconnaissance across the street to report that it was too late to seek refuge in a neighbor's two-story house. Jonathan Green stood 6 feet, 8 inches tall, and he had to wade through chest-high water to return to his family.

With water pouring into the house, Robert Green climbed atop an armoire and reached the attic. From below, Jonathan Green helped lift the little girls, Joyce Green and Sheppard toward safety.

But the water followed quickly, entering the attic in minutes.

Frantic, Jonathan Green kicked out a section of roof and again helped his brother pull the family through, this time emerging outdoors into the full force of the storm.

Robert Green watched the houses flanking his shift on their foundations, catching his house in a grinding squeeze. The Greens' house floated off its moorings and began to break up. An old addition tore loose. The rest of the house floated free, began to rotate and drifted toward the middle of Tennessee Street.

With Jonathan Green sheltering his mother and Robert Green clutching the three little girls, the house began to scrape down the flooded street, past rooftops poking out of the water, the only landmarks the storm permitted.

The journey was both disorienting and weirdly recognizable. Before the storm, Robert Green had walked that neighborhood daily, stopping to visit neighbors with his granddaughters toddling along like chickadees. Now as he floated by each submerged and splintered home, he recognized each neighbor's house by its passing rooftop, knew who lived in each. The familiar was turned inside out.

After a block and a half the Greens' house rammed another at 1617 Tennessee. Pinned, with thousands of tons of water pushing against it, the Greens' house began to crumple.

Exposed in the storm, trying to protect his sick mother and little grandchildren, Green felt sick with helplessness. He was their caregiver and protector. He bathed them and dressed them daily. Now they were all exposed and terrified, still depending on him.

With two houses jammed together, Robert and Jonathan Green tried to move their family to the other roof.

Robert Green grabbed Shanai, 3, first and moved her over. He turned away, had Shaniya, 4, in hand, when Jonathan Green saw Shanai slip off the roof into the water.

Stricken, Robert Green put the second child on the roof.

Crying for his lost Shanai, Robert Green turned away and reached for the third grandchild, Shamiya, 2.

That's when Shaniya toppled into the water.

Early morning, Chef Menteur Highway, eastern New Orleans

The Gericas

Thirteen miles to the east, along Chef Menteur Highway in eastern New Orleans, commercial fisherman Pete Gerica and his family awaited Katrina in a brute of a house Gerica had built 14 years earlier, just for this moment.

Gerica lived all his boyhood summers on the Chef, local shorthand for the low, serpentine ridge of dry land running eastward out of New Orleans. He set down roots there as an adult and fished Lake Borgne for shrimp, crab and drum to support himself, his wife, Clara, and daughter, Christina.

Gerica built their two-story house on the north side of the highway a mile east of the U.S. 11 junction. He framed it with oversized two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours. He wrapped it in half-inch plywood, then brick. He locked the roof to the walls with double and triple reinforcements and raised the second-story living quarters 12 feet above sea level. He equipped the first floor with breakaway walls, sacrificing his freezers and marine hardware to let a storm surge crash through with minimal effect.

He had built it to withstand a storm like Camille, which he estimated would have put 1 ½ feet of water over the first floor. Gerica figured a major storm would cost him some equipment but little more.

As Katrina bore down, the Gericas awaited in the custom-built storm fortress, equipped with a generator, four boats, 50 gallons of diesel fuel and food for a month.

Confident, they summoned 19-year-old Christina from Louisiana State University and gathered Gerica's mother, Ramona, 77, who lived alone in eastern New Orleans. As morning broke and Katrina screamed outside, Gerica moved about his house, alert for trouble.

In the dim light about 6:30 a.m., Gerica was astonished to see two houses next door being dismembered before his eyes: great chunks of roof and wall being torn away, whirling out of sight in the lashing rain.

He called his family into a hallway. They hurried through two prayers. Suddenly, with a roar that sounded to Gerica like a herd of cattle running overhead, Katrina lifted a corner of the roof and suddenly whipped it away.

Several exterior walls instantly collapsed, thrusting the occupants suddenly outdoors. In the explosion of wind and noise, Pete and Clara Gerica said they felt the second floor beneath them heave upward, then collapse, tilting steeply to one side.

Christina Gerica toppled out of sight off the high side. The others tumbled down the slanting floor into the storm, landing in their yard in frothing, waist-deep water and howling wind. Pete Gerica briefly found his wife pinned under debris, lifted something off her, then was blown backward, toward the flooded highway.

Pete and Clara Gerica both remembered the screaming wind. It flung debris at them; rain stung their faces like nails. Clara Gerica found she had to turn away from the wind to catch a breath; Pete Gerica remembered how it filled his mouth and made his cheeks flutter uncontrollably.

The water drove Gerica and his mother south, across the highway and into a line of saplings along the shoulder. In the debris flapping everywhere, Gerica said he found a length of doorbell wire from his house and looped it around his mother, tying her halfway up a slender Chinese tallow tree.

Then, a gift: After a few minutes his daughter appeared out of the wall of rain. She emerged almost in front of Gerica as she struggled blindly across the road, grasping a floating shutter.

Gerica grabbed his daughter and tied her to another tree. Water still rising, he refastened his mother still higher, looping a length of television coaxial cable around her that he found dangling from a nearby telephone pole.

The three hung for hours while Katrina raged around them.

Meanwhile, Gerica's wife was gone.

Early morning, eastern New Orleans, near Lakefront Airport

Graylin Miller

Eleven miles west of the Gericas, Graylin Miller stood perched halfway up a ladder on the front porch of his house, cradling his Chihuahua in one arm, surrounded by rising water. He had run out of space. His head bumped against the porch ceiling, but the water still climbed around him. He had no place left to go.

Katrina lashed at the neighborhood just off Downman Road, splitting trees, rapidly filling houses with water and, as Miller could see, forcing some neighbors onto their roofs.

The city's cell phone systems were nearing collapse from overload and the spreading destruction from the storm. Yet Miller's phone beeped in his hand.

It was a colleague, a woman who taught with Miller at St. Paul the Apostle elementary school. Safe in Atlanta, she knew the storm was now upon the city. How was Miller doing?

"I told her I wasn't doing so well. I said I'm on a ladder out on the porch and the water's coming up all around."

The woman broke down, weeping, and handed the phone to someone else.

A few seconds later, another call, from his brother, Louis, nearby, and for the moment, dry, in Gentilly Woods.

"Don't you fool around and drown now," Louis Miller cautioned him.

This time, Graylin Miller hid his plight: He let his brother believe all was well.

"No, I won't," he told him.

Miller, in fact, was in considerable trouble.

Two days earlier, Miller had casually waved off every entreaty to evacuate.

To be sure, he sent his wife, Sheila, and two college-age daughters out of town. But in his historically dry neighborhood a few blocks from Lakefront Airport, he believed a hurricane would mean only wind, roof damage and loss of power.

Miller was a deacon at nearby St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, and he assisted at 8:30 a.m. Mass that Sunday, attended by only a few dozen remaining people. His pastor, the Rev. Bernard Assenyoh, canceled the 10:30 a.m. Mass and sent Miller to his home on Majestic Oaks Drive, in the sole company of Peanut, his Chihuahua.

A sister called with the offer of a ride out.

He declined. It was his last opportunity to leave.

The next morning Miller lost power early. Like many people, he spent the first few hours of that morning moving about his darkened house, trying to gauge the danger outside.

The wind began to send debris flying. Before long, water began to seep under the front door of his blue wood-frame house raised on concrete blocks. Miller checked the step-down kitchen in the rear and found it filling rapidly.

Miller quickly waded back to the front of his own house, urgently calling for Peanut.

With his house flooding, Miller edged out into the storm on his small front porch, its overhang resting on each side on vertical supports of decorative ironwork. He found a small wooden extension ladder, stood it beside the front door and climbed partly out of the water, until his head bumped the porch ceiling.

The water continued to rise.

Soon Miller abandoned the ladder. Clutching Peanut in the crook of his arm, he climbed the ornamental iron support holding up one side of the porch. He craned his head outside and above the roof line.

There he stayed for hours, wedging first one foot, then another, into the scrollwork of the ornamental iron railing. Katrina roared all about, tearing at him. He'd wrap one arm around the support and, when it grew tired, switch to the other.

Sometimes he'd use both arms and stuff Peanut into his T-shirt.

His feet went numb.

All he could do now was pray the water didn't keep rising.

He surrendered his fate to God.

"Lord, you can't be ready for me," he said to himself. "I have too much work still to do for you. But if it's your will . . ."

Early morning, Arabi

The Rev. Dennis Hayes

Five miles to the south, in Arabi, the Rev. Dennis Hayes lay sprawled across an office settee before being jerked awake by the blaring of his school building's alarm system, running now on backup battery power.

He was on the second floor or St. Louise de Marillac School on Aycock Street, only three or four blocks beyond New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward.

Rising with Badooki, his tricolored mutt, Hayes walked downstairs to check out conditions below -- and stepped into ankle-deep water on the first floor.

More remarkably -- and unnerving -- Hayes saw that the churning brown water was higher outside than inside. It was climbing against the glass windows, pushing to get in.

A Gentilly native, Hayes speaks quietly, deliberately, with a low, firm voice. He teaches part time at Notre Dame Seminary. At 46, he had seen New Orleans experience half a lifetime of hurricanes, including Betsy in 1965 and Camille four years later. And he knew the city had weathered dozens more storms before that.

More practically, he had utter confidence in the sheltering bulk of St. Louise's elementary school. With the storm approaching Sunday, Hayes prepared to move from the rectory to a second-floor campsite in a faculty office.

For safekeeping, Hayes gathered the church's sacramental records: a dozen red ledger books recording its baptisms, marriages and funerals and other life-cycle events. From the church he collected a golden vessel called a ciborium containing the Eucharist, the consecrated wafers left over from the last Mass. He scooped up several cellophane packs of peanut butter crackers, a bottle of Chianti, a few theology books from which to prepare class notes, and a radio, then climbed the stairs to a faculty office on the second floor of the school.

There he bedded down for the night -- to be awakened by the building alarm, then jolted by the roaring winds outside.

Two blocks north of the church a low levee separates the 9th Ward and St. Bernard from thousands of acres of delta marshland, and a few hundred yards beyond, the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a broad waterway to the sea.

In the predawn darkness Katrina's surge had come roaring unimpeded up the waterway, spreading across the marshes on either side and rushing toward St. Bernard and the Lower 9th. He watched as it rose to the height of telephone wires in a mere 45 minutes, tossing debris and moving cars and houses in a rush of white water.

He knew others had been as hardheaded as he had. They had stayed, and in much less secure buildings.

As he watched the water rise, he knew many would die -- were dying at that moment.

Midmorning, Lakeview

Vincent Tusa

By midmorning on the New Orleans lakefront, five miles west of Lakefront Airport, the rain blew horizontally. Katrina's counterclockwise winds blasted out of the north, sweeping over Lakeview.

At the corner of Fleur de Lis Drive and 38th Street, Vincent Tusa, 82, was home alone, preparing to take a shower.

Short and rather stocky, with an unlined face and wavy hair that belie his years, Tusa is the son of a Sicilian shoemaker who came to the United States. through New York's Ellis Island. For 30 years or more, he and his brothers ran Messina's Oyster House on Chartres Street. With his former wife, he raised three girls in a one-story red-brick house on Fleur de Lis Drive.

For the past 25 years, he had lived there by himself.

On the morning of the storm, Tusa was alone and not very mobile. He was in rehabilitation with a new artificial right knee, which remained sore and stiff three months after surgery -- but better than his left knee, which was racked with arthritis and awaiting replacement.

Still, alone and relatively immobile in an empty neighborhood, he was not particularly anxious.

Two or three decades ago, Tusa suffered the wound of his life when his marriage broke up. After five years of depression, he found the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. Its members nurtured in him an infant faith. He felt, late, that he had come to know God: perhaps one reason, he said, that he felt no fear as the storm bore down.

He hadn't left because he felt he had nowhere to go. Who would he stay with? Besides, he had survived eight decades worth of hurricanes. Why panic now? As the storm built that morning, he simply remained in his blacked-out house as the wind howled outside. About 10 a.m. he decided to take a shower.

On the way to the bathroom, he took a momentary detour and glanced out the picture window in his living room.

To his surprise there was water in front of his house, even though his yard slopes steeply to the street.

Naked but for rubber shower shoes, he hobbled to the rear of the house to check the view from the sliding glass door, a block from the 17th Street Canal.

He had hardly opened it when dirty water sluiced past his shins and gushed into the house. Startled, he watched the water eddy and whirl into the den, the kitchen, the hallway.

Within a few minutes the refrigerator became buoyant and began to wobble. He waded painfully into the bedroom, saw his bed afloat, cockeyed and rotating slightly. He thought to get into his home office, the next room down the hall, to retrieve birth certificates, insurance papers.

The water rose above his knees.

With the papers in hand, he found to his horror that the door, although slightly ajar, would no longer open sufficiently to let him out. Burglar bars on the windows barred his exit. The water was rising.

Tusa dropped the documents and began to yank at the door with two hands.

He looked toward the heavens and pleaded with Jesus, even invoking his guardian angel, Luigi.

"I looked up to Jesus. I said, 'If you're ready, I'll come. But please allow me some more time. I want to see my grandchildren again.'

" 'Send Luigi. Luigi, if you're on the other side, you push and I'll pull.' "

The water continued to rise, now to his waist -- piling more weight on the door he couldn't open.

Mid-morning, Port Sulphur

Cyril Crutchfield

Two hours after he had first fled the water, Crutchfield remained marooned on the topmost bleacher of the Port Sulphur High School gym, trapped between the roaring winds outside and the rising water inside.

The water had risen to the bottom of the basketball backboards. Then it swallowed the rims, 10 feet above the floor. Now only two bleacher seats remained above water.

And then, mercifully, a break. The storm quickly subsided. It appeared Katrina's eye was passing overhead. The water began to drop as fast as it had risen.

As the water fell, Crutchfield and his companions decided to wade across the floor and make for another classroom building where they knew they could reach the roof.

From their new vantage point, some of the men took some shaky video as the storm built itself anew.

A late-morning shot of the football field at the back of the campus shows wind-driven waves lapping at the crossbar of the goal posts, 10 feet above the ground.

Katrina slackened as the day wore on. Toward late afternoon an airboat from the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office ferried the men to the nearby Mississippi River levee. Another sheriff's boat picked them up late in the afternoon and carried them upriver to Belle Chasse, Crutchfield said.

A year later, what sticks with Crutchfield is the enormity of the peril and his powerless to do anything to fight back. He remembered his utter helplessness.

"In football, if a play doesn't work, you put in another. You're just sitting here hoping you catch some kind of break. You need a break, because there's nothing you can do.

"Nothing."

Midmorning, Lower 9th Ward

Robert Green's family

With the wind still roaring, Robert Green ached at the loss of two granddaughters, swept off the roof of their disintegrating home and into the flood raging through the Lower 9th Ward.

Then, suddenly, hope .

"Paw Paw!" he heard 4-year-old Shaniya cry out.

"Paw Paw!"

Shaniya had surfaced. She dog-paddled frantically around the front of the house and struggled toward the house next door. She crossed a submerged driveway and grasped the roof of a parked delivery truck to save herself.

From a distance, Robert and Jonathan Green pleaded, scolded, sternly commanded Shaniya to pull herself up onto the truck roof, which she finally did.

The brothers shepherded Joyce Green , Hyman Sheppard and baby Shamiya to the truck, where they climbed onto its roof with Shaniya. But with water still rising and the rear of the truck starting to float and tilt dangerously, they transferred to their original destination, the safer roof of 1617 Tennessee.

Yet Joyce Green was failing. She shook with tremors as they tried to get her onto the roof. Three times she fell back into the water. Each time her sons pulled her back up onto the roof,.

There they rode out the balance of the storm. Stripped of most of their clothing, they wrapped themselves in insulation for warmth. Terrified, Shaniya wailed through the storm; 2-year-old Shamiya, bereft of her plastic diaper and wearing only a soaked shirt, knelt with her little face pressed close to the roof.

The toddler never cried.

In time three neighbors joined them, huddling and enduring the storm through the long morning. Locked in a survival struggle, Robert Green had just focused on the moment. Are the babies OK? Is Mama OK?

As the storm weakened, Green gave way to exhaustion, lying sprawled on the roof while water churned all around him. He slipped in and out of sleep. Soon they could talk, even stand. They began congratulating each other on their shared survival. Then Jonathan Green spoke:

"Mama didn't make it," he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Soon enough three neighbors appeared in the flooded streets in a rescue boat, navigating the jumbled tangle of splintered houses knocked askew by the flood.

Robert, Jonathan, Shaniya, Shamiya and Sheppard slipped off the roof into the boat, leaving behind Joyce Green's soaked and lifeless body.

Shanai's body lay underwater somewhere nearby.

On high ground just a block away, Green hiked across the Claiborne Avenue Bridge to check the condition of the Upper 9th Ward.

On the return trip he looked over the rail and saw for the first time the huge breach in the Industrial Canal floodwall. A 200-foot barge floated unmoored in his neighborhood, just a block from where his home had been.

At that moment he grasped the scope of the destruction.

He understood there was nothing anyone could have done. And in that acceptance came something like relief from the crushing sense of responsibility. He let himself off the hook. He had been unable to protect two loved ones, but he had helped the rest fight off the monster of Katrina.

Afternoon, eastern New Orleans

The Gericas

Pete Gerica, his mother and daughter remained immersed in water and lashed to trees all morning, shifting their weight from foot to foot, lodging them in the crooks of their trees. As the wind slackened in early afternoon, Gerica waded across the highway and retrieved a small boat from his yard.

Gerica ferried Ramona and Christina to The Equalizer, a neighbor's 54-foot shrimp boat that had torn free from its moorings and grounded squarely across Chef Menteur Highway, about 100 yards up the road. There they found food, dry clothes and supplies.

Clara Gerica, his wife, was still missing.

Aboard The Equalizer, Gerica found a pair of binoculars and climbed high into the rigging to sweep the area with the glasses.

For hours Katrina's winds had roared out of the north. The storm broke open houses and splintered boats. It peeled open the steel walls of industrial shops, scattered their contents and drove the floating debris south, across Lake Pontchartrain and across the Chef Menteur ridge, piling up the wreckage against the barrier of a low protection levee running parallel to the highway on its south side.

The debris backed up there as a dense mat, in some places 3 feet thick and a hundred yards deep: a carpet of marsh grass, smashed furniture, chunks of wall and flooring, ice chests, loose lumber, gas cans, exposed insulation, tubing, hatch covers and the broken flotsam of scores of smashed welding shops, shrimp boats, homes and backyard sheds.

By early afternoon, the whole miles-long floating mat was moving slowly with an outgoing tide, scraping glacierlike eastward along the levee. And away from Gerica.

It was there, sitting exhausted on a low wharf floating on the mat of debris, that Clara Gerica came into focus in her husband's binoculars.

She was a quarter-mile away.

Hours earlier Clara Gerica had grasped a floating door from her exploded house. She drifted helplessly across the submerged highway and through the tree line that snagged her family. When the wind ripped the door from under her, she found a floating TV table and let it carry her toward the levee south of the highway.

Buried in the teeth of the hurricane, battered, alone and adrift, gripping a piece of furniture and struggling to stay afloat, she drifted in and out of focus.

"I'm dreaming," she told herself. "I'm going to wake up."

Nature ended that. A nutria scrambled aboard her makeshift raft, startling her out of her daze. She swatted it away and held on.

Fetched up at the edge of the debris mat, Clara Gerica occasionally treaded water and kept a grip on the TV table. Like her husband, she worried about hypothermia; for hours, throughout the morning into afternoon, she kept herself covered in marsh grass for warmth and wind shelter.

In time she spotted the floating wharf and released the TV table. She belly-crawled across the top of the debris mat and reached the platform, where she sat, exhausted.

She knew her husband and mother-in-law were safe -- or had been safe hours earlier. But she was terrified for her daughter.

She had heard Christina Gerica scream when the house collapsed but never saw her after that. For hours she was tormented by the likelihood her daughter had died.

Marooned by herself but within sight of the highway, Clara Gerica waited for the tide to drop. She meant to start wading back toward the house to look for Christina. And although calm and mostly rational, she also was overwhelmed and prone to the occasional absurd response, as when she fished her cell phone from her submerged pocket and blew it dry in a futile attempt to revive it.

By midafternoon, having spotted his wife, Pete Gerica climbed out of the rigging and began wading through chest-deep water toward her. He carried a plank, and as he reached the edge of the debris mat he began carving his way into it, opening a path toward her. He carried her out on his back through the path he had cut.

It was nearly nightfall when Pete and Clara Gerica returned to The Equalizer. For the first time since morning, they were together, but not entirely safe.

Pete Gerica's mother remained weak and dazed, suffering from a deep gash on her arm. His daughter Christina nursed bruises all over her body and struggled to breathe, probably from bruised or cracked ribs, Guerica guessed.

But they were dry. And the storm had passed.

They slept the night together.

Afternoon, Arabi

The Rev. Dennis Hayes

Consumed with the grim realization that people all around him had died -- were in fact at that moment dying, or soon would -- Hayes pulled out a rosary from his pocket and prayed the ancient devotion in its fullest form, fingering through all four sets of mysteries, the Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious and Luminous.

By early afternoon the roaring wind and rain died away, replaced now by cries for help rising all around from hundreds of men, women and children who had crawled onto the relative safety of their roofs: thousands of roofs surrounded by a single sheet of water.

Soon a few helicopters began to beat overhead. Occasionally a volunteer rescue boat would pass, its pilot pulling people from rooftops or floating quietly in the streets, listening for muffled cries for help coming from inside attics.

Night fell.

Hayes' church is only two blocks from the Lower 9th Ward: black, working class and similarly flooded to the eaves. He could hear their rooftop calls as well. And in the stillness he could occasionally make out something else, rising distinctly into the night.

People were singing, to each other, sending a wave of comfort through the sea of misery. He couldn't always make out the music, but the melodies were clearly gospel, voices raised to the same God he served, singing of their hope in Jesus.

It gave them comfort. And it comforted him as well.

Afternoon, eastern New Orleans

Graylin Miller

Still hanging onto his porch support, with his tiny dog sitting on his shoulder, Miller rode out the heavy winds and high water until they began to subside after noon. In time Miller, who is 6 feet tall, was able to climb down and stand stiffly erect in the water on the porch.

Hours passed with Miller marooned in front of his house. Nearby, neighbors called to one another or called for help from rooftops all through the neighborhood.

Across the street an elderly couple, Earl and Gloria Balthazar, struggled to cope with deeper water than Miller; their house sat a bit lower than his. They had life jackets, and in the late afternoon or evening they swam across the street to join Miller on the porch.

The three clung together on the porch -- the neighbors floating in their life jackets and the taller Miller standing in deep water.

Darkness enveloped the ruined neighborhood. Miller felt as if he was standing in the middle of a lake, abandoned. In the filthy water, rats, dogs and spiders passed nearby.

"Let's stand inside the door," Miller told his neighbors, and they moved inside the even darker house.

Nothing broke up the stillness of the night but occasional, futile cries for help from rooftops all around them.

They passed the night standing in water just inside the screen door.

The morning after the storm Earl Balthazar became increasingly weak, dehydrated, irrational. As the morning progressed, he announced to the others he would swim across the street to his flooded house to empty it of water. On his second trip he began thrashing his way back toward the porch. Halfway across he became agitated, and it seemed to Miller he was becoming overheated in his life jacket.

With his wife and Miller looking on, Balthazar stripped it off in the middle of the street. He disappeared under the water almost immediately and drowned.

Late morning, Lakeview

Vincent Tusa

In Lakeview, trapped in his bedroom with water rising around him, Vincent Tusa gripped the jammed bedroom door and entreated his guardian angel for help.

"Luigi! You push and I'll pull," he repeated.

Then, on a particularly hard pull, the door cracked and he shimmied through. Freed but still naked, Tusa waded down the hall and grabbed a pair of pants and a shirt. He pulled down the hatch door to the attic stairs.

"Luigi, you got to help me here. I can't fall or nothing," he said. "If I do and crack my head or something, I could drown."

Tusa climbed painfully up, hobbled by his surgically repaired right knee and the arthritic left knee. One leg up, other to match. One leg up, other to match.

Pulling himself inside, Tusa found shafts of light streaming between exposed roofing planks where the storm had ripped shingles away. More importantly, he found that something outside had knocked loose the turbine vent on his roof.

With a push, a perfect circular hole opened above his head.

Tusa looked down the hatch into the hallway below. He counted seven steps before the ladder disappeared into the black water: 4 feet of water in the house.

Settled in his attic, Tusa pulled on the pants and shirt. He stacked two nearby ice chests on top of each other as his boost through the hole. But he decided to wait. Soaked and exhausted, he wrapped himself in a scrap of loose carpet, lay down and drifted off to sleep.

Tusa said he was awakened hours later by the sound of the springs creaking in the attic door.

He looked down the hatch. The water had risen. It was now just a foot or so below the opening.

He turned again to his angel. "Luigi, I got to climb up here to get out," he said.

He climbed on the chests, got one shoulder out, shimmied a little and got the other shoulder out. On the roof, he saw that a neighbor's tree had fallen; its topmost branches were just long enough to have knocked loose the vent that freed Tusa.

"Thank you, Lord, for knocking that turbine off the roof," he said.

Tusa looked around: nothing but rooftops and the tops of lamp posts poking out of a flooded neighborhood.

But within minutes a helicopter spotted him. Tusa waved. The helicopter hovered above him, and soon a boat came by.

It carried three firefighters.

"Mr. Tusa," Danny Danflous shouted, "you ready to come down from there?"

Hearing his name stunned him. He didn't recognize his longtime neighbor's son: a firefighter now, assigned to Ladder Company 5 at a station on Magazine Street.

Danflous had brought his 16-foot boat to the station, precisely for this possibility. By midafternoon he and other firefighters and civilians were launching boats at the edge of Lakeview and penetrating the flooded neighborhood. They plucked homeowners off roofs or drifted quietly, listening for calls for help from people trapped in attics.

Sometimes a helicopter hovered in place, marking a site for rescuers to steer to. That day they would pull hundreds of people out of danger; many, like Tusa, old, infirm and stubborn.

Danflous called back to Tusa: "You don't remember this boat? We went fishing in this boat a year or two ago. We filled a big ice chest."

With evening gathering, Tusa boarded Danflous' boat and pushed away from his roof. The firefighters took him to the Filmore Avenue bridge over the Orleans Canal at the edge of City Park.

Sixty or 70 people had already congregated there. Tusa looked around for buses but saw none.

His legs ached. He sat heavily, with his back against the bridge's rough wall.

Insects bit him, and he felt the stones and pebbles beneath him.

The flood surrounded him as far as he could see.

Hundreds not so lucky

As Crutchfield, Green's family, the Gericas, Hayes and Tusa emerged from their struggles, hundreds of others had already died: drowned, helpless in their wheelchairs, or in attics. Or exhausted, they had drowned outdoors entangled in debris, in trees or the kindling wreckage of their homes.

Many others, trapped alone in closed attics or weak and exposed outside, would die in the ordeal of heat and dehydration of the following days.

As night fell, Crutchfield arrived safely in Belle Chasse; the Gericas huddled aboard The Equalizer.

Robert Green and his surviving family members sought sleep in the Superdome, while the bodies of his mother and little Shanai lay behind on Tennessee Street.

Near Lakefront Airport, Miller and the Balthazars stood through the night in chest-deep water.

And in the still night in Arabi, Hayes listened to homeowners marooned on their roofs singing of their hope in Jesus. Their soulful melodies cut through the stillness over the Lower 9th Ward.

. . . . . . .

Bruce Nolan can be reached at bnolan@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3344

Epilogue:

Cyril Crutchfield: Today he lives in a FEMA trailer in Port Sulphur. He is the first head coach of the new South Plaquemines Hurricanes, comprising students consolidated from the ruins of Boothville-Venice, Buras and Port Sulphur high schools. They meet in modular classrooms at the old Port Sulphur High School. They lost their first game Saturday to Helen Cox High School by a score of 13-12.

Robert Green: After the storm Robert Green and his family were evacuated to the Superdome, then split up between Texas and Tennessee. Searchers recovered little Shanai's body on Oct. 19, near the crumpled house that nearly saved her. Green waited for authorities to notify him that they had recovered and identified his mother's body from the roof where he repeatedly told them they would find her. On Dec. 29, Robert Green and a frustrated brother, David, returned to 1617 Tennessee St. to make their own thorough search. There Robert found Joyce Green's skull and scraps of recognizable clothing, precisely where he said they would be. Granddaughter and grandmother are buried in Kenner. Shaniya and Shamiya live in Houston with their mother. Jonathan Green now teaches public school in Nashville. Robert Green and Hyman Sheppard live in Algiers. Robert Green plans to return to work as a tax preparer and one day rebuild -- on high brick piers -- at 1826 Tennessee St.

The Gericas: The next morning Pete Gerica repaired an antenna aboard The Equalizer and radioed a ship, the Pacific North, on the Mississippi River. Later that day a Coast Guard helicopter lifted Ramona and Christina Gerica off the boat and deposited them at a hospital in eastern New Orleans. That began another grueling odyssey that would not end until they reached Baton Rouge four days later. Pete and Clara Gerica remained aboard The Equalizer until Sunday. Today they split time between Baton Rouge and two FEMA trailers on their property on Chef Menteur Highway. Gerica said that after mediation they have received 75 percent of their insurance coverage on their house, which their insurer claimed was destroyed by flood. Because the industry's infrastructure of ice, fuel and docking facilities is still wrecked, Gerica is unable to earn a meaningful fishing income. Clara Gerica sells what little he catches at the Crescent City Farmers Market. Christina Gerica is back at LSU. Ramona Gerica lives with a daughter in a FEMA trailer in Slidell. "It's still so hard, so hard," Clara Gerica said.

The Rev. Dennis Hayes: The next day Hayes walked into New Orleans, looking vainly for assistance at Notre Dame Seminary. He slept with strangers in the B.W. Cooper public housing development, then walked to the Superdome and ultimately back to Arabi, where he ministered to rescuers and homeowners. His church and school, St. Louise de Marillac, were thoroughly wrecked. They remain closed. Today he lives and works at Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Chalmette, the only functioning Catholic parish in St. Bernard.

Graylin Miller: Shortly after Earl Balthazar's death, a rescue boat reached Miller and Gloria Balthazar and took them to a motel on Chef Menteur Highway. Miller slept there that night, and the next night atop Interstate 610 with hundreds of others waiting for buses. He and his pastor, Assenyoh, reached Miller's family in Baton Rouge on Thursday. Today he sells electronics at Wal-Mart. He lives in a FEMA trailer in the yard in front of his porch and hopes to rebuild his house. Gloria Balthazar was evacuated and today lives with two daughters, splitting time between New Orleans and Slidell. Peanut, the Chihuahua, did not survive. Miller left him with food and water at St. Paul the Apostle Church but could not return to the city until early October. Peanut is buried in Miller's yard.

Vincent Tusa: His memory is foggy, but Tusa thinks he spent two days and two nights at the Filmore Avenue bridge before being evacuated to Jefferson Parish. With three others, he boarded an ambulance there and was driven to Baton Rouge. He lives there today. He hopes to rebuild his house in Lakeview.

ClickHere for article

Hurricane Ernesto

2006-08-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

Ernesto may fizzle into nothing, may hit the gulf coast somewhere between Texas and Florida. Here is a map of projected 5 day forecast.

Here is a map of projected computer model forecast tracks.

Link Here

Link to Jeff Masters blog about Ernesto, click here

The track forecast
As Ernesto crosses into the Gulf of Mexico on Tuesday, a trough of low pressure will be swinging across the eastern U.S. and should pull the storm on a more northerly track. Most of the models are showing that this trough will be strong enough to bring the storm all the way to the coast between Louisiana and the Florida Panhandle. However, the trough may not be strong enough to do this, and Ernesto could get stuck in the Gulf for a week, potentially heading westwards towards Texas as a new ridge of high pressure builds in. A subsequent trough could then turn the storm northwards into the coast at some later time. The UKMET model and GFS model prefer this solution. At this point, there is not enough information to say which solution is most likely, and residents from Texas to the Florida Keys need to be prepared for this storm to affect them.

Another video, pre-Katrina, post and mucking/gutting a home Chalmette, LA

2006-08-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

Click Here
Good video that shows home before Katrina, what they came back home to, how to muck and gut, all intersperced with each other. Almost happy anniversary.

Katrina: A Man Made Disaster video.

2006-08-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

New Orleans suffered not just from 2 hurricanes, but a flood of massive proportions. This video includes news bits (why could people not go across the bridge into Gretna where there was food and water?) pictures, video bits, ending up in St.Bernard Parrish, E New Orleans, Lakeview, etc March 2006.
Click Here

Levees for Greater New Orleans

2006-08-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

Mission

We are a non-partisan non-sectarian grassroots group formed in November 2005.

We hold the US Army Corps of Engineers accountable for our flood protection because the responsibility for the design, construction and performance of Louisiana's flood control belongs exclusively to the Corps, a federal agency.

On June 1, 2006 the Corps of Engineers admitted system wide catastrophic errors in their flood protection system. A separate independent study funded by the National Science Foundation also cited the same errors on May 22. A third study on June 5, by the American Society of Civil Engineers sternly reprimanded the Corps for not properly managing the New Orleans flood system.

These reports - one by the Corps itself - confirm that the federal government is primarily responsible for the death and destruction that the citizens of New Orleans and south Louisiana suffered. Our loss is mainly due to disastrous design and planning mistakes by the Corps, the result of internal cultural problems that go back decades.

Congress must recognize and acknowledge the errors of the US Army Corps of Engineers, and must accept their responsibility to the people of Louisiana.

Accepting responsibility means setting aside the funding necessary to begin the process of making the citizens of Louisiana whole again. It means reforming the Corps of Engineers by establishing a clearer sense of urgency, requiring peer review of Corps projects and better prioritization of Corp projects with attention to lives saved, not just economics. Finally, it means providing dedicated funding for Louisiana's coastal wetlands management by giving Louisiana its fair share of the royalties on offshore oil and gas production.

Levees.Org is devoted to sending America the facts about the metro New Orleans flood and we will not stop until this information becomes mainstream.

Levees.org

Hurricane Katrina Relief Knox Students in New Orleans

2006-08-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of college students spent their spring break on the gulf coast, in big part due to efforts of John Edwards organizing it. Here is a blog and pictures of 1 group who worked with Common Ground in New Orleans http://www.commongroundrelief.org/. A big thank you to these college kids.

Click HERE to go directly to blog page with many pictures.

March 9, 2006
An Introduction
Andy Fitz @ 11:04 am

As this is my first post on this blog, I feel I owe you an introduction. My name is Andy Fitz and I am Secondary Ed. and Physics double major at Knox College. As you will soon see, my hobby is photography. I am currently the Photo Editor of The Knox Student, our on-campus weekly student newspaper.

I’m traveling down to New Orleans with ~65 other Knox community members to do some relief work in the 9th Ward with The Common Ground Collective. I plan to also be taking plenty of photographs in order to document the disaster that has occured in New Orleans and raise awareness back home.

The plan is that I will be uploading several photos from New Orleans to this blog nightly so that people such as yourselves can stay in touch with what is going on in New Orleans. So if you’re interested in seeing photos of the trip, check back here every day! I will also be posting, if possible, more photos on my own website www.andyfitz.com. I’ll put these up for those of you who would like to see more than the couple photos I’ll post here. Again, I’ll try to update that nightly, but no promises.

As, a photograhper, I have to talk about my equiptment, so if you aren’t a equipment guru and really don’t care, I won’t be hurt if you skip this paragraph completely. I use a (Konica)-Minolta Maxxum 7D digital SLR. I plan on bring a Minolta 28-75mm f/2.8 zoom lens (UPS should bring it Friday!), a Minolta 135mm f/2.8 prime, and a Minolta 5600 HS D flash along with plenty of batteries and CF cards.
So I guess that’s it for my first post and back to finals for me. See you in New Orleans! (much more at link above).
------------------------------------------------------
www.andyfitz.com
Here is another link to Andy's photography page which has links to more photos he took there. On the main page, click on Hurricane Katrina gallery, this takes you to a page with other links, photos organized by day.

"When the levees broke" on HBO tonight

2006-08-21T17:21:00.001-07:00

Direct Link Here

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts

As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina's catastrophic passage through New Orleans. Acts I and II premiere Monday, August 21 at 9pm (ET/PT), followed by Acts III and IV on Tuesday, August 22 at 9pm. All four acts will be seen Tuesday, Aug. 29 (8:00 p.m.-midnight), the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

I do not have HBO, please watch and let me know how it is.

Almost a year. Not very long but very very long.

2006-08-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

I really did think our country was better than this, that it would help more in disasters and with disasster recovery. Things have improved, are improving every day. When you start with 90% chaos and destruction (picking a number out of the air), getting to 85% is good. But you are still then at 85 % chaotic destruction.

Mr. Bush held a press conference today where he said "I also want the people down there to understand that it's going to take a while to recover. This was a huge storm." I think the people down there do understand that, also they understand how little actual federal assistance they will get, and how slow it is to come. The Iraq invasion/occupation has cost at least $308,000,000,000 (billion) , is increasing steadily. How much assistance would even 1% of that bought? How about another 1% to health care, 1% to schools, 1% to subsidized childcare so parents could get training for decent paying jobs?

It has been almost a year. Now, back to that press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. As you know, the one-year anniversary of Katrina is coming up. And there are a lot of retrospectives about what went wrong down there last year. Specifically, what has your administration done in the past year to help the folks down there, and what remains to be done?

THE PRESIDENT: Thanks. You know, I went to New Orleans, in Jackson Square, and made a commitment that we would help the people there recover. I also want the people down there to understand that it's going to take a while to recover. This was a huge storm.

First things -- the first thing that's necessary to help the recovery is money. And our government has committed over $110 billion to help. Of that, a lot of money went to -- went out the door to help people adjust from having to be moved because of the storm. And then there's rental assistance, infrastructure repair, debris removal. Mississippi removed about 97 percent, 98 percent of its -- what they call dry debris. We're now in the process of getting debris from the water removed. Louisiana is slower in terms of getting debris removed. The money is available to help remove that debris. People can get after it, and I would hope they would.

Q What --

THE PRESIDENT: Let me finish. Thank you.

We provided about $1.8 billion for education. That money has gone out the door. We want those schools up and running. As I understand, the schools are running now in New Orleans, a lot of schools are. Flood insurance, we're spending money on flood insurance. There is more work to be done, particularly when it comes to housing. We've spent about -- appropriated about $16 billion, $17 billion for direct housing grants to people in the Gulf Coast and in Louisiana.

I made the decision, along with the local authorities, that each state ought to develop a housing recovery plan. That's what they call the LRA in Louisiana. They're responsible for taking the federal money and getting it to the people. Same in -- Mississippi has developed its own plan.

I thought it would be best that there be a local plan developed and implemented by local folks. And so there's now, as I mentioned, $16 billion of direct housing grants. Each state has developed its own plan, how much money goes to each homeowner to help these people rebuild their lives. And so I think the area where people will see the most effect in their lives is when they start getting this individualized CDBG grant money.

Q Has anything disappointed you about the recovery, the federal response?

THE PRESIDENT: I was concerned at first about how much Congress and the taxpayers would be willing to appropriate and spend. I think $110 billion is a strong commitment, and I'm pleased with that. Any time -- I named a man named Don Powell to go down there, and the thing that's most important is for the government to eliminate any bureaucratic obstacles when we find something that's not moving quick enough.

I think, for example, about the debris removal. There was the issue of whether or not the government would pay for debris removal on private property, or not. So we worked out a plan with the local mayors and local county commissioners, local parish presidents to be able to designate certain property as a health hazard. And when they did so, then government money could pay for it. In other words, we're trying to be flexible with the rules and regulations we have to deal with.

But the place where people, I'm sure, are going to be most frustrated is whether or not they're going to get the money to rebuild their homes. And my attitude is we've appropriated the money, and now we'll work with states to get the money.

April, I suspect you have a follow-up on this.

Q Yes, I do, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Why don't you let her go?

Q And another question, sir. The follow-up: Some have a concern that you've given all of this money, but the federal government has moved away to let the local government, particularly in New Orleans, handle everything, and things are not moving like they expected. And that's one of the concerns. And another question, if you --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me address that, and I promise you can ask that other one.

As I mentioned to you, the strategy from the get-go was to work with the local folks in Mississippi and Louisiana, and they would then submit their plans to the federal government, particularly for housing, and that upon approval, we would then disburse the appropriated monies -- in this case, about $17 billion for housing grants. And so each state came up with a grant formula, and I can't give you all the details. But it's -- the whole purpose is intended to get money into people's pockets to help them rebuild. And once the strategy is developed at the state and local level, it makes sense for the monies to be appropriated at the state and local level. And if there's a -- if there's a level of frustration there, we will work with the LRA in this case.

Second question.

Q Well, I have one follow-up on that. Do you think --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, how many -- are you trying to dominate this thing? (Laughter.)

Q No, sir, but I don't get a chance to talk to you as much as the others.

THE PRESIDENT: That's not -- wait a minute. (Laughter.)

Q But a follow-up real quick. Do you think that more needs to be done? Does the federal government need to put its hands on what's going on? Because New Orleans is not moving --

THE PRESIDENT: I think the best way to do this is for the federal government's representative, Don Powell, to continue to work with Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco to get the money into the hands of the people. The money has been appropriated, the formula is in place, and now it's time to move forward.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/08/20060821.html

RIP Trueblood family. 6 yr old Montava drowned 8/29/05, body ID'd 8/15/06, Mother & 4 yr old brother died in fire 12/05

2006-08-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

Byndra Trueblood, who with her son was killed in a fire December 2005, barely survived Hurricane Katrina. Her other son disappeared during the storm.

Link here

A FAMILY LOST
A child is buried almost a year after the floodwaters swept him away. But his mother and brother aren't there to mourn. They died in a fire months after the storm.
Monday, August 21, 2006
By Gwen Filosa

The foul floodwaters swept little Montava Trueblood away, snatching him from his mother as New Orleans fell into absolute horror almost one year ago.

Montava slipped off a rooftop in the Lower 9th Ward and into a violent sea of destruction on Aug. 29.

He never got to enter first grade. He never got to celebrate his 7th birthday in December. Instead, he slipped beneath a pile of debris and drowned.

Only days ago, Montava was finally given a proper funeral, as the world prepares to take notice of the one-year anniversary of the worst natural disaster -- and arguably the worst engineering failure -- in the history of the United States. Preachers comforted the 30 or so mourners inside Littlejohn's Funeral Home on Aubry Street.

On Aug. 15, the boy's remains were identified by the Orleans Parish coroner's office through a DNA sample his mother gave mortuary officials a month after the storm, the Trueblood family said.

When the child's ashes are placed in a plot at Resthaven Cemetery, he will not be alone.

Montava will be laid to rest in October alongside his mother and his baby brother who, after barely escaping the floodwaters, perished in a fire in Milwaukee in December, a few days shy of his mother's 32nd birthday.

Almost nothing remains of 1908 Tennessee St., where Montava lived. It is among entire city blocks in the Lower 9th where houses were erased by the floodwaters, rocked off foundations to float away or destroyed on impact. On Friday, unkempt grass and weeds flourished where houses once sat. Beneath the weeds, though, one could find the concrete slabs or steps that lead to nowhere. It's all that is left.

After the rising tide crashed through the levee breach at the Industrial Canal, Byndra Trueblood took her sons out of their flooding house, waded through the dirty water and sought refuge on the roof of a house down the street.

The children clung to their mother. Trueblood would later show her family the scars on her arms and legs left by toddler Davonta, who had clutched her tightly amid the rushing waters.
"They were overtaken by the floodwaters," Trueblood's sister, Darleen Trueblood said of the little family. "She said she couldn't hold both of them and he was swept away."

The family evacuated first to Texas, then took refuge in Milwaukee.

Montava's body was recovered sometime before November behind a house in the 1900 block of Forstall Street by Kenyon International Emergency Service, hired after the storm to search for the dead. He remained among the anonymous Katrina victims, stored cold, until Aug. 15.
...(more of story @ link above).

Their home was in the blast zone, where it looks like this--

Here is the area his body was found--

Suicide by cop, photographer snaps. Mental health issues are a huge problem.

2006-08-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

Here are 2 articles about Mr. John McCusker, photographer for Times-Picayune in New Orleans. The first is about his attempt at suicide, the second about the aftermath, the third link to some photos he took a couple weeks ago.

After Long Stress, Newsman in New Orleans Unravels

By SUSAN SAULNY
Published: August 10, 2006

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 — On the morning after Hurricane Katrina, when members of The Times-Picayune’s staff found themselves marooned in its flooded building here, John McCusker refused to join most of his colleagues in relocating to a remote newsroom in Baton Rouge.

After the building was evacuated, Mr. McCusker, a photographer for the paper, swam through muck while managing to keep his equipment dry and, from a kayak, captured some of the most harrowing images of the storm’s immediate aftermath.

Then, for months, he lived the misery he had been photographing, having lost his possessions, his family’s home and his entire neighborhood to the hurricane. On Tuesday, nearly a year after the storm, he seemed to snap.

In an episode that began as a traffic stop for erratic driving, the authorities say, Mr. McCusker was halted once, pinned a police officer between cars by backing up, then fled and drove into several cars and construction signs in the Uptown neighborhood before being stopped again and finally subdued with a Taser gun. In both stops, the police say, he begged officers to shoot him, telling them he did not have enough insurance money to rebuild his home in the Gentilly neighborhood and wanted to die.

“He was demanding it; he kept saying, ‘Just kill me, just kill me,’ ” said James Arey, commander of the negotiation team of the Police Department’s special operations division, who responded to the scene.

“He never stopped saying that, and made every attempt to hurt the police officers with his automobile because that’s the only weapon he had,” Mr. Arey said. “Our officers are well trained to recognize crises and attempts at ‘suicide by cop,’ and that’s what this was.”

As of Wednesday night, Mr. McCusker, a veteran member of the Times-Picayune staff and son of an old New Orleans family, was in a jail cell under a doctor’s care, having been charged with reckless operation of a vehicle and hit-and-run driving, among other things.

The public unraveling of such a well-known local photographer shined light again on the troubled state of mental health in New Orleans, where the struggle to return to normalcy has produced an epidemic of post-traumatic stress and depression and where psychiatric help is extremely limited.

The state has estimated that the city has lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health workers, many of whom relocated after the storm. There are only three acute-care hospitals open in the city now, fewer than 65 beds for adult psychiatric patients, and no psychiatric crisis intervention unit that might have accepted Mr. McCusker after his arrest. Mr. Arey, a friend of his, said it was better for him to be in a jail cell rather than neglected in an overcrowded emergency room where officers could have taken him.

“We have known patients who’ve sat in emergency rooms for days,” Mr. Arey said. “I’m not exaggerating, literally days. We didn’t want him to sit for days. We had grave concerns about his safety, and I thought he might be safer in jail under suicide protection.”

Terry Baquet, the Page 1 editor of The Times-Picayune, which returned to its building not long after the storm, tried to get to the scene of the chase to speak with Mr. McCusker. They are friends, and before the hurricane their children attended the same Catholic elementary school.

“I saw him in the back of a police car driving off,” Mr. Baquet said. “It was just sad seeing him like that. I’d like to see him doing well again.”

When asked about sadness at the newspaper, which won two Pulitzer Prizes this year for its Hurricane Katrina coverage, he added: “I don’t think you can tell, and it’s fair to say everyone’s affected. We live with Katrina every day.”

In an interview with The American Journalism Review published this month, Mr. McCusker said he had recently taken a leave of absence from the paper to concentrate on dealing with the raw emotions left by the storm. He said he went to therapy three times a week and spent a great deal of time sleeping off exhaustion.

“You have to understand the depth of the horror that the city was,” he said.

Link to article here

Times-Picayune Photographer John McCusker Out Of Hospital

August 17, 2006

By Daryl Lang

New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer John McCusker was released from the hospital this week and will face four criminal charges related to his confrontation with police two weeks ago, according to his editor.

McCusker feels embarrassed about what happened and grateful for the people who supported him, says photo editor Doug Parker, who spoke to McCusker earlier this week. "He's in very good spirits," Parker says.

McCusker had been under psychiatric evaluation since Aug. 8, when he provoked police officers in what was described as an attempted "suicide by cop." McCusker, a life-long New Orleans resident, was apparently depressed over being unable to get enough insurance money to rebuild his house, which was destroyed in the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina last year.

He is now home and has been talking to friends. "He sounds like the John we know," says Bridget O'Brian, who spoke to McCusker Thursday. O'Brian is a former Picayune reporter and founder of Friends of the Times-Picayune, a fund to help employees of the newspaper.

When the news of McCusker's arrest appeared, fellow journalists and friends began contributing money in his name to the Friends of the Times-Picayune. As of Thursday afternoon, more than 100 people had donated $20,000 to a special fund called the Friends of John McCusker Trust Fund.

The general fund has raised $204,276 for employees of the newspaper as of Thursday, according to the Friends of the Times-Picayune web site, which also has details about how to contribute.

Last week, police arrested McCusker after he allegedly led them on a chase and backed his car into one officer, who suffered minor injuries.

Police charged McCusker with aggravated battery, aggravated flight from an officer, hit-and-run and reckless driving, according to Parker. The first two charges are felonies.

McCusker's episode underscored the difficulties facing journalists living and working in the flood-damaged areas of the Gulf Coast. McCusker was going to therapy and took a leave of absence from work earlier this year, according to one report.
Link to article here

Finally, here is a link to some pictures he took August 2, 2006, nearly a year after Katrina hit. These houses are in no way unusual. Click here

So far at least $20,000 has been raised through the Times-Picayune site since Mr. McCusker's arrest August 8.

This is a terrible time to demolish public housing (affordable housing that survived Kartrina are being closed!)

2006-08-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

With thousands of South Mississippians still displaced by Hurricane Katrina, now is a terrible time for a government agency to toss as many as 400 families out of public housing.

Yet that is just what the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority VIII intends to do, by selling the L.C. Jones property in Gulfport and transferring the W.M. Ladnier property in Gulfport and Charles Warner in Pascagoula to the nonprofit South Mississippi Housing and Development Corporation.

The housing authority has told its tenants that it can no longer maintain the properties as public housing because of a lack of insurance proceeds and funding from HUD. But rather than ask HUD for more funding, the authority has asked HUD for permission to proceed with the sale and transfers.

The Jones property may or may not be redeveloped as affordable housing. The Ladnier and Warner properties will be, but in stages.

In the meantime, what are the hundreds of families now living in those housing units supposed to do?

The housing authority suggests that its soon-to-be-former-tenants use vouchers to obtain substitute accommodations. Duh! Are the folks at Region VIII really that out of touch with the shortage of shelter in Harrison and Jackson counties?

This is no time to demolish usable housing anywhere in South Mississippi and this effort must be stopped.
Link to SunHerald.

""When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" by Spike Lee

2006-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Link to movieHERE

Lee focuses on New Orleans, peeks at Coast
By PETE TATTERSALL
ptattersal@sunherald.com

NEW ORLEANS - Spike Lee's four-hour Hurricane Katrina documentary premiered in New Orleans on Wednesday, and the filmmaker held a press conference to discuss the impact the movie could have on audiences in the United States and around the world.

"When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" will air on HBO at 8 p.m. Monday (Parts I and II) and 8 p.m. Tuesday (Parts III and IV), and will repeat on Aug. 29 from 7-11 p.m.

Lee was joined on the dais by Chris Albrecht, HBO chairman and CEO; Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films; and historian and author Douglas Brinkley.

"I do feel that what happened here is a criminal act. The devastation was not brought about solely by Mother Nature," said Lee, who also addressed criticism that the film only focuses on about two-thirds of the New Orleans population, specifically the city's black majority, saying the film reflected the city's diversity.

When the Sun Herald pointed out that there is a perception on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that the national media focus is on New Orleans, and asked if the film touched upon the Coast, Lee said: "We, early on, say that we are going to deal specifically with New Orleans. We have a couple of scenes that take place in Gulfport, Miss.

"But because of the historical significance of this, this is a great city, a world city, we choose to focus here. And again, that was my vision. It's not to belittle any other places of the Gulf region that were hit by Katrina. I wanted to concentrate on New Orleans."

Lee was asked if he believed the levees in the 9th Ward were intentionally blown.

"As a filmmaker, why should I edit those people who swear on a stack of Bibles that they heard an explosion? Now, people will come and say, 'They might have heard something else.' But would it not be my duty as a filmmaker to let these people, who for years have not had a voice, they need to have an opportunity, and they thought that they heard something and I put it in the film, and left it to the audience to make up their own mind. And there was more than one person, who heard something.

"We're all intelligent people. Who are you going to believe? It's there for you to make up your own mind."
Link to Sun Herald article here

Then and Now photo gallery from NOLA

2006-08-15T22:39:00.000-07:00

Click here to go to photo gallery. Some things have changed, some have not.

FEMA trailers share locks with many others. Same key can open may be able to open other locks. Oops

2006-08-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

Link to story here
FEMA says same key opens many trailers
Agency to replace locks on up to 118,000 homes of Katrina evacuees

WASHINGTON - FEMA will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering the same key could open many of the mobile homes.

One manufacturer cut only 50 different kinds of keys for the trailers it sold to FEMA, officials said Monday. That means, in a worst-case scenario, one key could be used to unlock up to 10 mobile homes in a park of 500 trailers.

FEMA officials said such a situation was unlikely, but they still moved to warn storm evacuees living in Louisiana and Mississippi trailer parks of the security risk.

“We are working aggressively to establish the extent of the problem and determine the best solution for the safety and security of those who now reside in these trailer units,” said Gil Jamieson, deputy director of Gulf Coast recovery for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

He said FEMA was “asking residents to be extra vigilant and take precautions to secure the trailer that they occupy.”

“We encourage them to work together to promote a neighborhood watch and help ensure the safety of all residents,” Jamieson said.

Dane St. Pe, who lives at a FEMA trailer group site in Bay St. Louis, Miss., said he had heard that you could use common keys to open more than one trailer.

“One of the kids was saying that, and I didn’t believe him,” said St. Pe.

It is unknown how many trailers will need to have their locks replaced, said FEMA spokesman Pat Philbin.

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., called the lock risk “very troubling.”

“While this development certainly adds to a long list of oversights lost in the dysfunctional bureaucracy of the agency, I’m encouraged that FEMA has already begun to take steps to ensure the security of the residents entrusted to it,” Landrieu said.

FEMA provided about 77,000 trailers for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Louisiana, said state emergency management spokesman Mark C. Smith. He said the largest trailer park for hurricane evacuees in the state was Renaissance Village, just north of Baton Rouge, La., with an estimated 480 mobile homes.

Only three kinds of locks
The problem stems from a limited number of kinds of locks — three — that trailer manufacturers use when building mobile homes, FEMA officials said. That increases the likelihood of locks being the same, they said.

One manufacturer cut only 50 different patterns for the first set of locks used in the trailers, Philbin said. Another manufacturer cut 100 and 200 patterns for the second and third kinds, he said.

Philbin did not immediately know how many trailers were distributed for each key cut. In all, the agency has issued about 150,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to evacuees since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita slammed into the Gulf Coast last year. About 32,000 have been taken out of service, Philbin said.

In the meantime, FEMA has asked local police to increase patrols in the trailer parks and is distributing flyers to residents. FEMA security personnel and contractors also are on guard for suspicious behavior, Philbin said.

Residents who want new locks can request them from the trailer park’s manager or service provider, FEMA officials said.

Hurricane Katrina Was No Lady

2006-08-14T16:30:00.000-07:00

This is a photo diary with writings added to pictures. Click on Link Here to go to this website. Pictures are from before Katrina to August 2006. That is right, August 2006.

"ALL SORROWS CAN BE BORNE IF WE PUT THEM IN A STORY OR TELL A STORY ABOUT THEM."--Isak Dinesan. This is a personal history, and recorded for history, of Hurricane Katrina which struck southeast Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama the morning of August 29, 2005. The power of Katrina was none ever seen before in Louisiana and it changed forever life as we knew it . The flooding in New Orleans that followed Katrina was caused by breaks in the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal and the Industrial Canal. These floodwalls were the responsibility of the Orleans Parish Levee Board and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Over one thousand five hundred people lost their lives by drowning and thousands more clung to rooftops in near 100 degrees temperature for days waiting to be rescued. It was a human catastrophe unimaginable to the human heart. The flooding
in Jefferson Parish (Metairie) was caused by a decision made by the Parish President not to operate the pumps. Thousands of people's homes flooded needlessly and millions of dollars of damage was done, damage that was to take years, if ever, to fix. The photos and narratives under the photos record my life and my family's lives following Hurricane Katrina. It also records the City of New Orleans and my town of Metairie. I plan to update this gallery for one year following landfall of Katrina. IF YOU CLICK ON THE SMALL IMAGE YOU WILL GET A FULL SCREEN IMAGE WITH A NARRATIVE UNDER THE TITLE. BE CERTAIN TO SCROLL DOWN AND READ THE STORIES.

"TFW" mystery finally solved. Toxic Flood Water

2006-08-14T15:55:00.000-07:00

Here are 2 houses with TFW on them, and then examples of what TFW looked like. When homes were searched, some had doors swollen shut trapping the noxious toxic mess inside. These were marked "TFW" and some have still not been searched fully. Skeletal bodies are still being found inside homes under debris.

This stuff wasn't "water"

Finally, a TFW'd dog, rescued, cleaned, fed, loved.

Habitat for Humanity video

2006-08-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

Link to video here
This is an excellent video, made by a man working with Habitat for Humanity in St. Bernard Parrish. He does an excellent job of describing what it is like. Not knowing what to expect, debris piles mean hope, lots of energetic positive people helping people, being involved with the aftermath of the largest natural disaster to hit the USA in recorded history. This is the area Emergency Communities is located (free community cafe and distribution center). They had levee water from the west, storm surge from the ocean on the east, utility pole height water come through. No power, no potable water, no commercial activity (stores, including grocery stores). Very good video, very good group, Habitat. Habitat-Nola

My apologies to those on dial-up internet, it is 9 minutes long.

Changes in volunteer camps

2006-08-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Bayou Liberty Relief Camp is slowing down. The volunteers have been minimal recently and, due to problems with some "volunteers", it may be shut down earlier than planned (Sept rather than Nov) but is still open for business. As the situation changes, I will post an update. It is really too bad when these things happen.

Volunteers are still very welcome there, housing, food, water, equipment and jobs are available for all. Also they are still offering a 2 night break for volunteers from elsewhere on the gulf, take a break, get refreshed, don't burn out.

Ginnie and Ray have been working in the Biloxi area with http://www.handsonusa.org/ since shortly after Katrina. She put in a grant to be a volunteer and camp coordinator through the Unitarian church and will be returning to the gulf soon for another year. If anyone wishes advice as to where to volunteer, or wants to know where to donate money, HomeDepot gift cards, supplies, etc, please leave a message here and I will get back to you.

Emergency Communities Food for Love cafe EC link is continuing to operate in St. Bernard's Parrish nearby in Violet, LA as well as opening another cafe further south in Buras. This is welcome news since neither of these places has electricity, potable water or much in the way of grocery stores nearby.

It has been almost 1 yr. Violence surges across the world. Gulf coast residents are still living in unsafe places, having to deal with human remains, etc etc etc. Vote for change, vote Democratic. It is not a perfect solution, but we need to start slowing down the awfulness.

New Orleans, Lower 9th Ward, 8 months after Katrina

2006-08-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

Click here to go to movie
This is when we were there this spring. Not my movie, but filmed at the same time. It was amazing. Yes, this is after it has been cleaned up. A whole lot of debris is gone, it looked much much better than a few months before. So, when people say progress is being made, this is true. However, look at how much further there is still to go.