Hurricane Cleanup, Part 2

Slidell's police are facing problems with looting and traffic accidents. Both of which have been on the rise as tempers flare and a return to normalcy will be measured in months and years:

Looting arrests and traffic collisions both reached an all-time high in Slidell this month following a national trend of unexpected firsts left in Hurricane Katrina's wake.
In Slidell, 21 automobile accidents occurred in 12 hours Wednesday, shattering any previous records, said Slidell Police Capt. Rob Callahan.

As tensions mount, road rage is rearing its head like never before, said Callahan.

"They're trying to get from A to B, and safety is not that high of a priority," he said. "It's hectic on us just handling the crashes. If we could knock out the wrecks we could be doing more constructive things."

Interstates and off and on ramps from Slidell to Mandeville, Abita Springs and Covington are at times a parking lot, turning normally short jaunts into hours-long journeys, he said.

In Covington, traffic accidents are up to eight per day, four times the two accidents per day average, said Lt. Jack West, spokesperson for the Covington Police Department.

The scene of devastation in Gulfport is still unimaginable. Mail service is slowly being restored as well for places like Pearlington and Waveland. Pearlington and Waveland residents will be able to get mail service at Bay St. Louis, and temporary retail locations have been arranged as well. A Wal-Mart in Waveland has set up a tent store because its regular store was badly damaged:

The wind and water of Katrina wiped out nearly every home and business within a half-mile of the beach, including the Wal-Mart that served Waveland, Pearlington and Bay Saint Louis.

Wal-Mart manager Ray Cox and his crew have set up a miniature version of the mainstay of small-town America.

The 16,000-square foot Wal-Mart tent is like none the company has opened before.

Though Wal-Mart has set up temporary structures in other disaster areas, Cox said it's never pitched a tent on this scale.

The regular store is full of cleanup and construction workers, and its lot is jammed with tents and recreational vehicles occupied mainly by law enforcement from other states who have come to help maintain order.

So until it's rebuilt, the tent is home.

The march of the lawsuits begins. I'm talking about the suits against oil companies, gas stations, and the middlemen who transport the oil and gas for price gouging.

New Jersey sued Hess, Shell and Sunoco on fraud charges Monday, accusing them of illegally raising prices in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

Separate suits filed in Superior Court in Trenton charged the oil companies, along with several independent gas-station owners that sell those brands, with failing to display sale prices and making multiple price increases within a 24-hour period.

Expect to see more suits across the country.

Mississippi continues to press forward on its lawsuits against insurance companies to try and force them to cover flood damage under the standard homeowners policy, when they clearly have been interpreted to exclude flood damage. That's why there is a separate flood insurance program that has the full faith and credit backing of the US Government (NFIP).

Don Surber continues to question why the country should underwrite the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast when everyone knew that hurricanes occurred, people assumed the risk, and some people took appropriate levels of insurance to make sure that they weren't wiped out completely. While the pork laden Louisiana bill ($250 billion!?) is certainly debatable, as is the reconstruction of New Orleans as it was, only with bigger and better levees, there are thousands of people who may have been permanently dislocated from the region and the governments at all levels need to address this issue. And yes, that will take some money, but I don't think that will take the hundreds of billions that the legislators are throwing around. Besides, if we're going to be throwing that kind of money at these families, just cut each displaced family a check for $100,000 or $150,000 and say that you can use the money to buy/rent property to live on, a vehicle, and replace clothing subject to dollar limits. Not only would directly cutting these people checks save everyone money, but no bureaucracy would need to be implemented that would siphon off the resources for the people who were displaced in the first place.

Surber isn't the only one wondering where fiscal responsibility has gone. Everyone wants to show that they care, but Congress does it by getting all Jerry McGuire. Show me the money!

Oh, and if you didn't know by now, but the mainstream media royally screwed up the coverage of Katrina and Rita. No fact checking. Running with wild stories of violence and mayhem without any corroboration of sources. You know, all the usual stuff I cover here.

Fox News, a day before the major evacuation of the Superdome began, issued an "alert" as talk show host Alan Colmes reiterated reports of "robberies, rapes, carjackings, riots and murder. Violent gangs are roaming the streets at night, hidden by the cover of darkness."

The Los Angeles Times adopted a breathless tone the next day in its lead news story, reporting that National Guard troops "took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance."

The New York Times repeated some of the reports of violence and unrest, but the newspaper usually was more careful to note that the information could not be verified.

The tabloid Ottawa Sun reported unverified accounts of "a man seeking help gunned down by a National Guard soldier" and "a young man run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer."

London's Evening Standard invoked the future-world fantasy film "Mad Max" to describe the scene and threw in a "Lord of the Flies" allusion for good measure.

Televised images and photographs affirmed the widespread devastation in one of America's most celebrated cities.

"I don't think you can overstate how big of a disaster New Orleans is," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a Florida school for professional journalists. "But you can imprecisely state the nature of the disaster. … Then you draw attention away from the real story, the magnitude of the destruction, and you kind of undermine the media's credibility."

Times-Picayune Editor Jim Amoss cited telephone breakdowns as a primary cause of reporting errors, but said the fact that most evacuees were poor African Americans also played a part.

"If the dome and Convention Center had harbored large numbers of middle class white people," Amoss said, "it would not have been a fertile ground for this kind of rumor-mongering."

Is Jim Amoss essentially blaming race for the exaggerated claims? That's what it sounds like to me. Why would he think that if the Superdome and Convention Center had middle class white folk that it would have minimized the spread of rumors?

Has he ever played telephone? It doesn't matter who starts the rumor, and who the folks in the middle are, or what color and shape the person at the end of the phone are like, but the message will be distorted no matter what. It was a game I once played in grade school in a circle. And the result was always the same - the message changed each time. Without fail. It didn't matter who started the message, who finished the message, or who was involved.

Yet, Amoss wants folks to believe that because it was some black folk instead of white folk that the media should be forgiven? I call BS on Amoss.

I seem to recall all manner of rumor in NYC after 9/11. Tales of people who survived the collapse by surfing down the ruins. Tales of firefighters or police pulled from the wreckage days later. Cabbies that all seemed to disappear right as the hijackers hit. 4,000 Jews that didn't show for work at the WTC because they had advance knowledge of the attacks. All untrue. And all were rumors started in a largely upper middle class environment.

Rumor mongering knows no ethnic, social, or economic boundaries. And Amoss should know better. That he doesn't suggests a larger problem with his coverage-the infantilization of the poor communities in his area; "they do not know from whence they speak because they're poor and black."

UPDATE:
The cleanup continues throughout Louisiana, and the parish of Cameron was completely destroyed by Rita as it came ashore.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco saw the damage Sunday from the seat of an Army helicopter. She was able to assess the flooding from Intracoastal City in Vermilion Parish to Johnson's Bayou in Cameron Parish.

"Cameron Parish, as you might suspect, is just about wiped out," Blanco told officials at the Lake Charles 911 Emergency Center. "Holly Beach is gone."

Vermilion Parish suffered heavy flooding. But it was Cameron Parish that got the double whammy of wind and water.

In the town of Cameron, near where the eye of the Category 3 storm blew ashore, homes vanished. Only concrete slabs remain.

Meanwhile, former FEMA head Michael Brown is testifying before Congress. Michelle Malkin has more.

UPDATE:
Brown's testimony has gotten a lot of play in the blogosphere. Macsmind thinks Brown was right to call the dysfunctional Louisiana government on the carpet. I agree. It was dysfunctional. Here's my question. How do other states fare? Are they any better than Louisiana. Well, considering that we have a representative sample of five states affected by Katrina and Rita within a span of a month, we can test this assumption: Florida handled things quite well, evacuations went smoothly and there wasn't a breakdown in law and order. Alabama and Mississippi both were hard hit, but again, no breakdown in law and order as law enforcement quickly moved in to stop looting and to maintain law and order. Texas saw some minor looting, but law enforcement was quickly on the case. Only in Louisiana did we see rampant looting, law enforcement abdicating their posts, and state and local officials trying to pin the blame on the federal government.

So, with this admittedly small sample, I can say that Louisiana's government did the worst of any of the affected states during the past month.

UPDATE:
More people are picking up on the racial angle to the LAT story, including Ace of Spades.

UPDATE:
Confederate Yankee has posted pictures from Gretna, Louisiana.

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