Katrina Thursday Roundup

It seems that the media has had its fill of the Big Easy and are moving on to other areas of the Gulf Coast. We got to see Katie Couric rummaging through a destroyed house - well it looked like the house had been cut in half by the storm - showing the place in complete shambles.

Took you long enough to figure out that there was more to this disaster than New Orleans. And we now have yet another meme developing - people didn't get out of the way along the Gulf Coast because they were able to ride out Hurricane Camille and didn't think that anything could be worse than that storm.

They were wrong. Dead wrong.

It appears that Katrina's storm surge exceeded that of Camille, and that the storm surge went more than 2 miles inland, which is an incredible indication of the power and fury of this storm.

Once again, it is another powerful reminder that when forecasters say that a storm can produce catastrophic conditions, you must get the hell out of the way. Even in a developed country, not much can withstand the force of such a monster storm.

The Mayor of Pascagoula, MS is concerned that FEMA has overlooked his city.

The destruction here is substantially less severe than in Biloxi, Gulfport or Waveland to the west along Mississippi's Gulf Coast. And it's far less extreme than the humanitarian crisis in New Orleans.

Still, Mayor Matthew Avara said he's worried that his city is being overlooked by FEMA.

"Right now, our biggest problem is FEMA and getting the FEMA trailers in" to house the homeless, said Avara, sworn in two months ago and now forced to run his government from a city maintenance building.

Avara said he fears that FEMA's resources were exhausted by Hurricane Ivan last year. "I know a lot of the trailers are still in use in Alabama and Florida," he said.

FEMA representatives were supposed to arrive here Tuesday to begin processing applications for housing assistance, Avara said. "We found a facility, put tables in, got electricity and got the Internet," he said. "Then we were told Monday night that a decision had been made and they would be here on Friday."

Mary Hudak, a FEMA spokeswoman, took issue with Avara.

"My guess is the mayor probably misunderstood," she said. Hudak said FEMA opened a disaster recovery center in Jackson County on Tuesday and will open another Friday. "FEMA's presence has been very strong in Jackson County. That is evident in the bags of ice, bottles of water, the plastic tarps and the meals being distributed throughout the community."

Last year, FEMA had to address four hurricanes hitting the Continental US, with significant damage to many areas of the Southeast and particularly in Florida. Resources that could have been devoted to Katrina relief are still in use in Florida because of the housing shortage in the way of the 2004 hurricane season.

The USS Comfort, one of two hospital ship in the US Navy, will be moored in Pascagoula to provide relief. The article specifically names two other Navy ships providing direct assistance to Mississippi - the USS Harry S Truman (an aircraft carrier), and the USS Bataan - an amphibious troop carrier. Both have the capability to field numerous helicopters which are crucial for search and rescue in remote areas where access from the ground is limited.

Northrup Grumman is hoping to get its shipyard in Pascagoula up and working by next week. They're busy cleaning up the damage and hoping to get back in business; the region needs this badly:

Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman has three Gulf Coast yards -- in Pascagoula, Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans -- that build ships or sections assembled elsewhere.

They sit within about 110 miles of one another, the largest being Pascagoula's 800-acre facility.

Including an onshore facility, the defense contractor employs close to 19,000 people in the Gulf region, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of its annual business.

The regional impact is significant. Northrop Grumman's average Gulf operations payroll is about $17 million a week, Cullin said.

Pascagoula has the highest profile among the three shipyards. Here, the company builds four classes of vessels for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. It competes with Maine's Bath Iron Works for defense contracts for Navy destroyers.

Nearly every worker who reported to the shipyard was put on clean-up duty. Jackie Robinson didn't want to drive the Caterpillar front-end loader, but he understood that he had no choice.

Cable companies struggle to restore service throughout the region.

"I've heard most of Pascagoula is up, Ocean Springs is on its way, and Biloxi is working to come back," Perry said, from behind his desk in a Long Beach office, his post-Katrina home for 10 days.

Cable One covers most of the Coast, from Diamondhead to Pascagoula, and Perry said the plan is to follow power trucks down cluttered streets.

"Power guys are doing a great job, and we're following them, hopefully to have cable restored as soon as the power comes back," he said.

Perry said the company has suspended billing for this month, even for customers who already have cable, and those who had receivers, remote controls or other equipment smashed to bits by Katrina's muscle will not be charged.

Cable One has contracted part of the restoration work to MasTec, a group of project managers used in New York City after 9-11 and in other hurricane riddled parts of Florida.

MasTec will conduct assessments of the damage and help tweak the logistics of the project.

Actor Matthew McConaughey has been working to rescue animals that were left behind as people were forced to flee for their lives or were told that shelters would not accept pets. He's been working in the Slidell area.

UPDATE:
Jack Shafer of Slate suggests that we should not rebuild New Orleans. More than a few politicians have floated that idea, including Denny Hastert, who got a prompt browbeating from the media and former New Orleans residents who consider anything less than a rebuilding to be blasphemy.

The police inspire so little trust that witnesses often refuse to testify in court. University researchers enlisted the police in an experiment last year, having them fire 700 blank gun rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood one afternoon. Nobody picked up the phone to report the shootings. Little wonder the city's homicide rate stands at 10 times the national average.

This city counts 188,000 occupied dwellings, with about half occupied by renters and half by owners. The housing stock is much older than the national average, with 43 percent built in 1949 or earlier (compared with 22 percent for the United States) and only 11 percent of them built since 1980 (compared with 35 for the United States). As we've observed, many of the flooded homes are modest to Spartan to ramshackle and will have to be demolished if toxic mold or fire don't take them first.

New Orleans puts the "D" into dysfunctional. Only a sadist would insist on resurrecting this concentration of poverty, crime, and deplorable schools. Yet that's what New Orleans' cheerleaders—both natives and beignet-eating tourists—are advocating. They predict that once they drain the water and scrub the city clean, they'll restore New Orleans to its former "glory."

Meanwhile, Witold Rybczynski examines the usefulness of temporary housing. He suggests that many people don't want temporary housing, but to go home. Here, we're going to find that many homes simply don't exist and are uninhabitable due to flooding, contamination, and structural failure. However, he notes:

This needs to be borne in mind in the context of the current total evacuation of New Orleans. According to Davis, "all evidence from World War II onwards indicates the failure of [compulsory evacuation]." Certainly, the situation in New Orleans poses more immediate health and logistical challenges than most disaster areas do: The water must be drained, and critical infrastructure repaired before people can live there safely. But the bureaucratic impulse to keep all citizens out until this work is completed should be resisted. People must be let back into the city, or parts of it, as soon as possible; Mayor Ray Nagin is right about that. There is already anecdotal evidence being reported that some evacuees are considering settling down in Houston, or Dallas, or San Antonio, and not returning home.

What Davis' work also suggests is that most of the rebuilding of New Orleans will not be done by government but by the private sector, much of it by small contractors, do-it-yourselfers—and volunteers. Americans, more than most, are a nation of handymen. Their individual spirit of improvisation and inventiveness must be allowed to do its part.

UPDATE:
MSNBC has discovered the rest of the Gulf Coast as well. Mississippi expects to have power restored to all businesses and homes capable of receiving power by Sunday. That's a pretty impressive feat. Consider all the debris that had to be cleared just to get crews in to install new poles and run new lines. In many areas they had to rebuild the grid from scratch.

Meanwhile, folks are poking around what the Army Corps of Engineering has been up to. They've been plenty busy, but not necessarily on flood control.

Before Hurricane Katrina breached a levee on the New Orleans Industrial Canal, the Army Corps of Engineers had already launched a $748 million construction project at that very location. But the project had nothing to do with flood control. The Corps was building a huge new lock for the canal, an effort to accommodate steadily increasing barge traffic.

Except that barge traffic on the canal has been steadily decreasing.

In Katrina's wake, Louisiana politicians and other critics have complained about paltry funding for the Army Corps in general and Louisiana projects in particular. But over the five years of President Bush's administration, Louisiana has received far more money for Corps civil works projects than any other state, about $1.9 billion; California was a distant second with less than $1.4 billion, even though its population is more than seven times as large.

It's all about priorities. Corps projects are a great way for politicians to show they've brought home money, but does anyone really take a good look at what that money is spent on?

Facts will out, and it wont be pretty.

UPDATE:
LGF relates a story from The Dallas Morning News that goes beyond ugly. A nursing home in St. Bernard Parish apparently never evacuated, even though parish officials had sent a bus to help evacuate the residents. No one knows why the offer of assistance was turned down, but it appears that many of the residents were killed by the storm and its aftereffects.

St. Rita's had the required evacuation plan: Ambulances would be called to take bedridden patients away, and the others would be evacuated by school buses. At least 60 patients and six staffers may have been in the building when Katrina hit.

Parish coroner Dr. Bryan Bertucci said several of the parish's other nursing homes evacuated during the weekend, but St. Rita's staffers never put their plan into effect.

Sunday afternoon, Dr. Bertucci said, he checked with St. Rita's staff to see why. He said the owner, Mabel Mangano, told him she had five special-needs patients, and an ambulance hadn't come to pick them up. Officials said she also told them that she had spoken with the families of patients who said it was okay to stay behind.

"There was frustration over not having her patients out; a false sense of security because they'd never flooded before; they had generators and stuff, and it [an evacuation] tends to be traumatic for some of these special-needs patients," Dr. Bertucci said.

"She asked me if we were upset," Dr. Bertucci said. "I said I'm not on the council, I'm concerned about the patients."

Dr. Bertucci said he told Ms. Mangano, " 'We've got two buses and two drivers that'll take you anywhere you want to go. Do you want the buses?'

"She said no."

UPDATE:
I have set up a seperate entry for St. Rita's Nursing Home.

In Mississippi, history is a salvage job. Cleanup includes trying to salvage the remnants of a grand antebellum past. Huge plantation estate buildings were devastated by Katrina, including the home of Jefferson Davis:

THE barrel of the Confederate 12-pounder howitzer was missing, and so was the saddle on which Jefferson Davis rode into the Mexican War. Four days after Katrina, Patrick Hotard's face was shadowed with exhaustion and dismay as he surveyed what was left of Beauvoir, the beachside Jefferson Davis home and presidential library, where he is the director. He had just arrived from his refuge in Louisiana, and many of his worst fears were being confirmed as he picked through the bricks, giant wafers of plaster and nylon Confederate flag replicas.

"Devastated," Mr. Hotard said, a hand on his forehead. "It's a real feeling of emptiness." Beauvoir is not just his personal address - he and his family lived in a house now vaporized on the 51-acre site, which is owned by the Mississippi division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans - but his life's work.

Some $220,000 had just been spent renovating the graceful gallery porches and the entrance doors, each with its nine oval panes, of the 1852 Greek Revival house where Davis, the Confederate president, spent his last 12 years. Those features are now either gone or in ruins, along with two original porch-wrapped cottages, a replica of a Civil War barracks and the entire first floor of the presidential library.

Mr. Hotard is one of the many curators, archivists and preservation advocates who are beginning to tally the losses in the areas hardest hit by the hurricane, even as emergency workers turn to the more essential tasks of gathering the dead and providing supplies. For preservationists in Mississippi no less is at stake than the region's architectural patrimony.

We have lost a big piece of American history along with everything else. Historians will have a tough time trying to piece together the collection, but many items have been lost.

Slidell, LA businesses are assessing the damage and are starting with the basics - who was available to work. With communications spotty, getting in touch with businesses is tough. Contractors are going to be in incredible demand, but they have to have an available workforce to do the work. That takes time, and those workers have to have a place to stay too.

Emeril Lagasse, the famous chef who calls New Orleans home, is helping his workers try to find work at his other restaurants all while providing continued direct deposit paychecks to employee accounts:

"Due to conditions in New Orleans, we do not know at this time when the restaurants will be able to be reopened," the site said. "We are making efforts to employ New Orleans employees at other locations, where possible."

Good on him!

UPDATE:
Does anyone in the media know what's going on in Kenner, LA? Apparently not many are asking that question. I see a story about flooding continuing to be a problem for a manufacturing plant and a slightly older one that talks about the economic hit to the region (New Orleans, Metairie, and Kenner corridor).