Hurricane Katrina

[SpaceMonkey]

The mayor of New Orleans certainly ain't happy about the whole situation: http://stream.2003.02.garnierprojects.com/geenstijl/majornagin.wma

According to a group of Aussies rescued by a Channel 7 TV crew many of the "looters" (including them) are simply "looting" food and water to stay alive. Are the police going to shoot them on sight too?

 

[MysteryGirl]

Sorry if i was snitty...it just seems that we're more concerned about your citizens than your elected officials are.

There's a difference between morbid curiosity and concern. I've seen much of the curiosity - even some "we better not send a cent to help" - but not much true concern.

 

[Rexxy]

poll?

your america hate is palpable

Your sycophancy is noted. But understood.

A population where the rich "bug out" and leave town in their 4 wheel drives while cripples and the elderly were abandoned in nursing homes, and babies left alone in hospitals.

Everyone for themselves. That's the Republican way.

 

[Rexxy]

i do beleive given the destruction it is a credit to the authorities the death toll is so low

what is the death toll?


at what stage would it stop being a credit to them?

 

[Willow]

Many ask if race a factor in New Orleans' crisis

By MARTHA MENDOZA
AP National Writer
HoustonChronicle.com

Hurricane Katrina had no deliberate target, but in the aftermath it's clear that the victims — who are now facing a horrifying lack of rescue and care — are mostly black and mostly poor.

So many photographs from the devastation of New Orleans show the same faces: Desperate. Grief-stricken. Black.

"Love has no color," Cassandra Robinson said as she huddled with her family in a parking entrance along New Orleans' Convention Center Boulevard. "But I've seen where this is all black and everybody else who is Caucasian, they're up high in the hotels."

In fact, those in hotels complained bitterly they were neglected, too. But Robinson's comment echoes those of others who question the part race may have played in New Orleans' crippling crisis.

Would the response have been more urgent if the victims had been mainly white? Is economic class a factor even more than race?

In Orleans Parish, where the boundaries are the same as the city limits, 66.6 percent of the residents are black. The black population nationwide is 12.1 percent.

New Orleans neighborhoods, once lined with old live oaks, charming cottages and imposing mansions, had been proof of the ease with which black and white could live side by side. With the exception, perhaps, of the toniest areas of St. Charles Avenue, and the poorest blocks of housing projects, black and white homeowners chatted to each other from their front porches and greeted each other as they walked their dogs down the streets.

D.J. Kelly, stood on a wet New Orleans sidewalk today with an American flag that he plucked from a gutter and washed with "some of my precious water." Kelly, who is black, said the disaster has nothing to do with the color of anyone's skin.

"Don't make it seem like no racial thing," he said. "That's not the way I feel. We all is in this together."

Uptown New Orleans, around Tulane University, was mostly white and affluent; the areas north of the French Quarter and east of downtown tended to be poorer and more heavily populated by minorities.

New Orleanians were divided not so much by race as by economic class, a daily fact of life in a city where birthlines mean much. Sen. Mary Landrieu, a blue-eyed blonde, is the daughter of a former mayor. Marc Morial, the color of cafe au lait, followed his own father into the mayor's office.

The political power structure is, to the eye, firmly controlled by people with African blood in their veins; most of the economic power of the city is held in very white hands.

When 80 percent of the city's population, according to the mayor, evacuated before Hurricane Katrina, that left behind those with no cars, no resources, no way out. Twenty-one percent of Orleans Parish households earn less than $10,000 a year. Nearly 27,000 families are below the poverty level. Most of those families are black.

Larry E. Davis, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center on Race and Social Problems, said images of the disaster are an embarrassment to this nation.

"It suggests that the residuals of a racist legacy are still very much intact," he said. "It's as though you are looking at a picture of an African country."

The images of the black poor struggling in New Orleans' chaos should be "a powerful wake-up call," said Dr. Jeff Johnson, a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Medicine.

"The message is that these people are in some sense abandoned, and that's why they're so angry," he said, "but that abandonment occurred not just around this storm. They've been abandoned by our society in the last decade. That's something as a society we have to acknowledge and grapple with."

Racial disparity in access to health care has been documented. Last December, the American Journal of Public Health reported that 886,000 African American deaths could have been prevented between 1991-2000 if they had the same care as whites.

There has been an outpouring of donations from throughout the United States in response to the images seen in news coverage — but might it have been greater if those images did not show black faces?

"I do think the nation would be responding differently if they were white elderly and white babies actually dying on the street and being covered with newspapers and shrouds and being left there," said David Billings of The People's Institute, a 25-year-old New Orleans-based organization focused on ending racism.

Jesse Jackson, en route to Louisiana for what he said was a humanitarian effort, said racial injustice and indifference to black suffering was at the root of the disaster response.

"In this same city of New Orleans where slave ships landed," Jackson said, "where the legacy of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow discrimination, that legacy is unbroken today."

Black members of Congress today denounced the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina.

"It looks dysfunctional to me right now," said Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif.

"We cannot allow it to be said by history that the difference between those who lived and those who died in the great storm and flood of 2005 was nothing more than poverty, age or skin color," said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md. "It would be unconscionable to stand by and do nothing."

Ben Burkett, a black farmer whose fields of kale, spinach and broccoli and acres of soft pine trees were wiped out by the hurricane, said the initial disaster made no distinctions, but he expects relief to be inherently biased.

"The eye of the storm made everybody equal, black or white, rich or poor, big house or small house," he said. "But believe me, when the relief comes — and we haven't seen anything yet — the small farmer is going to be at the end, and the small black farmer is going to be at the end of that.

"Basically I expect it because that's the way it's always been."

———
Contributing to this report were AP writers Rebecca Carroll in Washington D.C., Charlotte Porter in Baton Rouge, and Allen G. Breed in New Orleans.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3337225

Sept. 2, 2005, 5:13PM

 

[MysteryGirl]

Willow:
You thread killer!

 

[Timmah]

millersnose, the only person who hasn't conceded that the way this has been handled is poor was Bush himself. Every authority figure, and most of millions of homeless have gone public on international television denouncing the handling. All have conceded. So why are you still trying to give credit and praise for a low death toll when that figure is set to move into the thousands? You are a disgrace.

 

[griff]

From CNN:

Four days after Katrina killed hundreds if not thousands, Republicans joined Democrats in wondering why it was taking so long to relieve the misery of so many people living in squalor without the necessities of life.

"If we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack?" asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican.

Republican Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts called the government's response "an embarrassment."

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Florida, called upon Bush to recall National Guardsmen stationed in Iraq whose homes and families were in the path of Katrina's destruction. The president said there were enough Guard troops for Iraq and recovery efforts.

The storm of criticism was stinging for a president who won widespread praise for his handling of the terrorist attacks four years ago. It was an unwelcome turn for Bush, suffering sagging approval ratings in the polls.

While Bush has been loath to admit errors throughout his presidency, he conceded that the recovery is not proceeding well.

Some White House aides and Republicans were glad to hear the president stop defending the administration's response when it was so obvious that conditions were so bad for so many people.

millers, when will you join Gingrich, Foley Romney and even Bush and stop defending the administration's response?

 

[shadow grinder]

i dont know if anyone has posted this or not...but here is a letter from Michael Moore to dubbya bush.

Dear Mr. Bush:

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our national guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this -- after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them -- BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr. Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 percent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing -- NOTHING -- to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr. Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=2005-09-02

 

[Willow]

Willow:
You thread killer!

Sorry about that. Just the messenger.
But the Houston Chronicle article highlights those questions already being asked.

The poor couldnt get out as quickly as the rich.

Here's another...

New Orleans in chaos, rescue plan under fire
By Mark Babineck
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - New Orleans fell deeper into chaos on Friday with gangs roaming the streets and corpses rotting in the sun a full four days after Hurricane Katrina lashed the city and exposed federal aid efforts as a failure.

A long military convoy of emergency supplies finally rolled into the flooded city on Friday morning, the first sign of significant relief after days of delays and broken promises.

Armed troops rode on the convoy and began giving out instructions to residents desperate for food, clean water and basic medical care.

Hospitals lacking drugs and power were in a desperate fight to save critically ill patients and thousands of people who lost relatives and all they own in raging floodwaters sat on sidewalks waiting for long-delayed help.

Hit by mounting criticism that his administration was too slow to respond, U.S. President George W. Bush conceded the rescue efforts were "not acceptable" and promised to fix them. "We'll deploy the assets necessary to get the situation under control," Bush said as he left Washington to tour the region.

He told reporters in Biloxi, Mississippi that a top priority was getting troops into New Orleans to secure the city and ensure delivery of relief supplies.

The military convoys raised hopes that the government might finally be getting a grip on the crisis.

In another positive sign, commercial aircraft flew in and out of New Orleans International Airport at an improved rate of four an hour to drop off supplies and evacuate displaced residents, many of them seriously ill.

Also, the U.S. House of Representatives gave final passage to a $10.5 billion (5.6 billion pounds) emergency-aid bill that Bush was expected to sign later in the day.

But thousands of people are feared dead and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he was furious at the lack of help his historic city had received.

"I need reinforcements. I need troops, man. I need 500 buses, man," he said in a radio interview. "Now get off your asses and fix this. Let's do something and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country."

Plumes of thick black smoke rose after a mighty explosion rocked an industrial area hit hard by Katrina, and an apartment complex in the centre was also in flames.

DESPERATE TO ESCAPE

Stunned residents stumbled around bodies that lay rotting and untouched. Others trudged along flooded and debris-strewn streets towards the Superdome football stadium where they hoped to be bused to safety.

Some angrily accused authorities of dividing evacuees into lines of men on one side and women and children on the other, effectively splitting up families.

"If you've got to drag me, then you'll have to drag me. I've done lost everything else, I'm not gonna lose my kids," said Albert Sumlin, who refused to get on a bus until he was reunited with wife and children.

Most of the victims were poor and black, largely because they have no cars and so were unable to flee the city before Katrina pounded the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday. The disaster has highlighted the racial and class divides in a city and a country where the gap between rich and poor is vast.

The U.S. response would be a moral test, said U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"Many of those now in such dire circumstances were already living in poverty and destitution even before the hurricane came. They had no ability to evacuate and now their very survival depends upon the response of this country," he said.

The scenes of destruction and mayhem resembled a major Third World refugee crisis, angering politicians and local residents who said the lack of aid was unacceptable in the world's richest country.

"Operational effectiveness is an 'F' or a grade lower, if there is such a grade," said U.S. Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said 14,000 Guard troops were on the ground along the Gulf coast and he expected 30,000 there in the coming days.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said they were going with shoot-to-kill orders. "These troops are battle-tested. They have M-16s and are locked and loaded."

But Nagin questioned why they had not come sooner. "People are dying, people have lost their homes, people have lost their jobs. The city of New Orleans will never be the same."

Shell-shocked storm survivors said they were stunned by what had happened in their city known as a carefree place of jazz and French Quarter bars.

"Call it biblical. Call it apocalyptic. Whatever you want to call it, take your pick," said 46-year-old Robert Lewis, who was rescued as floodwaters invaded his home.

"There were bodies floating past my front door. I've never seen anything like that," he said, near tears.

The tragedy caused by Katrina did not end in New Orleans.

Storm survivors were shipped to the Houston Astrodome where the government had hoped to house 25,000 evacuees, but then limited the population to 13,000 as conditions began to deteriorate.

Officials diverted buses full of evacuees to other shelters, including the Reliant Arena next door.

Katrina forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and shut refineries along the Gulf Coast shut, sending gasoline prices at the pump soaring to new records of well over $3 a gallon in most parts of the country.

(Additional reporting by Erwin Seba in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Paul Simao in Mobile, Alabama, Peter Cooney in Houston, Marc Serota in Pensacola, Florida, Steve Holland, Charles Aldinger and John Whitesides in Washington)



© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-02T183134Z_01_SCH262765_RTRUKOC_0_UK-WEATHER-KATRINA-WRAP.xml

Fri Sep 2, 2005 7:31 PM BST

 

[Blade]

The questions a shocked America is asking its President

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington


Why has it taken George Bush five days to get to New Orleans?

President Bush was on holiday in Texas when Katrina struck. He then spent Monday on a pre-arranged political fundraising tour of California and Arizona, which he did not cancel or curtail. On Tuesday he surveyed the hurricane damage - but only from the flight deck of Air Force One, prompting criticism that he was too detached from the suffering on the ground. He didn't give a speech until Tuesday afternoon - 36 hours after the storm first hit - and didn't embark on a proper tour of the region until yesterday. Key advisers have come under fire for similar levels of detachment. As the full magnitude of the disaster unfolded, the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was seen buying shoes in New York, and Dick Cheney remained on holiday.

How could the world's only superpower be so slow in rescuing its own people?

It will probably take months, even years, to answer that question. But here are a few factors to consider: 1) the federal government's disaster relief agency, Fema, has lost considerable clout because the priority at the Department of Homeland Security has been counter-terrorism; 2) the homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, has no experience in disaster relief; 3) because of Fema's low profile, almost no contingency measures were taken before Katrina struck; 4) the under-resourced local Army Corps of Engineers appeared completely unprepared to conduct emergency operations after the levees were breached; 5) nobody appears to have considered the communications problems inherent in loss of phone and cell-phone service.

Why did he cut funding for flood control and emergency management?

Another question likely to be the subject of official investigations. Local and former federal officials are in little doubt that the budgetary priorities of Iraq, tax cuts and the "war on terror" are to blame. Disaster prevention experts have been studying New Orleans for years and urging upgrades to its levees and other preventive measures. The Army Corps of Engineers was supposed to carry out some of this work last year, but its funding was cut. It seems the Bush administration considered the risk of malicious human attack and the risk of the ravages of nature, and found itself incapable of holding both ideas in its head.

Why did it take so long to send adequate National Guard forces to keep law and order?

The National Guard is under pressure in every US state because of the strains of deployment in Iraq. More than one-third of Louisiana's 10,000 guardsmen are either in Iraq or Afghanistan. No mass deployment of guardsmen from other states is being contemplated because they are all needed in Iraq too. At first, only 3,000 guardsmen were sent to New Orleans, but that was increased to about 10,000 as looting and gun violence became widespread.

How can the US take Iraq, a country of 25m people, in three weeks but fail to rescue 25,000 of its own citizens from a sports arena in a big American city?

America's obsession with maintaining its pre-eminent position as the world's largest superpower means it is incapable of responding swiftly and effectively to a humanitarian crisis. While it has the firepower for fighting wars, it does not have the leadership and skills to combat natural disaster.

 

[Blade]

New Orleans / 2005 Hurricane Katrina Satellite imagery

 

[Mong]

Millers??

 

[sunny]

millers?

 

[Blade]

The Tale of Two Photos

President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. (AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz). HERE is proof of when the photo was snapped.

Meanwhile, during those same hours, in Mississippi: Volunteers rescue a family from the roof of their Suburban, which became trapped in floodwaters on US Highway 90 in Bay St. Louis, Miss. (Ben Sklar / AP) Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.

 

[Generalzod]

Your sycophancy is noted. But understood.

A population where the rich "bug out" and leave town in their 4 wheel drives while cripples and the elderly were abandoned in nursing homes, and babies left alone in hospitals.

Everyone for themselves. That's the Republican way.

So true,,The world has finally seen how inept this President really is.

 

[CanadianSteve]

Tonight on an NBC special program to raise money for the hurricane relief, the rapper Kanye West departed from a prepared script and said "George Bush doesn't care about black people", along with a few other comments. He also said something about troops coming back from Iraq and being given a shoot to kill order "against us" (meaning blacks). Mike Myers who was beside him and had just read a comment from a teleprompter, looked at him in surprise and then the camera cut to something else after the George Bush comment. The show was on live. Later NBC cut the comment out of a replay of the program on sister network CNBC, and issued an explanation that West departed from prepared comments and did not reflect the views of the network.

I was watching and immediately felt wow, this is one of those TV moments that'll be talked about for a long time.
__________________
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9146525/

 

[Rexxy]

Quote:
Originally Posted by millersnose

i do beleive given the destruction it is a credit to the authorities the death toll is so low

what is the death toll?


at what stage would it stop being a credit to them?

 

[gunnamatta bay]

From what I have seen a lot of white people are at the forefront of rescue operations.

No doubt there will be an inquiry. A lot of heads are going to roll.

Hopefully it will teach valuable lessons. Lessons that should already have been learned. It's not like natural disasters are new to Americans.

The scary thing is the hurricane season still has about a month to go.

 

[Blade]

Yeah, they were remarkable comments, Steve.

Both NBC and the Red Cross have issued statements denouncing West's remarks.

The Red Cross statement:

WASHINGTON, Friday, September 02, 2005 — The American Red Cross is incredibly grateful for the support we’re receiving in the wake of the catastrophic events caused by Hurricane Katrina. We want to acknowledge the ongoing support of NBC-Universal, which aired a telethon tonight on behalf of the victims of this tragedy.

During the telecast, a controversial comment was made by one of the celebrities. We would like the American public to know that our support is unwavering, regardless of political circumstances. We are a neutral and impartial organization, and support disaster victims across the country regardless of race, class, color or creed. We cannot, and we do not endorse any comments of a political nature.​

The NBC statment:

"Tonight's telecast was a live television event wrought with emotion. Kanye West departed from the scripted comments that were prepared for him, and his opinions in no way represent the views of the networks. It would be most unfortunate if the efforts of the artists who participated tonight and the generosity of millions of Americans who are helping those in need are overshadowed by one person's opinion."

Video of the comments is HERE if you don't mind signing up for free.

For those who wish not to, HERE is the script of what West said.
​