I had more links to put up but ran out of time. Life has been a little intense with Zoe's mom, who has Alzheimer's. Zoe talks about it here. And then there is Katrina and New Orleans. I was an Urban Planning major many years ago. (I quit that when I realized Urban Planning was an oxymoron.) I did learn about cities. Cities are more than buildings. Cities are the people that live there. People that form communities. People that have businesses selling groceries, changing tires, renting DVDs. Cities are very intricate webs of interactions. Cities are not just buildings. New Orleans has been destroyed. The buildings can be rebuilt but the communites are gone. New Orleans was a city of poor people. They aren't going to wait for months (years?) for their destroyed homes to be rebuilt, if they ever are. They will go elswhere. The New Orleans middle class is now poor. They are destitute. They have no homes and no jobs. They are all refugees. There is the short term tragedy of making it out of New Orleans alive. That will only be the beginning. There will be the mid term tragedy of what to do with hundreds of thousands of people without food, water, and housing. Then the ripples will move throughout this country. The economy is on a knife edge. Katrina may be a tipping point. I bought gas today. Premium is over $3 here on Whidbey Island. (That didn't take long.) This is a disaster greater than any I have seen in my lifetime and my kids will tell you that I'm older than dirt. And we will be seeing, in the weeks and months to come, what a bunch of worthless fuckheads we have in Washington. When two airliners crashed into two buildings almost four years ago I felt that it was much worse than it appeared at the time. No shit! Look what has happened to this country since. I think what is happening in New Orleans, as horrific as it may look, is going to be much worse than it appears.

When the Levee Breaks
by Billmon

Some media reports paint an picture of almost biblical desolation -- of pillars of smoke rising from fires that can't be as fought because there's no pressure in the water mains; of the risk that corpses from the city's vast above-ground cemeteries might be exhumed by the floodwaters and sent drifting through streets transformed into canals; of snakes, alligators and a three-foot shark -- yes, a shark -- spotted swimming in the fetid water. Add in the raw waste from a hundred backed-up sewer lines, the rotting food from a hundred thousand kitchen refrigerators and the industrial filth of one of the country's largest ports and petrochemical centers, plus the corpses, dead animals, debris and the mosquito eggs -- many of them no doubt already hatching -- and you've got the makings of a first-class public health nightmare. Stew in the sun and the heat of a Louisiana September for a week or two, and watch the nightmare become a reality. As a living, functioning city, then, New Orleans has ceased to exist. Even if it can eventually be resuscitated, the patient's long-term prognosis is grim. Just as yesterday was a catastrophe in slow motion, the future of the Crescent City is likely to be a slow, lingering death by drowning: the environmental equivalent of pulmonary edema. In that sense, New Orleans is the canary -- peacock might be the more appropriate bird -- in the mine of global climate change. If melting ice caps continue to push sea levels rapidly higher, its death may also await many of the world's other low-lying cities.

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"No one can say they didn't see it coming"
In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.

Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature. A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

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The Price of Poverty
by Steve Gilliard

New Orleans, despite it's tourist friendly image, has always lived on the edge, of poverty, of a great flood. So when things collapse, there is no surprise that the city collapses into disorder. Many, many New Orleans residents barely had the resources to survive day to day living. When government checks come on the first week of the month, and even those with jobs may not have access to savings or even a bank account, cashing their checks at check cashing places, the ability to leave in a hurry is nearly impossible. And when people talk about looting, there is a situation where there is no order, no supply, no water and no light. Also, people are being told to not walk around barefoot to avoid skin infections. Jungle rot and trench foot are all too common in damp situations. That means people can't walk. The problem is that the government is treating this like a US domestic crisis where people can drive to relief centers and that ain't it.

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A political hurricane is gathering force
A war and a deluge stretch resources -- and nerves -- thin

For years the Pentagon’s standing readiness plans required the country to be able to fight two major wars simultaneously. But no one anticipated what we face now: a war in Mesopotamia and another along the Mississippi. We have journalist Malcolm Gladwell to thank for the idea that every social phenomenon has a dramatic “tipping point.” It doesn’t always work that way. And yet Hurricane Katrina is just such a moment. We are a big, strong country — and New Orleans will, somehow, survive — but you do get the sense, as President Bush finally arrived here after a month-long vacation, that a political hurricane is gathering force, and it’s going to hit the capital any day.

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  thanks to Steve Gilliard's News Blog

Where's Bush?
by Steve Gilliard

Steve Gillard quotes the above piece and adds...

The problem is that, no New Orleans, may not survive, not in the way we're used to seeing the city. But the problem is going to be a military one, complete with refugee camps and massive government funding. Churches and the Astrodome can only last for so long. They can't put people up for six months or more and that's what we're facing here. We don't know if another hurricane is coming or not. Florida had four last year. All of Bush's pro-greed policies are going to face reality. New Orleans is a poor ,black city and the people there will need massive government help in a way WTC workers and their families didn't. The aid is trickling in and we're watching people die on TV.

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A failure of leadership
by Steve Gilliard

If Bush understood how serious this was, a brigade of the 101st would be have moved to Ft. Polk over the weekend and their helicopters would have been rescuing people as soon as the weathered cleared. Their heavy lift battalion would have been ferrying in supplies to isolated communities and the AF would have been dropping humanitarian aid packages like they did in Afghanistan over isolated rural areas. But that would be a serious understanding of the situation. Like taking over a couple of military bases recently closed and starting to build housing there and establishing order. The Astrodome will turn into the Superdome within days. The response here has not met the need in any way, shape or form. Just three C-130's could have tossed out enough food and water to keep people alive until the trucks arrived in the rural areas. Instead, this is disaster business as usual and that is condemning people to die.

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'And Now We Are in Hell'
Inside the Superdome

There are four levels of hell inside the refugee city of the Superdome, home to about 15,000 people since Sunday. On the artificial-turf field and in the lower-level seats where Montrel sat sweltering with her family, a form of civilization had taken hold -- smelly, messy, dark and dank, but with a structure. Families with cots used their beds as boundaries for personal space and kept their areas orderly, a cooler on one corner, the toys on another, almost as if they had come for fireworks and stayed too long. The bathrooms, clogged and overflowing since Monday, announced the second level of hell, the walkway ringing the entrance level. In the men's, the urinal troughs were overflowing. In the women's, the bowls were to the brim. A slime of excrement and urine made the walkway slick. "You don't even go there anymore," said Dee Ford, 37, who was pushed in a wading pool from her flooded house to the shelter. "You just go somewhere in a corner where you can. In the dark, you are going to step in poo anyway." Water and electricity both failed Monday, and three pumps to pressurize plumbing have been no match "when the lake just keeps pushing it back at us," said Maj. Ed Bush, the chief public affairs officer for the Louisiana National Guard. "With no hand-washing, and all the excrement," said Sgt. Debra Williams, who was staffing the infirmary in the adjacent sports arena, "you have about four days until dysentery sets in. And it's been four days today." [...] "This is mass chaos," said Sgt. Jason Defess, 27, a National Guard military policeman who had been stationed on a ramp outside the Superdome since Monday. "To tell you the truth, I'd rather be in Iraq," where he was deployed for 14 months, until January. "You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan."

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City of Nature
New Orleans' blessing; New Orleans' curse.

In retrospect, the idea was so stupid and yet so American: Move the homeless, the elderly, the impoverished, the unlucky, all those poor souls who couldn't get out of New Orleans in time to avoid Hurricane Katrina; move them into the city's cavernous domed football stadium. Anyone who has seen a disaster movie could have predicted what would happen next: Katrina slammed into the Superdome, ripped off the roof, and knocked out the power, cutting off the drinking water and the air conditioning. Those trapped inside had to be moved again—to Houston's Astrodome, of course. If it's not too callous to say so while the tragedy on the Gulf Coast is still unfolding, the stadium mishap is an apt metaphor for New Orleans' environmental history. The sodden city has long placed itself in harm's way, relying on uncertain artifice to protect it from unpredictable environs.

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  thanks to Talking Points Memo