In the holy shiite department

[strandinthewind]

Finally and look at them spin it -

'People making decisions hesitated'
More officials' jobs may fall to Katrina response criticism

(CNN) -- Michael Brown may have been the first official to lose his job to Hurricane Katrina, but he might not be the last.

Even after Brown's departure as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, criticism of the government's response to the disaster keeps rising like the unstoppable floodwaters.

It threatens to swamp other officials involved in the recovery effort. Blame is being directed at every level of government -- federal, state and local

As new details emerge on what happened behind the scenes as the storm ravaged New Orleans, it is becoming clear that government officials knew what to expect, despite claims to the contrary. ( Watch the video that documents what officials knew and who warned them -- 3:28)

They had planned and trained for it for five days last year, playing out the disastrous scenarios of a hypothetical Hurricane Pam. But when the real disaster stuck, they appeared to be paralyzed.

President Bush on Tuesday acknowledged "serious problems" in the government's response to emergencies, and accepted responsibility for the federal government's failures in responding to the disaster.

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government and to the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush said during a news conference.

There are plenty of unanswered questions about what went wrong, when it went wrong and who is at fault.

In the hurricane's aftermath, thousands of people trapped in the submerged city began asking how they got left behind without food and water. And why?

Why did it take so long to get help to stranded people? Where were the helicopters to drop food and emergency supplies? And eventually, why were people who sought safety in shelters still without food and water five days after the storm?

In the aftermath, the questions grew sharper: Why did aerial shots of the flooded city show hundreds of school and city buses window-deep in water? Why hadn't anyone used those buses to move people out? Did Amtrak really offer residents seats on trains the company moved out of harm's way? And if so, who refused that offer and why?

People also asked why FEMA wouldn't allow the delivery of 20,000 trailers Sen. Trent Lott found? Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, lost his own home.

Then there's perhaps the most alarming question of all: Is the Department of Homeland Security too big a bureaucracy to be effective in its mission?

"We had our first post-9/11 task and we've miserably failed," said former U.S. Rep. Tim Roemer, an Indiana Democrat who was a member of the 9/11 Commission.

"Our government couldn't drop water to our most needy citizens," Roemer said. "We couldn't get generators to people in hospitals. We didn't go by any evacuation plan."

Plenty of blame
In addition to Brown, other public officials face criticism and hard questions about what they did and didn't do. Chief among them are Michael Chertoff, who heads the Department of Homeland Security, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

Chertoff has insisted for two weeks he had no warning of how bad Katrina could be.

But the National Weather Service issued a detailed message a day before Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, saying buildings would be leveled, high-rises crippled and most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer.

Chertoff, whose department oversees FEMA, had continued to downplay the significance of the levee breaks in New Orleans, even as floodwaters consumed 80 percent of the city.

Blanco is under fire over whether she asked the right people in Washington for help soon enough. She has been accused of waging a bureaucratic turf war that delayed the National Guard response as New Orleans spiraled into anarchy.

Help turned away?
State officials also are being blamed for turning back assistance during the critical first few days. Sheriff Steve Simpson, of Loudon County, Virginia, sent 22 deputies with supplies and 14 vehicles, including four all-terrain vehicles. But he called them back when Louisiana state police officials waved him off.

"I said, 'What if we just show up?' and he says, 'You probably won't get in," Simpson told CNN. Later that night, Blanco cleared legal hurdles that would have allowed local officials to accept the help, but no one ever got back to Simpson.

"I'm very frustrated, trying to figure out what went wrong in that process," Simpson said.

The White House has suggested that Gov. Blanco also failed to call early enough for the federal help she needed. The governor's office says that before, during and after the storm, Blanco's message to the president was consistent. (Watch the video on political defensive moves -- 1:56)

"The governor genuinely felt at that time she had asked for help," press secretary Denise Bottcher said, "She said, 'We need your help. We need everything you've got.'"

Blanco lashed out at FEMA Tuesday for what she said was a "lack of urgency and lack of respect" involving the recovery of bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims.

Blanco said she ordered the state to sign a contract with Kenyon International Monday , after Chertoff failed to live up to renew the private disaster recovery firm's contract. The company has been recovering bodies in New Orleans.

Kenyon worked for the Australian government to identify the remains of tourists killed during the December tsunami, and the company handled the remains of plane passengers who crashed into a Pennsylvania field during the September 11 attacks.

Kenyon told the state that if they didn't get a contract soon, they would be force to leave as soon as they professionally could.

"In death, as in life, our people deserve more respect than they have received," Blanco said.

Empty train
Nagin, whose desperate plea for help in the days after the storm made him a folk hero to some, faces criticism for turning away resources that could have moved more people out of the city faster.

The mayor's disaster plan called for mobilizing buses and evacuating the poor, but he did not get it done. He said he could not find drivers, but Amtrak says it offered help and was turned down, so a train with 900 seats rolled away empty a day and a half before the storm. (Watch the video detailing the failed evacuation plan -- 2:11)

"One of the problems that we're facing at the federal level and at the state level and at the local level -- and again, not casting blame anywhere, is a total system-wide failure, because people making decisions hesitated," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, told CNN.

Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, a Republican, said he initially was impressed by how quickly federal authorities mobilized before the storm. But after it hit, nothing happened for days.

"There was absolutely no execution," Vitter told CNN.

"I was very happy with how quickly the president had signed his first emergency order," he said. "The FEMA director was on the ground before the storm. FEMA teams were on the ground. But then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, absolutely no execution. I don't know what they were doing."

Bureaucratic breakdown
The accusations and the public outrage make federal, state and local leaders jittery and defensive. They know that just a few days ago Brown's job appeared to be safe.

Vitter believes the time will come soon enough to answer the hard questions.

"I don't have a doubt in the world that all of these questions are going to be asked in a very forceful, focused way," he said. "So there are a lot of folks, myself included, just as a citizen of Louisiana, who are going to demand straight answers and get the full story, wherever that leads."

He said that the blame does not rest solely with Brown.

"This wasn't a failure of one person, although it was that also," Vitter told CNN. "It was a failure of the whole bureaucracy, and the solution to that isn't getting a new head bureaucrat or a new type of head bureaucrat. I think the whole bureaucratic FEMA model is what has to be probably discarded. "

CNN's Tom Foreman, Mike M. Ahlers and Anderson Cooper contributed to this report.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/13/kat...nse/index.html

[strandinthewind]

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Article published Sep 11, 2005
Surviving Katrina's wrath

By John Hill
jhillbr@gannett.com NEW ORLEANS — The lesson to be learned from Katrina is that there's only one direction that matters for rebuilding New Orleans — up.
Far beyond the French Quarter and Garden District beloved by tourists, New Orleans' architecturally significant neighborhoods are intact, with little structural damage.

A team of experts — including three evacuees — explored the city with Gannett News last week and found housing intact from the Bywater district near the Industrial Canal on the city's east side to the Carrollton area on the far west.

"It's the older homes, built out of cypress or heart of pine, built up off the ground to withstand the flooding that are fine," said Jimmy Blanchard, a New Orleans architectural archivist, artist and rehabilitation designer.

"The old homes of the city look intact," said LSU architecture professor Michael Desmond, an urban planning expert. "But for the loss of life and inconvenience, it is exciting. The parts of the city that have architectural and historic value are intact."

Draw a line across New Orleans from the Industrial Canal on the east starting a block or two on the lakeside of St. Claude Avenue, taking in a tiny corner of the French Quarter on the lakeside, upriver corner of the French Quarter, then across to the Superdome and along four-five blocks on the lakeside of Canal Street to the Carrollton area near the Jefferson Parish line on the west.

Most of the neighborhoods from that line to the river are dry now, though the streets are blocked with branches, trees, telephone poles, power and cable lines, and there is no electricity. The water was turned on, but the pressure is too low for firefighters to protect the wooden tinderbox that is old New Orleans. Several properties already have burned, and there is great fire danger because gas lines are on to prevent water from coming in and ruining the system.

"We have mile after mile after mile of shotgun houses and Creole cottages that have over the decades withstood the storms, including this one," said Patty Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. The PRC is a private nonprofit organization that has, over the past three decades, renovated more than 1,000 homes and sold them to homeowners and assisted others with buying and renovating.

Though living temporarily in Franklin, Gay is already working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington on asking the U.S. Congress and State Legislature for tax incentives to rebuild damaged homes and rehabilitate blighted housing.

"We need incentives because we want people to come back," Gay said. "We need all socioeconomic groups to come back."

The federal 20 percent tax credit for five years that applies to money spent rehabilitating rental property needs to be expanded to include homeowners, she said.

A state tax credit of up to $1 million a year for four years, due to go into effect Jan. 1, should be made immediately effective and allowed all at once.

Even in such neighborhoods as the Holy Cross Historic District in the Lower 9th Ward, where the raised old homes had a couple of feet of water in them this week, Gay said she is optimistic. "They are definitely salvageable," she said.

As the streets slope away from the river, and street flooding begins, even many of the older raised homes are intact, Gay said, standing at the water's edge on Esplanade Avenue at Marigny Street gazing as far toward the lake as she could see.

In the historic districts of Uptown, Central City, the Garden District, the Irish Channel, the Lower Garden District, the Central Business District, the Faubourg Marigny, the New Marigny, Bywater and Algier's Point, few homes have significant damage, even in the blighted areas.

And most homes in these areas have no visible damage from the street, though that can be deceiving, as Peter Raarup of Raarup Landscape Design learned when he opened the door to his home on Coliseum near Napoleon Avenue. Something — there were no nearby trees — had knocked a hole in his roof and the water had caused a 6-foot-by-8-foot piece of the plaster ceiling to fall, allowing sunshine to stream into the room. "But it is minor, not structural, and easily repaired," he said.

Throughout the old part of the city, built on the highest lands, the old homes built up on piers escaped any flooding. It was the newer neighborhoods, built from the 1950s to date, where flooding was severe — up to the eaves in Lake View and to 4-5 feet in the Canal Boulevard I-610 area.

"There ought to be a bumper sticker that reads, 'No slab houses,'" Raarup said.

Even the houses that have taken on seven feet of water may not have to be bulldozed, depending on whether they have older, heart-of-pine wood framing. They will have to be gutted to the structural timber, allowed to dry for months before it can be determined if they can be built out anew, Desmond said.

But many houses, even whole neighborhoods, will have to be removed in both Orleans and St. Bernard parishes.

Rebuilding will have to be done carefully so as not to interfere with New Orleans' architectural identification.

"New Orleans has the finest collection of wood frame houses anywhere in the world," Desmond said.

Building codes will have to be changed to require new homes built in the lower-lying areas of the city to be raised up so the first floor can flood harmlessly, such as used as a garage, bathroom or knock-away walls. That's required on Florida's coast and in flood-prone areas of St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Medium-rise condos with floodable garages on the first or second floors are also possible solutions.

"I would like to see right away a design team put together to come up with recommendations for affordable housing that could be raised off the ground," Gay said.

Changing the method of building may not be an option, depending on what insurance companies decide to do.

"It's the old struggle of do you design with nature or do you design against nature," Raarup said.

The only rational future for rebuilding New Orleans is to go up both with the houses and with a system of ring levees isolating low-lying areas.

"If this were a rational process, yes," Desmond said. "But this is a political process."

Bob Mann, communications director for Gov. Kathleen Blanco, said the governor is committing to restoring.

"She doesn't want to see one single building demolished that doesn't need to be," Mann said. "We will be very soon developing a very comprehensive program dealing with housing needs and what to do with structures of historic significance."

Mann said the U.S. Congress and President Bush "appear to be resolved" to spend what's needed.

"It is very important to her that we don't lose the historic architectural character of New Orleans," Mann said.


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