Month: September 2005

The building has quite a history, but rumors are flying tonight about the future of the Superdome.  A reporter from the U.K. Daily Record interviewed a member of the National Guard who was posted outside the structure. The serviceman doesn’t think the structure can be saved.

At the Superdome, all that remained last night were piles of stinking rubbish and human waste. No one was allowed in because conditions were a major health hazard.

One serviceman guarding it said: “I don’t reckon they can begin to clear up the mess in there. It will have to be demolished.”

During Monday night’s Florida State-Miami game on ABC, Ted Koppel reported that there was a strong possibility that the Superdome would be demolished.

In USAToday:

The future of the Superdome is cloudy, impacting the city on a variety of fronts. New Orleans Saints officials say the prospects of the building and the team’s home dates remain uncertain. A number of sports events in the Gulf region are reacting, as well as many athletes who live or have family in the affected areas.

New Orleans Saints head coach Jim Haslett played it straight during Monday’s press conference:

Q: There are published reports coming out of Louisiana that the team may never return to New Orleans again. How would you react to that?

Haslett: “I don’t know where they would get those reports and I don’t think they are true. I think that is the last thing on anybodies mind right now. If somebody would say that obviously they do not have a good handle on what they are talking about so I don’t think that is true by any means whatsoever. I don’t think it is on anyone’s mind and that is something that is going to have to be determined after the season is over. Right now we have four months of football and hopefully we can get though those and get into the playoffs and then figure out where we are going to live. Hopefully it is back where we came from.”

Q: Do you have a preference for your home games between San Antonio and Baton Rouge?

Haslett: “I would like to have them here because we are practicing here but I think we owe it to the fans of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, all the people in Baton Rouge, all the way up to Lafayette and Shreveport. We have season ticket holders all over the Gulf Coast not just New Orleans. I think we owe it to the state and to the region to play a couple games back in Baton Rouge, if we can.”

I personally think it should be put down. After all the horror that happened inside that building, I don’t know how anyone, let alone the citizens of New Orleans, could go back in there. Build a new dome, rename it (not after a commercial sponsor), and dedicate it to the memory of those who lived and died there last week.

Meanwhile, the official website for the Superdome posts only the following statement:

“Until further notice all events scheduled for the Superdome are canceled.”

UPDATE: 09.06.05 – Louisiana Superdome, where thousands were stranded after Katrina, is likely to be torn down, state official tells CNN.

MORE: Superdome likely to be torn down.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was interviewed on CNN Monday morning by Soledad O’Brien (transcript), where he revealed that Gov. Kathleen Blanco met with President Bush aboard Air Force One to make a decision about the timing of a New Orleans relief/support response by the federal government. Bush told Blanco that he was ready to move with troops and relief immediately, but Blanco requested a delay of 24 hours. Nagin doesn’t know why Blanco requested an additional day. All he knows is that more people died as a result of her decision.

Why? What was the purpose of the delay? Why did Gov. Kathleen Blanco not allow President Bush to give an order to move troops into New Orleans?

Your actions killed more people Governor. Why? Could it be that you were worried about the political ramifications of the White House looking like the hero instead of you? Or maybe you didn’t want it to look like you were running to George W. Bush for help?

And Mr. Mayor, while you’re busy providing interviews…what about those buses?

(h/t LGF)

MORE: Watch the Interview

UPDATE: Blanco interviewed on CNN (video). Transcript here.

S. O’BRIEN: Solidly behind your efforts, although there’s been much written about kind of a power tussle between the two of you. Specifically, the mayor was telling us about a flight on Air Force One. And he said that you and he and the president were all in a room, and finally you and the president went separately to have a meeting.

Listen to what the mayor told us, ma’am, if you will.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN (D), NEW ORLEANS: He called me in, in that office, after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said — I don’t remember exactly what — two options.

I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O’BRIEN: Twenty-four hours. Is that right? Was that what came out of that meeting on the tarmac with the president?

BLANCO: Soledad, the mayor was not in my meeting. And it was — I’ll tell you, it was a meeting that did not affect what was going on out in the field.

They were talking about paper organizations, nothing else. Nothing more. And they gave me a very complicated proposition to look at.

It didn’t help our effort in that instant moment. I needed a little time to understand exactly what it meant.

We went forward, all of us. All the resources were there. Nothing stopped. We ended up coming to terms and agreements. And I think that the effort’s going great.

S. O’BRIEN: Coming to terms, meaning that you rejected after that 24-hour window, that you didn’t have any interest in federalizing the troops or turning power over to the president. Why not hand it over, Madame Governor, when the first five days — and I think that meeting was on Friday, so the first several days of the recovery were clearly disastrous?

BLANCO: The first five days of the recovery were heroic. We had — we were the people who took control.

The National Guard took control of the city, brought order out of chaos, because we have law enforcement authority. The federal troops do not. I was very concerned about giving up law enforcement authority.

S. O’BRIEN: Heroic, but by a very small number of people who were on the ground. In fact, I believe it was Friday morning when I was talking to the FEMA director, who had only just seen that there were tens of thousands of people at the convention center. So at least by Thursday, let’s say the first four days, those people at the convention center were actually not getting anything. If it was not coordinated…

BLANCO: Soledad…

S. O’BRIEN: Yes, ma’am?

BLANCO: Soledad, the mayor and I were both asking for the same thing. We wanted troops, we wanted food, we wanted water, we wanted helicopters. We asked for that early in the week.

I asked for everything that we had available from the federal government. I got it from the National Guard. I got as much as possible. And the federal effort was just a little slow in coming.

I can’t understand why. You know, those are questions that are yet to be answered.

Jon Christian Ryter – “Blanco’s advisers told her that the remaining 7,000 National Guard troops left in Louisiana were not enough to secure the city of New Orleans, and that it was not in her best political interest to use them until they could be reinforced since they might get hurt, or worse, hurt or kill a civilian they were charged with protecting. Instead, she let Nagin’s 1,500 New Orleans cops fend for themselves in a city that had been tacitly surrendered to looters and thugs.”

Bob Livingston: “I raised hell with Gov. Blanco for not declaring martial law. I told her last Wednesday night I was going on ‘Hannity & Colmes’ and criticize her for not doing that, and 20 minutes later, she did.“

Blanco: “We all wanted more, faster,” Blanco said Monday evening after a day that included meeting with President Bush in Baton Rouge. “We needed more, faster. We were limited by our own capacity. We were limited by the speed at which organization could be mustered. There isn’t any person who is not sorrowful about wanting to do more in a quicker amount of time. We knew lives were being threatened minute-by-minute. Everything is now stabilized. We know there are still people to be rescued. Loved ones need to be buried.“

Related: Bush, Blanco spar over military | Bush, Congress to Investigate Response | Latest CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll biased in favor of Gov. Blanco? | Blame Amid the Tragedy | NYT: Political Issues Snarled Plans for Military Help | Delusional, Dysfunctional, Divisive, and Defiant |

Rounding up stuff I’ve come across today…

September is National Preparedness Month. Guess the Governor of Louisiana missed the memo.

I was wondering if someone was going to do this. Here’s a timeline covering the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Bible Codes and Katrina.

Nick Bradbury, the guy who developed FeedDemon (the RSS reader I use), is going in for surgery to deal with an acoustic neuroma.

Wanna see the Left’s plan to politicize Katrina?

Dutch authorities seize 10,140 pounds of blow.

Jason Deparle thinks that New Orleans is all about race. I don’t.

Muslims ransack a Christian village

Katrina death toll may hit 10,000.

To all of you out there who are angry at Bush regarding the delayed deployment of the National Guard to New Orleans…

Factoid: The constitution says the governor is in charge of the Guard. The president would have to invoke the Insurrection Act to over-ride that. No president has done that since the Civil War. And he would have to do it over the head of the governor.

The million dollar paragraph sucked from this post:

A person of some modest education might have remembered that the worship and adulation fostered after 9/11 was for the NYPD and the FDNY. No one was buying FEMA hats after 9/11, because FEMA is essentially a mop-up agency. It’s the first responders, the local governments, that will determine if a city will live or die. The State — that means, the “governor”– has the sole authority to mobilize the National Guard, and the governor of the state of Louisana was not only slow to do that, she turned down NG assistance from several OTHER states as well. The President does not have the authority to drop precious egg salad sandwiches from Michael Moore’s missing helicopters. We do this ON PURPOSE. We limit the power of the federal government, as those of us fortunate enough to have spent time in Civics, rather than Self Esteem classes, are aware. This is so that we do not develop a central power so strong that eventually we end up with idiot inbred royals, or Presidentes for life, on the face of OUR money.

Jeff Goldstein on how the Left keeps trying, but alas, they just can’t get it to stick…

Bush nominates John Roberts for Supreme Court Justice. There are a lot more people more qualified than me to comment on this whole thing. Go read about it all here, and then keep scrolling.

If you’ve become a fan of The Times-Picayune and NOLA.com, you’ll enjoy this story from the New York Times, which digs into the details of what it’s like to keep a newspaper going while a city around you is falling apart.

Lots of people are calling for the head of FEMA director Michael Brown. Here’s one, and here’s another, and here’s one more.

Bill Quick, commenting on the pairing of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton: “I am so sick and tired of GHWB providing ethical cover and legitimacy to this lying, perjurious scumbag. He should be shunned by decent people.”

An elderly couple from Louisiana is safe with their son in Redmond, Washington after spending the last week fleeing Katrina’s destruction.

Has Katrina saved the U.S. Media? Heh, wishful thinking.

But, Katrina has been good for FoxNews star Shepard Smith. He’s on Letterman tonight.

Zarqawi’s thugs take control of a key western town in Iraq.

Two words: Sean Penn

In case you missed it, Dan Riehl and Michelle Malkin had a brawl over the weekend, and it continues into Monday, here and here.

Ace comments on Bush I, Bush II and Bill Clinton being named as accomplices in the murder of John John.

$955,000

Charles Johnson is trying to understand why, when thousands are missing and/or dead, the city of New Orleans would send its cops to Las Vegas. Paul at Wizbangblog says he understands.

Jihad Watch: While American Muslims may indeed be role models in their wealth and high voter registration rate, it is not at all true that only ill-educated poor people actually commit terrorist atrocities.

What did Katrina do to all those famous New Orleans landmarks?

So why labor?

Actually, I need a break from New Orleans, floods, buses, who didn’t do the right thing, who “might” have done the right thing, what Clinton would have done, what Bush should have done, what Rudi can do, what Kanye said, didn’t say, should have said, and how everyone is racist.

Blah Blah Blah.

I’ll do a round up of stuff tonight.

Until then…

(Repost – Scroll down to see Update III)

Laurel and her family left Slidell, Louisiana on Sunday, August 28th and drove 500 miles north into Tennessee. They weren’t going to mess around with Hurricane Katrina. They didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. But leaving wasn’t easy. What to take? What to leave? Pack enough clothes for a week. Grab the family photo album, the dogs, and some food from the fridge. Put everything into the minivan. Turn around, and snap the picture.

The “Before” picture. A simple digital image of the house, captured just before they fled Slidell.

And now, Laurel wonders what’s left of her home. What does it look like? Is it still there?

“I hope the ‘after’ photo isn’t too horrifying. I can only pray. There is very little information on TV right now about Slidell. The eye of the storm passed right over it, and so far all we have is news that half the town is under water. I am just hoping that my house is on the other half.

So basically, we’re refugees. We have nowhere to live at the moment and will probably spend the next month shuffling from relative to relative.

The posts on her blog describe the emotional roller coaster ride they are stuck on. Frustration, anger, hopelessness, gratitude, and thankfulness. Most of all though, she’s happy to be alive, and to have her family close.

MORE: Photos from Slidell. I wonder if any of these pictures are from locations near Laurel’s house?

UPDATE: Laurel writes to say that one of the pictures from Slidell shows a street which is very close to her house.

“The ones labled “Entrance to Breckenridge” are taken at the end of my my street. The photo is taken from Pearl Acres Road. If the person who took the photo had turned around and walked a few steps, they would have been looking up my street (Rosemeade Drive). We are relieved to see that the homes are still there and don’t really appear to have that much damage.”

“We don’t have any tall trees near our home, so there is little chance of damage from trees to our house. I’m encouraged to see that so many people have returned already from seeing the cars in the photos.”

So far so good. Soon as Laurel has an “After” picture of her place, we’ll post it here.

UPDATE II: Laurel’s house was relatively untouched. Only superficial damage. Satellite view here.

UPDATE III: Here’s Laurel’s house, “After“. As you can see, it still stands.

View 54 images of Laurel’s home (inside and out)

Related:
— Whereabouts Unknown
— Goodbye Big Easy

Via 7news – Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge, killing five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal. The contractors were walking across a bridge on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Corps.

(h/t Dan Riehl)

Update: Apparently, there was some confusion with this report, and it has since been corrected to say that contractors were NOT killed.

Each of us have had a thought about how or when we will die. If you’re like me, you picture a soft-lit room with your (grown-up) kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids gathering at your bedside as your 95+ year-old body slowly drifts off into the afterlife. Obviously, we hope to leave this world in the most peaceful way possible.

I’m sure Vera had the same desire. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way for her.

A makeshift tomb at a New Orleans street corner conceals the body of a woman named ‘Vera’ who had been lying on the sidewalk for days in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005.

God bless you Vera.

Related: The rescue that never came to the St. Bernard nursing home. (Video – “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area.” — I’ve seen a lot of heart breaking videos this past week, but this has got to be one of the toughest to watch)

Bestselling author John Grisham and his wife are contributing $5 million to help Mississippians rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the residents in the three dozen hardest-hit neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama also were disproportionately minority and had incomes $10,000 below the national average.

People living in the path of Hurricane Katrina’s worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car — factors that may help explain why so many failed to evacuate as the storm approached.

Median household income in the most devastated neighborhood was $32,000, or $10,000 less than the national average.

Two in 10 households in the disaster area had no car, compared with 1 in 10 in nationwide.

Nearly 25 percent of those living in the hardest-hit areas were below the poverty line, about double the national average. About 4.5 percent in the disaster area received public assistance; nationwide, the number was about 3.5 percent.

About 60 percent of the 700,000 people in the three dozen neighborhoods were minority. Nationwide, about 1 in 3 Americans is a racial minority.

One in 200 American households doesn’t have adequate plumbing. One in 100 households in the most affected areas didn’t have decent plumbing, which, according to the Census, includes running hot and cold water, a shower or bath and an indoor toilet.

Nationwide, about 7 percent of households with children are headed by a single mother. In the three dozen neighborhoods, 12 percent were single-mother households.

A call for submissions from the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, needs help in finding URL’s of sites and blogs that contain documents of this major disaster.

Please email links to sites and pages that should be saved for future research to [email protected].

We have worked to archive events such as 9/11 and the tsunami with the generous help of volunteers finding and sending in links. We then save these digital works for the long term and create research tools (for example: http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/sept11/index.html and http://web.archive.org ). As a library, we provide free access to those wanting to learn from these events — we can only hope that we learn some lessons from disasters such as these.

Again, please send email to [email protected] with lists of URL’s you suggest should be archived relevant to the Katrina Disaster.

We are also looking for a couple of volunteers that can help orchestrate the crawl. If you are interested, please send a note to [email protected] with “volunteer” in the subject line.

Thank you.

-Brewster Kahle
Digital Librarian
Internet Archive