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DATELINE: 31 August, 2005

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G21 WORLD HQ - THE FACTS ARE GRIM AND COLD: Nearly a million people who once lived in the greater New Orleans metropolitan area are now refugees in their own country. In the aftermath of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, one of the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States, in a just world, there would be an investigation into how this catastrophe could have been avoided. We suspect, as this report will explain, that much of the blame should be put squarely at the doorstep of the Bush administration in the United States.

It is not at all difficult to assert that New Orleans has died for Iraq. Money that could have shorn up that city's infrastructure, money requested by the Army Corps of Engineers for just that purpose, was instead allocated to pay off contracts for the reconstruction of the newly occupied Middle East nation and line the pockets of executives at Halliburton subsidiary, Kellog, Brown & Root.

First, the story as it is unfolding today on the ground.

It had only been two days on Tuesday, 30 August, 2005, when Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco entered the Superdome in New Orleans to assess the condition of the refugees from Hurricane Katrina but when she came out of the damaged and leaking building, dazed, all she could say was that conditions inside the structure were "very, very desperate."

Calling friends out of state on their cell phones, refugee families reported that food and water had already run out, toilets were backing up, the air conditioners had failed, people were turning violent. One man, distraught, had apparently committed suicide. At least one young girl was said to h ave been sexually assaulted during the night. Conditions were grim, to say the least.

As this is written on Wednesday, 31 August 2005, the refugees who had huddled in the Superdome in downtown New Orleans during the ravages of Katrina, and people from other parts of the city who have been helicoptered or boated by the Coast Guard from their rooftops, are being evacuated to Houston, Texas, where they are to be temporarily sheltered in another sports stadium, the Astrodome.

The Fox News television channel has reveled in showing pictures of Black looters in New Orleans over the past forty-eight hours. CNN interviews a man who escaped the raging waters of the flooding city by hanging on for dear life to a piece of wood, even as he watched his own wife drown in the deluge. He said he wishs now that he had died, too, because he has lost everything and cannot go on.

Officials agree that nearly nothing was done on Tuesday to staunch the levee through which flood waters have consumed eighty percent (80%) of the Crescent City. All available vehicles and aircraft were being used to save people instead. The bodies of the dead are being pushed aside in order to get to those still living. The body count will come later, when infrastructure is repaired, the streets are pumped dry and all the remaining refugees are recovered and evacuated.

Coffins from the above ground graves of earlier generations of New Orleanians can be seen floating from helicopters passing above still looking for live victims.

Katrina did not seem like The Big One on Monday, when she jogged right, toward the east, and failed to hit New Orleans dead on but the levees had never been tested by a storm this forceful. The Army Corps of Engineers said the levees were built to withstand a Level Three hurricane but a Level Three had not struck New Orleans since the new levees were constructed, so everyone knew that forecast was speculative rather than proven.

All of us who lived in New Orleans used to joke about the 10,000 body bags Orleans parish had stored up to deposit us in when The Big One, the killer hurricane that was inevitable, finally slammed into town from up the mouth of the Mississippi River. But nobody was quick to move away.

Life was good in New Orleans. Some bar, somewhere nearby, was always open, 24 and 7, there were tourists enough to fleece, except in the summer, and; plenty of good food all around. The Big Easy. Bon temps roulez. A predominantly Black, dirt poor city, with no industry to speak of, no significant change in one hundred years and the biggest booze, drugs, gambling and sex problems on the North American continent. A hell hole and a drunkard's dream if she ever could see one.

Katrina hit at the end of the summer, a time when most of the population of New Orleans, who are predominantly service industry workers, are dead broke or just scraping along waiting for the sweltering heat to go away and the tourists to come back. On Tuesday, the day after the storm had passed, the flooding began. It was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit in New Orleans and there was no potable water.

The electricity was down and it was impossible for people to call into telephone area code 504 all day. At one point during the day, Tuesday, there was only guess work as to what was going on in the Big Easy because ALL forms of communication were down.

Could a disaster of these proportions, with nearly a million people stranded, have been averted? Perhaps. Part of the problem, what Governor Blanco now calls trying to fill a "black hole," repairing the five hundred foot hole in the flood wall at the 17th Street Canal might have been averted. The latest solution floated by the Army Corps of Engineers is to plug the hole by inserting a barge. But this failure to adequately prepare the levee and flood wall system of New Orleans goes back a few months to a rejected budget request to the Bush administration.

NEW ORLEANS DIES FOR IRAQ

In an article in Editor and Publisher on Tuesday, 30 August, 2005 ("Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? 'Times-Picayune' Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues") by Will Bunch, this passage stands out:

When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." [End snippet.]

In other words, it was the policy of the United States government to leave New Orleans to twist slowly in the wind, even after the horrific hurricane season of 2004.

Oh wait, the implication would be that accepting that hurricanes are becoming more severe because the oceans' waters are getting warmer, particularly in the Gulf stream, would be an admission that scientists are correct and there should be concern about global warming.

Not on Mr. Bush's watch.

WE HAVE NOWHERE TO GO

One million former New Orleanians find themselves at the mercy of the kindness of strangers in other cities. The governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans have told them don't come back home. So other cities and other people have to take them in until the water is pumped out of the soup bowl, the toxic sludge is cleaned up and the bodies are all taken away.

Before knowing this article would appear, I had written in my diaristic journal:

30 August 2005- 10:49 p.m. EDT: Well, we all know by now that if I still lived in New Orleans, particularly down in the lower 9th Ward (to which I was relegated after being Jo'ed) there would be no World's Magazine tonight. I would be one of those people standing on a rooftop waiting to be discovered.

But I'm not in New Orleans. Once again The Great Mystery helped me to dodge a bullet.

There are a lot of my friends from Nawlins I'd like to try to contact right now: Scott and Tierney, Greg and Teresa, JW and Elizabeth, Mary, Dave and Jenno, Leszek and Carolina, my girl Tanya ... I have the comfort of knowing Matt is sitting warm and toasty somewhere in Florida, probably watching The Weather Channel or "Larry King Live" on CNN to see if there's a shot of his house or the street where his job used to be. He's likely clutching a cocktail and thinking, "Got out just in time."

Nick's house, where I lived before my last month in Nawlins, before shacking with Shawn for a month and moving here, is probably heavily damaged, since it bordered the Industrial Canal. I heard the Governor of Louisiana, Ms. Blanco, say tonight to Larry King that there is no potable water in Orleans parish right now and that St. Bernard parish is demolished. It's almost out of that Randy Newman song entitled, "Louisiana 1927." He sang,

They gonnah wash us away, wash us away ...

No lie.

After being frustrated trying to reach friends from New Orleans about whom This Reporter was concerned, the Internet became the option. Most of my friends are smart enough to have evacuated the city when the warnings came, many of them likely would be somewhere with Internet access. It was worth a shot.

It was hard not remembering the good times, the bad times, and all the faces of people had I seen on both sides of the bar during the years I lived in Nawlins. I started thinking back to what I believed would be the opening passage of my long promised New Orleans book.

Flashman has lived in New Orleans for seven years now. He is my friend. We lived in the same apartment twice. He has lived there all along. He never moves; he is like a stone. He has been at the same job for four years, though he hates the job. Drink, work; drink, work; that is the definition of Flashman's life. He is a big man with a big heart, but not a great deal of education or ambition.

Flashman is one of those invisible, nearly faceless, service workers that keeps the tourism industry in New Orleans going. But he is not faceless when he gets off work, has a bit of money in his pocket and drinks whiskey after his beers. Then he becomes a Holy Terror.

The next morning -- or evening, if he arrives at his apartment at daybreak or eight a.m. -- he doesn't remember a bit of what Holy Terror did to you the night before. Not a syllable or a blow, as the case may be. He doesn't remember the dark power of his rage.

"You remember that money you gave me for rent two days ago?"

"I remember everything. That is my curse."

"Gone. All gone. It went straight to my liver."

"You said you were having a good time."

"A good time most of which I can't even remember."

"You remember talking to me when you got home yesterday morning?"

"I did?"

"I had to let you in. You couldn't find the hole, Shaquile."

"Asshole."

"Glad you remember my nickname."

"What time did I get back?"

"I don't know. About 8:30 I guess."

"So I was out from two until 8:30 in the morning? No wonder I feel like hammered shit today."

"You left at 12:30."

"No way!"

"You came back from your job, took a nap, and got up at about midnight, showered and left. Before your nap you said you were meeting your bartender friend at two. I was surprised you got up so early."

"12:30?"

"12:30."

"Dude, the last thing I remember is making out in the bar with this fifty-five year old woman who says her name is Peanut-Butter-and-Jelly."

"Going for older women now?"

"It's not the first time I've met her down there." Her paused and got this strange look on his face. "There's something about her that fascinates me."

"So you're sucking face with a woman in her fifties in public, in a bar. The train had already left the station, I gather."

"Yeah. No chance I'd be able to hit chicks my age after that."

"Ya think?"

"I just straight-up blacked out."

"Okay. Not the first time, after all. If I were you, I'd write it off to 'youthful enthusiasm.'"

"I don't know why I do this to myself."

"Take my advice and eat something, Bubula. You'll feel better."

"Think so?"

"Never argue with your bartender."

"Last week you were claiming you weren't a bartender anymore, Dude!"

"Once a bartender ... "

"We got beerage?"

"We managed to go to the store last night while you were out carousing, if that's what you're asking. We realized that someone might get home shit-faced and ask for a brew."

"Dickhead."

"There you go again. Let's restrict it to one epithet. I'm getting used to 'Asshole.'"

"Asshole."

"I knew you were a quick study."

I was going to start the book that way because that is a scene that everyone in New Orleans can easily relate to. New Orleans is the only place I've ever known where people could call in late for work because they had a hangover from the night before and proudly admitted it, especially during Mardi Gras.

Hell, you were lucky in New Orleans if your boss didn't call you to say he or she would be late because they were still half in the bag from a wild night in the French Quarter.

So watching the worst on CNN and The Weather Channel it suddenly struck me that I was going into a state of mourning. As much as my relationship with New Orleans had always been love/hate, I had to admit that I was losing someone/something/some special place in my heart that I had loved. I had never doubted until Tuesday afternoon that I would return to New Orleans whenever I got the chance.

Now, I knew, sadly, tragically, with a lump in my throat that the New Orleans in my memory, the New Orleans I had written about and breathed in like the jasmine-scented air on Esplanade Avenue, that New Orleans would never exist again.

The e-mails I got from the few friends I could reach, confirmed this fact. They were shell-shocked.

Matt wrote to me, from Tallahassee:

It seemed like everything would be OK earlier yesterday, and then we went out for a few drinks, came home and saw on the news that the levee had broken and "80% of the city is underwater". While I am on somewhat sorta kinda high ground, I *did* see some footage shot off of I-10 of the Circle Food Store on Claiborne & St. Bernard Ave...and it looked like there was 8-10 feet of water in there. Not a good sign. But that *is* a bit away from my place. Maybe, just maybe, I'm on high enough ground that there's little or no water in the house. I can only hope. I have my most important stuff with me, but still, the concept of losing my stereo, almost all my CDs, that huge DVD collection I've been burning over the last year, my entire literature collection, my old photos, blah blah blah, everything except the computer, the guitar, and a duffel bag full of clothes...it's hard to really comprehend it.

I have to assume that I no longer have a job, since it may take months to get that water out of there (plus time to clean up the toxic sludge), it seems to me that it will be impossible to SELL uninhabitable real estate. So my services will most likely not be needed.

I have $200 in cash and $300 in the bank, and that's it. Next destination is Kentucky, and after I get there I will begin deliberating on a course of action. Probably my best bet would be to go back to San Diego and survey the scene from there. Maybe head back to SF and kick it with Mark or Pen Girl.

Later in day I heard from Jamie Menutis, who used to write for your World's Magazine. She lived on the lake front. I remember calling her during the night of Hurricane Isidore hitting New Orleans, years earlier, to make certain she was all right. On Tuesday, she wrote in her e-mail:

we are safe, though i fear we have lost everything that we own.

i am in new york now and trying to make my way to houston. my daughter managed to save her dogs-i am happy about this. Having worked with refugees, i now understand that nothing material matters except your life in the end. we will be fine, because we are alive.

Later I heard from G reg Cowman, an inveterate jokester, a fellow bartender who worked at the Napoleon House on St. Louis and Chartres before Katrina and had once worked with me at the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street in the Marigny. I had trained Greg at that bar, in fact. We had become great friends. He had taken me to the airport when I left New Orleans for an abortive stay in Phoenix in 2004. He had been one of my mainstays when I returned to New Orleans in early 2005. Greg wrote in his e-mail:

Hey Rod -

Just a short note to let you know that Teresa, her youngest daughter, and I are safe and out of harms way. We drove up to Teresa's oldest daughter's place in Baton Rouge on Saturday. We all have beds, food, water, electricity, and basically everything we need. We are VERY LUCKY.

I don't know anything about my apartment or its contents, but I do have enough renters insurance to cover any loses. Actually, unless the big pecan tree fell onto the house or the roof got torn off, I doubt there will be any major damage to my stuff. But, then again, I don't have any idea what the place looks like. I just hope my landlord, her 96 year old mother, and my neighbor had the sense and wherewithal to get out of town in time.

Teresa's house, on the other hand, is probably gone. Slidell was pretty much ground zero and the water level is still rising as I type.

She, of course, has insurance. Whether she will have a job may be another story, but will deal with that when necessary. Obviously, I can get a bartending job anywhere, if/when push comes to shove. Ironically, I had just gotten a low interest loan a few days before the storm hit, so I have enough cash flow for a while. I suppose the Napoleon House will be back in business someday, but not for at least a couple of months. Then again, maybe not ...

So, life in New Orleans will never ever be the same. We don't have a clue as to our next step, but I'm sure we will make a new beginnning somewhere.

We are truly thankful to be alive.

I can't help wondering how many people I (we) know may not be with us today. It boggles the mind.

I am glad that you weren't here to suffer through this nightmare.

I hope you are well.

Write when you have a minute, but I realize you have LOTS of friends here who may not have been as fortunate as I, who need your attention more.

There's so much more to say, but we are all pretty drained right now.

More soon.

Hugs to you.

Send some back.

Greg

Uniformly, it was the same from everyone, uncertainty as to where they would go, shock about the extent of the damage and loss, the certainty, as Greg so aptly puts it, that "New Orleans will never ever be the same" again.

The New Orleans of my pal Flashman stumbling obliviously through his life must now give way to a city determined to rebuild and reinvent itself. Into what?

NEW ORLEANS: Not Big and Never All That Easy

New Orleans has/had one of the worst school systems in the country. People said that was by intent. How else could you keep a labor force willing to work for dirt wages cleaning the toilets and making the beds of the tourists coming down to make fools of themselves on Bourbon Street, overpaying for watered down drinks, guzzling 64 ounce beers, showing their breasts and generally trashing your home town?

In these pages more than once, I've called New Orleans "the American Haiti." It is, now more than ever.

Former New Orleans mayor Mark Morial, now in charge of the National Urban League, watched the devastation on television like the rest of the country and told the various reporters interviewing him that the Crescent City reminded him of looking at Pompeii. The only difference was that this modern city was being overtaken by raging waters, while the ancient city had succumbed to a storm of molten lava.

The hometown football team, the New Orleans Saints, are moving to San Antonio for the time being. Locally, we always called them "the Ain'ts," anyway.

Early today, Wednesday, the current mayor, C. Ray Nagin was airlifted from City Hall, where he had manned his post throughout this crisis, as rising water began to assault that structure, as well. Meanwhile, the bus convoys were taking the citizens of his city off to the Houston Astrodome. Nagin said that he was concerned about the disease that would come from the corpses left floating throughout the city. "We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and other people dead in attics, Mayor Ray Nagin said. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

Meanwhile, among the chattering classes in servive to the Mouthpiece Media, you had "pundits" like Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine.com) asking the insulting question: Should New Orleans be Rebuilt?. I did respond to this blog post but tried to show equanimity in the face of this raging stupidity. Who knows, I might need a reference from Jarvis one day.

What? Is anyone asking if Biloxi or Mobile should be rebuilt? Why single out New Orleans again, you turd!

Why put New Orleans exactly where the Bush administration put New Orleans when the city asked for the help it needed to avoid a disaster EXACTLY LIKE THIS ONE? The Army Corps of Engineers went to the administration with a tin cup asking for a dollar to help keep people safe and their homes standing and the administration gave them twenty cents and said get lost.

Databases have been set up by CNN and a newspaper in Mississippi to help people locate lost loved ones in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the Crescent City. Any number of people have posted messages on the nola.com blog seeking elderly relatives who they have not heard from since early Monday. That is one of the saddest fears, in This Reporter's view, the number of homebound seniors who could not get out of the city and who have no way of contacting anyone. I ran into a lot of older people like that in the Lower Nine. They would not have been able to get up to the rooftops of their homes, I know ...

I met these people because, earlier this year, I worked as a community organizer in the lower ninth ward of New Orleans. The Lower Nine is an adjunct to the City of New Orleans. You have to cross the Industrial Canal to get there. Your last stop before hitting St. Bernard Parish. It is predominantly Black. The street conditions, as I've reported here elsewhere, are abominable, akin to Haiti. The drainage is so bad that small children can actually swim on certain streets after a heavy summer rainstorm. Potholes are ubiquitous. Abandoned houses run chock-a-block through the neighborhood providing breeding grounds for rats, snakes and other pests. Wild dogs roam the streets. Corner stores act as fronts for drug dealers and there are places along the bus lines going toward Florida Street where the roughnecks own the block and flount their weapons and their crack deals. The Lower Nine is forgotten and neglected - by design.

Part of the standard sales pitch I had to spiel to get people to sign away access to their checking accounts for the poverty pimp agency, ACORN, was, "Do you think you'd have these problems, these issues, if you lived on St. Charles Avenue?"

"Hell no!" was the usual and expected reply.

"Why not?" I was scripted to prompt them.

When we practiced our "rap" back at the ACORN office on Elysian Fields, we already knew the canned responses. There were usually only two of them.

1. "Because they're White" or
2. "Because they got money."

In a CNN interview today, the news reader, Daryn Kagan, said, "New Orleans is a racially enginee red city, isn't it?" My jaw dropped. She said, "Weren't certain neighborhoods built for certain people to live in them?"

As we used to say in Nawlins, "Yes, indeed!"

During the four years I lived, worked and played in New Orleans with all my friends who have now become refugees, as I have always been, I can recall at least seven times reading major articles in the Times-Picayune about the problem of getting federal funds to keep the city, already below sea-level and prone to flooding, from washing away. According to the article in Editor and Publisher and Amy Goodman's reporting for today's episode of "Democracy Now!" the local New Orleans paper brought this issue up even more times than my memory serves.

The point of the articles in that newspaper was that one day the Big One that pushed the levees and pumping system would come and that action could and should be taken to avert a catastrophe. All that was required was providing the funding that SELA was created to utilize and the Army Corps of Engineer recommended to make New Orleans safe.

All of this happened concurrent to George W. Bush being in the White House and pursuing his twin agendas of tax cuts for the wealthy and a misguided war and occupation in Iraq. I know. I was there.

Another writer has said that there are only three story cities in America: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Today, I suppose there are only two.

New Orleans has died for Iraq and the Bush administration in Washington should be held accountable for the one million refugees now wondering where to go in their own country. The Bush administration shoud be held accountable for the seniors who will be found dead in their homes and the bodies floating down Canal Street. The Bush administration should be held accountable for the death of a great American city. Now you know, too.