This time seven years ago, people were dying in New Orleans, the Lower Ninth ward was flooded out, Plaqamines Parish was essentially destroyed, and government had ceased to function in southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
The National Guard hadn’t yet rolled the first relief convoys, and erroneous news reports were claiming that law enforcement, rescue, and military helicopters were shot at, and that (black) people were completely running wild raping and stealing everything that wasn’t waterlogged or nailed down. NOPD murdered two unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge six days after the storm came through. My National Guard didn’t even form up until the normally scheduled drill the weekend after the storm, and even then we didn’t start preparing for disaster relief until the afternoon of our Sunday drill. The leading elements of civil/military relief did not enter the city of New Orleans until six days after the hurricane swept through. The two biggest roadblocks to establishing a rescue/restoration mission were the incompetence of the Bush Administration (heckuva job, Brownie) and the politics is everything nature of the Bush Administration. They wouldn’t allow the National Guard from neighboring states to enter Louisiana unless the Governor of Louisiana ceded control to them. The fact that most states in the region were parties to a mutual assistance pact that specifically named the local Governor the responsible party with respect to assets volunteered by other states was irrelevant. The fact that people were dying was irrelevant. What mattered to them was who was going to get the credit and the glory. It didn’t work out so well, however. While nobody remembers Kathleen Blanco, EVERYBODY remembers Scott Michael Brown’s emails and George Bush flying over the area in Air Force One with that detached expression on his face. It started the permanent decline of Bush’s popularity. The country began to wake up from a nightmare.
Contrast that with today. Yes, there has been significant work on the levy system that has minimized the damage, and this was a smaller (Category 1 vs. Cat 3) storm. But the debris hasn’t even stopped falling, and the National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA are already in place and working rescues, levy repairs, flood pumping and remediation, and all of these things are happening without any drama, without any federal grand standing, and without any public turf battles with the local governments. What grand standing there has been has all been done by Bobby Jindal and his fellow republican governors and legislators from that region.
This is the choice our country faces this year. We have a serial liar with no honor and no integrity and no other guiding principle except to do whatever it takes to win the Presidency with no idea what to do with the office other than to make the lives of people like himself easier, and we have a man of quiet competence who sees his role as President to be the man who gets as many things done as possible for the largest number of people possible.
Joey Maloney
Bravo, well said. That is all.
LittlePig
Well said.
Quarks
Can we change your wording from “smaller” to “less powerful” category one versus category three storm? Isaac is a very, very large storm with bands stretching from Texas to Florida — here in the Orlando area we were still getting rain from it as late as last night, and we were never anywhere near the center of the storm. The size and slow movement of the storm are the major causes of today’s problems.
LittlePig
I don’t know how much the category comes into play for storms like these. The category just tells how hard the wind is blowing, not how much water is contained. Issac is a good-sized storm, and going the speed of a fast walk. Like with Katrina, it’s the water, not the wind.
amk
win
LittlePig
Dang. Beaten on both my comments.
Linda Featheringill
So the rescue/repair teams are already at it? Wonderful.
After the dangers of the storm has passed, I think somebody should point out the different results between a philosophical belief that society/government should help people and one that holds that no government services are the best services.
With details. With examples. Repeatedly. There should be ads on TV all through Louisiana and Mississippi, at least.
Gin & Tonic
You probably mean Mike and not Scott Brown.
elftx
I am watching WWWLTV.com and areas in Braithwaite are covered in probably 12-13ft of water..did see a rescue of an older man and they actually took his dogs too..I am happy for that at least.
Culture of Truth
Ah sweet liberty.
amk
Piece worth tweeting.
Karen in GA
Except for the wingnut who mentioned her this morning. He also said, “Payback’s a bitch.”
I went off on him. A brief snippet: “You want a failed disaster response, and all of the suffering that comes with it, because people complained about your precious politician? Did those mean wibewals hurt your widdle feewings that fucking much?” And more. And ended with “Enjoy your storm.”
Sumbitch changed the subject real fast.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
Beat me to it.
We remember Michael Brown’s emails. Brownie. Job well done.
Re Scott Brown: we remember the beefcake photo, pickup truck and TV anchor wife.
Sooner: otherwise a marvelous blogpost. True true true.
Linda Featheringill
@elftx:
Rescuing the animals, too? Great!
We and our pets are quite intertwined.
Linda Featheringill
Also, let’s get Anderson Cooper out there in a rowboat with cameras. Do it like they did it with Katrina. See the difference.
Brachiator
@Soonergrunt:
You nailed it.
? Martin
Slow moving Cat 1 isn’t as less powerful as it might seem. Thats a lot of rain, prolonged storm surge, and prolonged wind. Force x Time = Power. Fast moving storms really do help.
LanceThruster
Would that we practiced a little “nation building” at home every once in a blue moon.
KS in MA
@amk: Co-sign
JPL
The water has gone over Plaquemines Parish’s levees and even though the levees are not federal levees, someone will blame the current president.
Linda Featheringill
I see that the levee[s] in Plaquemines Parish overtopped and they are truly dealing with flooding.
[How do you pronounce Plaquemines?]
rdldot
What’s strange to me is that all of these storms since Katrina are so big. I think I’ve only seen one (can’t remember which) that looked like the old-time hurricanes that might be cat 2-3 but were small.
Soonergrunt
@Gin & Tonic: fixed. Thanks!
gelfling545
I was listening to BBC headline news on my local public radio station yesterday. They played a clip of the President advising residents to cooperate with rescue work & to evacuate if asked to. The news reader then stated that the President was making the announcement to appear engaged with disaster relief while Romney is at the convention as if there could be no other reason for the President to make such an announcement without even any weasel words like may be or could be. I was fairly amazed that the BBC would make such a remark (obviously, since it’s still on my mind today).
Maude
@? Martin:
Yeah, if the storm is someplace where you aren’t.
/snark
Jay in Oregon
SOClALlST!
/wingnut
gvg
Obama poached the florida FEMA chief to be the Federal FEMA chief within months of being sworn in.
http://www.fema.gov/leadership/william-craig-fugate
fortunately I believe the Florida FEMA has enough institutional competance built up that his former deputy has handled our business just fine. I’m from Gainesville Florida where his experience began. Very smart of Obama IMO, and silly that George Bush didn’t do it. He could easily have asked his brother Jeb for advice and help-poached some of our good guys.
The gulf coast had a historically dull 30 year period with almost no hurricanes which coincided with a lot of the sun belt migration from the north due to air conditioning making the south more pleasant and the rust belt rusting. Older residents and insurance agents warned the new commers not to over build on beachfront/ build solid/ buy insurance but after 30 years plus of the sky not falling it did seem like crying wolf. Then Andrew hit and Florida wasn’t ready. People died and many suffered. The first Bush looked incompetant and it is credited partly with him not winning the state nor reelection. Why did the 2nd Bush not know better? At any rate Clinton made it a priority to fix FEMA early in office and Florida pols of both parties also went about taking steps to do better. But then we had another long wait for hurricanes and I kept wondering if the fixes were real and if they would hold up for years until we could see them tested. Well 2004 was the year Florida had 4 hurricanes and we did fine.
When Katrina hit Lousiana and that other one hit Texas I was seriously angry with not just Bush but also the other states who evidently had not learned anything from Florida’s earlier screwups and had taken Federal money to get ready, then not done anything. They couldn’t even change all lanes to the same direction of their major highways so that twice as many people could evacuate. If you’ve never seen hurricane evac’s, one of the big scary problems is that when everybody in a high population area needs to go the same direction at the same time, the roads turn into parking lots without a lot of planning and you might be stuck in a car when the hurricane arrives. A car is not solid enough to be safe. Florida has a standard governors order that suspends all tolls and orders the lanes changed. cops have to set up directions and they also do shifts where they block intersections and let through long fast lanes of cars and make people not leaving yet, go other routes. It takes planning, you have to decide to be ready ahead of time. No other state was in practice.
After a hurricane here, it’s inspiring to me to go where I can watch an interstate. florida has prearrangements where the trucks of supplies stage just out of possible range, often over the state line and then they come roaring to where they are needed as soon as the wind is gone. I watched long lines of trucks with spare telephone poles, repair trucks, lifting trucks, loads of transformers, Florida National Guard, Red cross, everything to rebuild come down the interstate, 50 of this kind, 20 of those…power company trucks from every state if you look at the tags. for several days afterwards these long lines of trucks dominate the interstates. It is a real accomplishment of civilization and I found it cheered me up immensly.
Mnemosyne
When Katrina happened, I was working at an office full of Republicans, and one guy came in absolutely LIVID over Bush’s screw-ups. (And I mean that literally — he was bright red, turning to purple.) He could not believe that American citizens were being treated that way.
Katrina was a big turning point for a lot of lifelong Republicans, much more than I think the (yet to be named) teabaggers realized.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Wonder how long it will take the Villagers to compare the disaster response this time around as opposed to last time around.
I’m not holding my breath. It’s not just the wingnuts who never refer to the Presidency That Never Was.
Calouste
@gelfling545:
On American politics, the BBC is the worst of the worst of Villager CW. If you want to have an outside look on America, read the Guardian or der Spiegel
JWL
Good words. Throughout my life I’ve watched John Q public- and since 1980, the press- applaud the GOP’s dog & pony show. It’s a shame that more democratic politicians refuse to speak in such plain spoken terms, instead of continuing to accord the republican party the respect due an honorable opposition. (That rot starts at the top, by the way, and the worst offender of all is President Obama himself). It’s the sole reason why the partisan speeches of FDR and Truman sound so militant to the contemporary ear. And both of them would be as unwelcome in their party today as Eisenhower, Ford, Nixon, and possibly Reagan would be unwelcome in 2012’s GOP.
Merryl
@rdldot: You can thank climate change for that, at the sort of most-general level. The atmosphere and the hydrological cycle have changed enough that these sorts of storms are going to be more common–we’ve got a new “normal” state to evaluate, with the (generally) warmer air able to hold more moisture and generate larger fluctuations (instabilities) that can become the precursors of such storms.
(Sorry to be a downer–currently reading Bill McKibben’s eaarth, and the rundown of the current state of the climate is pretty harrowing stuff. My personal research is oceanography that’s less explicitly climate-related, but I try to keep abreast of the big picture =/ )
JPL
@Linda Featheringill: I think Plaque (tooth plaque) mines. Hope we hear from Lamb soon because she could correct me.
Jeff Boatright
@Calouste: Yep, I strongly suspect that Mardell has his gig because the rest of his BBC colleagues just want him out of the UK as often and for as long as possible.
mrmike
@JPL: I think Plaque (tooth plaque) mines.
It’s usually more like Plaque (tooth stuff) a — mins (as opposed to maxes). Sometimes Plaque-a-mans.
And I think the place I like the boudin balls at is completely under water (if I read the maps right).
It’s gonna be a hard one because the media is selling the “small storm” story but the damage is gonna be big. Levees are for storm surge, not sustained long-term rainfall. 15-20 inches of rain is a lot of water.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Merryl:
There was a science fiction series a few years ago that called the hurricanes of its setting ‘armada storms’, ranging from CAT 6 – 12. People on Earth had given up living in flimsy housing like ours.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot the last couple of hurricane seasons.
Merryl
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: It’s something that everyone ought to be thinking about, to be honest. One of the main arguments of the book I mentioned before is that we no longer live on the same planet our civilization developed on–even if we managed to cut carbon emissions to zero, we wouldn’t be able to restore the oceans and atmosphere to the way they used to be. We’ve altered the dynamics of the planet in ways that are impossible to undo, and natural feedbacks will be releasing more and more carbon reserves into the atmosphere as time goes on–the only question now is, how do we live in the world that we’ve created?
We’re going to see a lot of refugees, flooding, starvation, and desertification before too long.
Back OT: At least it’s good to see that, with proper management, our governmental disaster-relief services are up to the challenge–we’ll be needing them a lot more in the future =/
OGLiberal
@JPL: I know you are kind of joking but wanted to note that the difference with Plaquemines now and the Ninth Ward/Lakeview/etc in 2005 is that with Katrina, the levees failed – big giant holes opened in them, letting the Lake flow into NO. In Plaquemines this year the water overtopped the levees, they did not fail. Well, I guess they failed in the sense that they weren’t high enough but you can only go so high.
gelfling545
@Calouste: I do read the Guardian & a couple of other sources but my favorite classical music station gives the BBC headlines a few times a day & that’s it for their news. I just had never heard such a really nonpolitical event – there’s a hurricane – made so blatantly political by non Fox media.
Lee
@Calouste:
I agree The Guardian is really good for American coverage. I loaded their app on my phone it was so good.
K. Signal Eingang
Further evidence that Republicans talk, Democrats get shit done.
gvg
Global warming might not be the reason hurricanes seem bigger than they used to be. Historically we used to have more and they were bigger, its just from about the 60-70’s or so on, we had a long time without them much and that is most people alive today’s news experience. The reason the hurricanes dropped off was some drought in Africa of about 30 years or so the weather people always explained it for decades. Another factor is the gulf stream moves itself periodically per historical sailing maps, and that impacts a whole regions weather. For instance England used to be able to grow grapes in the Roman times and Greenland was much nicer when it was discovered and colonized but turned much colder within a few generations (Viking era). those events are attributed to a gulf stream shift in the past. The gulf stream keeps Britain warmer than otherwise. I have not heard why it changes positions but the records go back a ways. Florida around the end of the 1800’s was warmer than it is now and Jacksonville grew Oranges commercially until the freezes around I think 1890. they moved to mid state after several freezes and were again driven to south Florida in the 70’s after more freezes. Records of more hurricanes in past era’s is from Spanish times and also shipwreck histories. Diving wrecks is kind of a local thing, and there are lots of books. They are mostly brief blurbs what the ship was, when it sunk and why then what fish can be caught etc. If you are paying attention it’s just a matter of fact list of past hurricanes. We used to have several a year and right now just looks like the historical norm not a huge surprising increase that is unprecidented.
Global warning theory does predict more severe weather but so far I don’t think this is for certain global warming caused.
Mike E
Irene was poo-pooed as being “only” a tropical storm by some total idjuts…a storm’s category doesn’t really tell the story. All that energy and water is a freight train visiting upon your head.
When Floyd hit I had turned off my weather channel and hit the sack. When I awoke the next morning I flipped the tv back on and stared at what I thought was some kinda radar replay: this storm barely moved off the coast of NC, I couldn’t comprehend how that was possible. It was later dubbed The Flood of the Millennium; the eastern part of state was impassable from washed out interstates, and people lost their homes 9 miles away from the Tar River, some even further than that. I vote for faster moving storms.
Merryl
@gvg: Climate scientists are always reluctant to point to any particular event and say “climate change caused this”, because that’s not how it works–climate change makes extreme weather events *more likely*.
What we do have is a body of empirical evidence showing that extreme events have become more common (Spain getting hit by a tropical storm, the first known cyclone in the South Atlantic, the first tropical cyclone forming in January….etc, and those are just in the last decade, restricting ourselves to hurricanes/cyclones), and computer models of the climate under various atmospheric carbon regimes that give aggregate statistics showing more frequent storms with higher CO2 concentrations.
Sure, we can read into old records and make estimates about hurricane frequency in the past, and we can infer things about the state of the climate several thousand years ago, and those are important things to do–but paleoclimatologists use those sorts of things to help calibrate the models, and we understand how many of those changes happened, and those same models are the ones that are showing higher variability/more extreme events *now* as well as projecting more into the future.
Gravenstone
@Merryl: Oh they’ll reset. But we’re talking in geological timeframes rather than human ones once the sequesetered CO2 really gets rolling into the feedback loops.
Merryl
@Gravenstone: Agree, but by the time they reset, the planet won’t be recognizable anymore. We’re already seeing some of it–the jellyfish blooms in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, the dying-off/burning up of forests leading to savannah-fication, tropical disease vectors spreading further north…we’re losing biological diversity with every habitat change, and whatever fills ecological niches tens of thousands of years down the line won’t bear much resemblance to what we know today.
The feedback loops are, I think, what many people just haven’t gotten their heads around yet–the subsurface methane hydrate/clathrate deposits, forest die-off, peat bogs drying out, the collapse of the ocean food web with ocean acidification… There ain’t no brakes on this train.
LanceThruster
@Jeff Boatright:
Wasn’t that Mr. Bean’s vacation?
e.a.f.
I think Romney’s version of empathy with those in Louisiana during this hurricane is partying with other multi millionaires out on his 150 ft. yacht. Well they also were surrounded by water, just like those people in New Orleans, I mean that does count doesn’t it?
If this guy is elected president of the U.S.A. people can expect more of this demonstration of “empathy” when disaster strikes.
Gravie
The documentary “Trouble the Water” is a heart-rending account of one family’s experience in Katrina, much of it shot on a home video camera by the people themselves. There’s a segment in it when the husband is trudging from one place to another in the aftermath of the storm, trying desperately to find a place of shelter. At every one of them, including a military base with plenty of empty beds, he is turned away. You can pretty much see his heart breaking.
Starfish
@Linda Featheringill: I believe that it is Plaque-a-mins. Here is a relevant video that pronounces it correctly.
Starfish
@Linda Featheringill: I believe that it is Plaque-a-mins. Here is a relevant video that pronounces it correctly.
Bill D.
I awoke this morning to NPR of all people telling me that the reconstructed Corps levees in New Orleans had failed to protect people. Abysmal reporting.
Anne Laurie
Well said, Soonergrunt!
JR in WV
I don’t know what to say about NPR getting the wrong parish except that reporting is really hard, and no one has the budget to have experts everywhere. The NOLA newspapers don’t even publish daily anymore, like small towns getting a 3-a-week look at the news.
BBC has to cover dishonest Brit politicians, and from here the Brit crooked pols look even worse than our Republicans, so that explains their matter-of-fact lie about Obama’s remarks about the storm.
I wish I could think they (the BeeB) could be embarrassed by being held up and ridiculed, but not gonna happen.