Hurricane Katrina Archives

*This analysis of major league managers' tendencies illustrated as cartoon faces is...well, you have to click on the graphic to get the full effect. It's bizarre. H/T Rays Index.

*Today is the 97th anniversary of the introduction of baseball's MVP Award by automaker Hugh Chalmers. The first-ever MVPs? In the AL, 24-year-old Ty Cobb for his first and best .400 season, batting .420/.467/.621 with 47 doubles, 24 triples and 83 steals, scoring 147 runs and driving in 127. In the NL, 28-year-old veteran Cubs rightfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, narrowly over Christy Mathewson, for batting .300/.384/.534 with 21 triples and 21 homers (only the third 20-HR season ever if you exclude the fluky 1884 Cubs), 105 Runs, and 107 RBI.

*Our old friend Dr. Manhattan is back blogging! While I was tied up doing my baseball previews, he had a fine column taking John McCain to task for his knee-jerk ignorance on the connection between vaccines and autism. As a general rule, the more science is involved in an issue, the worse McCain is. He seems sometimes to have a superstitious faith in junk science.

*Former equipment manager Yosh Kawano is leaving the Cubs clubhouse after 65 years. That's a very long time to work for one baseball team and not get a World Series ring. I think Kawano's name is familiar to me from one of Joe Garagiola's books...as in, he was there when Garagiola played for the Cubs.

*Via Pinto, Travis Nelson at Boy of Summer has a lengthy attack on Melky Cabrera. I'm more optimistic about Cabrera's potential for across-the-board growth as a hitter, but I'd generally agree that his prospects are much dimmer if you don't regard him as a competent defensive center fielder.

*There's no such thing as an innocent non-Muslim? This may go a ways to explaining what this means. I can't buy into Hawkins' notion, which has been pushed for some time by my RedState colleague Paul Cella, that the U.S. should bar immigration by Muslims, but when you consider Hawkins' logic, I have to admit that that's more an emotional reaction than a reasoned position on my part.

*While I don't agree with all the analysis, David Frum and Bill Kristol have some useful points about the perlious passivity of the Bush Administration in responding to criticism, most particularly the conviction that there's no point in fighting over the past. The Administration's enemies have nourished a number of myths about the past 7 years that have proven terribly corrosive of its credibility, goodwill and, ultimately, ability to get anything done. (On a related note, consider how little press went to the Army Corps of Engineers' ultimate admission that its design defects caused the flooding of New Orleans).

*Yes, Glenn Greenwald is still a fool who has trouble with elementary logical reasoning.

*The Nineties economy in a nutshell. This, too.

*Guns don't kill people, guns kill movie scripts.

*24 is coming back! Maybe that means Jack Bauer will stay out of trouble.

It Wasn't George W. Bush. In Fact, It Wasn't Really Hurricane Katrina, Either.

We know now that the Hurricane Katrina story is the greatest media failure of our times, dwarfing not only single-issue scandals like "Rathergate" but also broader failures like the media's coverage of the War on Terror. The media got so many things wrong in such a short time that we will not, in our lifetimes, see the truth widely accepted. Newsday's Lou Dolinar, for example, has chronicled the extensive, heroic and totally unsung rescue efforts in New Orleans, mainly by the National Guard and the Coast Guard, here and here. Historians will have a field day with all the hoaxes circulated by the likes of Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith and Oprah Winfrey.

But nobody has been more dogged and diligent in following this story after the tide of headlines receded than Paul of Wizbang! If you missed it Monday, you must read the latest post in his long campaign to demonstrate that the flooding of New Orleans was the result of levee breaches caused by poor construction by the Army Corps of Engineers, rather than levee overtopping caused by a massive hurricane (and, thus, an essentially bureaucratic failure rather than a political one - as portrayed by some - or a simple Act of God). In fact, Paul now argues that the flood could have happened in any big storm, or indeed at any time, given the condition of the levees. Go read it (and watch the video that was kep under wraps by Congress for 10 months), and if you care at all about the truth of this story, spend some time with Wizbang's Hurricane Katrina archive. I guarantee you will learn something.

Via Instapundit, a RealClearPolitics analysis by Lou Dolinar of what really happened - as opposed to what the media wanted you to know - in Hurricane Katrina:

Official estimates at this point suggest the [National] Guard, working from the Dome, saved 17,000 by air and uncounted thousands more by boat.

Let's try that again: The cavalry wasn't late. It didn't arrive on Thursday smoking a cigar and cussing. It was there all along.

. . . [R]escue operations saved up to 50,000 lives, with perhaps an equal number making their way to shelters on their own.

+++

Except for the Coast Guard's brilliant performance, which saved up to 30,000 lives, most of the rescue operation was run by local National Guard middle management, combat tested in Iraq, accustomed to hardship, and intimately familiar with the city. (In fact, as I previously reported, Guard members rescued other Guard members, who then reported for flight duty.)

+++

Gov. Blanco, facing the voters in 2008, is eagerly, and with justification, claiming some of the credit for the rescue operation. "When all the stories are told," Gov. Blanco is quoted as saying, "the story is going to be that Louisianans were saved by Louisianans." Understandable, but a little bit of a stretch, as it conveniently leaves out the federal contribution, namely the Coast Guard, the regular armed forces and Guard units from other states, as well as the key coordinating role the National Guard Bureau played.

What's more puzzling is why the White House hasn't joined Blanco in trying to rehabilitate its reputation. . . .

The president's side isn't a complicated story. He sits atop a huge bureaucratic machine. He's responsible for how the pieces of the pyramid work, not every last detail. "The rescues happened way below the radar screen and that's not bad," Carafano said. "You want this kind of decentralized execution. If we have to sit around for someone in Washington to make a decision, we're all going to die."

FEMA failed miserably. Yet the Coast Guard, a branch of the much-maligned Department of Homeland Security, operated precisely according to plan and saved up to 30,000 lives amid near total destruction. The National Guard Bureau helped run the show. The State Guard and regular military, which owes its extraordinary professionalism to the administration's insistence on training and equipage for service in Iraq, saved tens of thousands more.

I still think this account is too easy on Blanco and Nagin for not conducting a more thorough evacuation, although even on that score, reports after the fact have stressed that many more people were evacuated successfully than it first appeared. Overall, though, Dolinar makes yet another compelling case that the people responsible for first response accomplished the best you could ask of them, and - more to the point - they, not people in Washington or Baton Rouge, were the ones who were really responsible for handling the crisis. Read the whole thing. Unfortunately, as usual, the Bush White House is only facing forward while it bleeds profusely from shots to the back over the past, instead of setting the record straight.

I have been, I admit, most delinquent in following up on the Hurricane Katrina fallout. I'm not alone: the national media, having initially blamed President Bush for nearly everything, lost interest in the story, and national Democrats are all too happy to leave things right where they are.

But the New Orleans media and some dogged observers have not been so content. One story that they have pursued is the long-term institutional culpability of the Army Corps of Engineers, which designed, constructed and maintained the levees surrounding New Orleans, for building levees that were unable to withstand the pressure of the water that built up against them, and eventually breached, flooding the city.

To backtrack a bit: you will recall that much of the official concern about Katrina hitting New Orleans, including specific concerns raised by and to President Bush, was that the levees would be "overtopped" - i.e., that the water level would rise above the tops of the levees and surge into the city. Thus, for example, if you have a 14-foot levee and 15 feet of water, you get one foot of storm surge lapping through the streets. Instead, however - and unexpectedly, for federal, state and local officials managing the crisis - the levees were breached, meaning that the walls gave way and the whole 14 feet of water came pouring in, a disaster of many times the magnitude of overtopping of the levees.*

Two of the more diligent bloggers following this story and its reporting in the New Orleans media have been New Orleans-based Paul of Wizbang and Harry Shearer (yes, the Harry Shearer, of "Spinal Tap" and the voice of Mr. Burns, among others) at the Huffington Post (h/t Kaus). Here, Paul explains why the Army Corps of Engineers manual shows that the levees should have been constructed to hold more water than they did. Here, Paul notes that tests done by the Corps showed the weaknesses of the way the levees were being built almost two decades before Katrina. Here, he notes that the badly-designed levees that failed were constructed in the late 1990s, and argues that the Corps is still using bad, old data to build new levees. Here, Shearer flags the admission by the head of the Corps at a recent Senate hearing that it was design defects in the levees that caused the flooding of the city. And here, Shearer excoriates the media for not caring about the Corps story.

Paul keeps talking about a lawsuit and perhaps there are some federal contractors who might not be protected by Boyle immunity for some reason, but I'm not sure who could get sued; I know that this lawsuit does not sound promising:

A lawyer who has filed a class-action suit over the levee failures said Strock's statement may mean little for his case because the corps is generally immune from legal liability by virtue of a 1928 law that put the agency in the levee-building business.

"The words are heavy and important'" Joseph Bruno said. "The problem is legal impediment called immunity. It was tort reform that began in 1928."

However, lawyer Mitchell Hoffman said it could help his case, which seeks to sidestep the corps' immunity by alleging the levee failure amounted to a massive government seizure of peoples' homes and land.

"It simplifies the case significantly because we don't have to have a battle of experts," Hoffman said. "Now the judge can say because of the enormity, it was a taking and the government needs to pay these people for their property."

I can't see how you can squeeze the square peg of a charge of negligent levee design into the round hole of a claim of Fifth Amendment takings of property.

Paul at Wizbang has the job for you.

Instapundit carries a debate on the wisdom of building vulnerable buildings on beachfronts in the aftermath of the hurricane, centering on this blog post from a series at Popular Mechanics on the aftermath of Katrina:

Biloxi ought to be Exhibit A in any discussion of whether current coastal development regulations make sense. The beachfront properties were devastated, but only a few hundred yards inland, damage was moderate. Maybe there's a lesson there for developers? Apparently not. Compared to New Orleans, where whole neighborhoods remain deserted, Biloxi is crawling with construction teams. Most of them are busy rebuilding hotels right at the water’s edge.

I disagree. It's in the nature of beachfront properties to be second homes, hotels, resorts . . . buildings that are owned by for-profit companies, investors, and wealthy individuals, not someone's only home. These are the property owners most able to bear financial risk in return for the many pleasures and financial benefits of owning beachfront properties, and most able either to self-insure or to purchase specialized insurance from large and sophisticated insurers and reinsurers. In short, they're the very opposite of the hand-to-mouth denizens of the poorer wards of New Orleans, whose losses were personally devastating and whose care had to be taken up by the state in the aftermath of a disaster.

By all means, let's have a debate about putting urban slums back in harm's way. But if investors in beachfront hotels want to gamble on how many seasons it will be before the next Category 4-5 hurricane in the Gulf, let them. It's their money.

The Club for Growth notes:

[T]he Army Corps of Engineers is, in large part, to blame for the levees breaking down in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Now, thanks to Republican Senator Thad Cochran, part of the funds being used to help pay for Katrina relief - approx. $13 million - will be used to build a museum celebrating the Army Corps of Engineers!

Let's repeat that.

Part of the money being used to fix the levees will be used to celebrate the government's inability to build levees that don't break.

Now, the Army Corps of Engineers has, in fact, had some accomplishments, but it's obscene to choose this time and place to siphon off money from rebuilding a mess that its own engineers were largely responsible for so as to build a museum in its honor. We should be discussing radical restructuring of the Corps right now, not a freaking museum.

Via Mary Katherine Ham, at Hewitt's place.

And then there's Mike Brown starting a disaster preparedness firm.

Were I Karl Rove, I would send out a memo to Republicans everywhere: this firm should never, ever, ever get a government contract of any kind.

John Derbyshire notes speculation that a very large portion of the absent police force in New Orleans during Katrina was either nonexistent cops or cops with no-show jobs and that New Orleans used the inflated numbers to scam federal dollars. Presumably, if this turns out to be true, someone in the know could file a lawsuit under the False Claims Act to recover the improperly allocated federal funds (I'm assuming without checking here that the FCA covers municipalities).

UPDATE: Lyford writes in to point out that this particular report is satire. I'm pretty sure I've seen reports of there being some genuine concerns about no-show jobs, but not in that scale.

I caught a few minutes of CNN last night, and, to their credit, Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper were walking through all of the false stories they had helped circulate during the week following Hurricane Katrina - 10,000 dead, babies being raped in the Superdome, etc. I've seen the same stuff done on blogs and in the newspaper investigations that exposed a lot of these falsehoods, but it was really something different to see it on TV, with the reporters who spread the stories walking them back, and with video clips of Mayor Nagin and the now-former New Orleans Police Chief telling totally baseless horror stories to a mortified Oprah. Cooper seemed particularly shaken by the extent to which he'd bought in to and repeated things he'd heard from NOPD sources that turned out to be false. One can only hope that Oprah performs a similar service for her massive audience, many of whom likely don't read blogs or watch late-night cable news.

The chief of the New Orleans Police Department has stepped down. According to some reports, as many as 300 of New Orleans' 1,750 cops went AWOL during Hurricane Katrina, and that's before you discuss cops who joined the looting. A man can't be proud of running a department that goes to pieces like that in a crisis, when it's needed most. LA cop Jack Dunphy explains.

*The Washington Post:

Slightly more than half of American teenagers, ages 15 to 19, have engaged in oral sex, with females and males reporting similar levels of experience, according to the most comprehensive national survey of sexual behaviors ever released by the federal government.

The report today by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that the figure increases to about 70 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds.

The survey, according to those who work with young people, offers one more sign that young women are more sexually confident than they used to be.

As a friend writes, "One could, accurately, replace the word 'confident' with 'promiscuous.'"

*Is Anderson Hernandez on the way?

*Michael Newdow may have won another round in California, but the US District Court in DC rejected his attempt to get a permanent injunction against prayers at the inauguration of the President. (Link opens PDF file).

*Maybe you saw, or heard, the tearful story told on national TV by Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard:

The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in a St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?' And he said, 'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday.' And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

If so, you were lied to. Via Jeff Goldstein, who has been en fuego on the Hurricane Katrina story, to the point that he can barely keep his server running.

*Wonder if the people who got all bent out of shape over the Tom Delay-Homeland Security-Texas Legislature flap will go nuts over a Louisiana Democratic Congressman, who is perhaps not coincidentally under federal investigation, diverting the National Guard to clear possessions out of his house rather than save people.

*Speaking of DeLay, if he really believes Congress is doing a good job holding the line on spending and there is no fat left to cut in the budget, it is clearly past time for the House GOP to go get itself a new leader. Via NRO (and yes, I've seen subsequent reports putting the quote in context - they make it a little more understandable but no more defensible.

*Then there's the story of a 57-year-old New Orleans man who drew on his long-ago training as a Vietnam veteran and walked out of town. Via Brian Preston, who has likewise been all over Katrina and its aftermath.

*Classic George Will (via NRO). Favorite line: "You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa."

*Go read Ann Althouse on John Roberts' view of the use of foreign law in interpreting the United States Constitution (hint: he's agin' it).

*So, what does the Chief Justice do? His main importance on the Court is that he picks who writes the opinions, out of the Justices in the majority (if he joins the majority - Burger used to switch sides just so he could control who wrote what). Rehnquist was reportedly less interested in using this power, except when he wanted one for himself. It was presumably Rehnquist who decided that the Bush v. Gore opinion should be an unsigned per curiam opinion.

However, the Chief has other jobs all to himself, such as heading the Judicial Conference and power of appointment for FISA court judges; this article explains these duties well. And more here. Also, as we recall, he presides at trial if the President gets impeached, although the way Rehnquist interpreted this role left most of the procedural rulings to be made by the Senate, not the Chief Justice.

*Some jokes never get old, especially #4 here.

*Mark Steyn, as usual, had the definitive word on the "Crescent of Embrace" design for the Flight 93 memorial, which has since been scrapped:

[T]he men who hijacked Flight 93 did it in the name of Islam and their last words as they hit the Pennsylvania sod were no doubt "Allahu Akhbar". One would be unlikely even today to come across an Allied D-Day memorial so misconceived in its spirit of reconciliation as to be called the Swastika of Embrace. Yet Paul Murdoch, the architect, has somehow managed to produce a design whose two most obvious interpretations are a) a big nothing or b) a splendid memorial to the hijackers rather than their victims.

*I agree with this.

*This is hilarious:

In order to draw attention to Wal-Mart's paying its workers an average of $10.17 an hour with benefits, the UFCW hired a bunch of temps at $6.00 an hour with no benefits. And while the oppressed, exploited Wal-Mart workers slave away in air-conditioned comfort, those blessed with the Union paychecks walk up and down outside in the sun until they get blisters on their feet. The Wal-Mart workers are coerced into taking regular breaks in a private area; the Union employees are dropped off at the beginning of their shift and left to fend for themselves for the entire day.

If the Democrats really want people who work and shop at Wal-Mart to vote Republican, and they get the people who hate the place, I'll take that deal. Dick Cheney understands that.

We've heard a lot lately about the notion that FEMA should have taken, and should take in the future, a more leading role in making the federal government, in effect, a first responder to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Now, there's a fair debate here over whether the federal government ought to improve its ability to respond quickly with redundant capacity to provide emergency supplies, evacuation, etc. in the event that state or local first responders are for one reason or another incapacitated.

But we should resist, at all costs, the idea (pushed by Mickey Kaus, among others) that the federal government should centralize a greater amount of the nation's first-response capacity. Let's look at two aspects of this problem.

1. Vulnerability

Let's think rationally here, in terms Osama bin Laden would understand, and we - as long as we're fighting him, or fighting anybody else, for that matter - can ill afford to forget. We have two choices:

A. Centralize disaster-response with FEMA, with the heads of DHS and FEMA and the President personally responsible for making the crucial decisions.

B. Decentralize disaster-response, with decisionmaking power in the hands of 50 Governors and scores of Mayors.

Even the leader of a ragtag terrorist operation can tell you that decentralizing authority into local cells that can operate on their own for long stretches makes you less vulnerable to your enemies. The more we centralize our response to disasters with FEMA, the more we hand our enemies the ability to cripple our response to multiple simultaneous attacks in different parts of the country. Imagine if Flight 93 had hit the White House - wouldn't it then have been a particularly good thing that Rudy and Pataki could put the NYPD and NYFD into action without awaiting word from Uncle Sam? Why on earth should our response to this disaster be to centralize rather than distribute our ability to respond in a crisis?

2. Local Knowledge

As critics of the Iraq War never tire of reminding us - and, for that matter, as opponents of the Vietnam War often noted - for out-of-towners, there's no substitute for knowing the neighborhood. Even closer to home, consider the lesson of the 2004 election. As was much remarked at the time, outside of the big cities - where Democrats had longstanding political machines skilled in getting voters to the polls on Election Day - Republican get-out-the-vote efforts were generally more successful than those of the Democratic side, in part because the Republican "GOTV" operation was carried out locally by local voters, whereas the Democrats in many areas were dependent upon outside groups. While you can debate the degree of importance of this factor, virtually every post-mortem on the election concluded that the Democrats need to improve their local grassroots operations.

What has this got to do with disaster preparedness? Quite a lot, actually. Just as with voter turnout, getting people to evacuate a city or gather in a safe shelter is a job in which there's just no substitute for local knowledge. You have to know who lives where, how to persuade them to budge, and you have to know the fastest way out of Dodge. And even moreso than in doing Election Day turnout, you don't have time to learn all of that in the chaos of a disaster or an attack that may give just a few days' or hours' warning, if even that much.

By all means, let's talk about improving the federal response to disasters; regardless of who deserves credit and blame for the response to Hurricane Katrina, nobody who watched the unfolding of events in New Orleans could conclude that there is no room left for improvement at all levels. But in so doing, let's not make ourselves more dependent upon Washington and less reliant on the people who are in the best position to know their own turf.

Bob Somerby collects excerpts from an interview with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, which make clear how incapable she is of answering even the simplest of questions; really, the excerpts alone tell the story. (Via NRO). This line is one no Republican could get away with:

Mayor Nagin and most mayors in this country have a hard time getting their people to work on a sunny day, let alone getting them out of the city in front of a hurricane.

And I thought Republicans were cynical about big urban political machines. (John Hawkins has more horrendous quotes from Left and Right about the hurricane).

I've created a new separate category for posts on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Even as the issue is politicized, I don't really feel comfortable just logging entries on this topic under the heading of "politics".

Polipundit carried some very optimistic predictions on Friday, from a veteran National Guardsman serving there at the moment, about Katrina's death toll and New Orleans' recovery. A sample:

3. The Mardi Gras Carnival Parade will go on "as scheduled" for February 28, 2006.

4. Within thirty days, electricity will be restored to a majority of NOLA.

5. Within thirty days, 90% of the city will by dry enough to access by civilian SUV.

6. Dependent on the restoration of water/sewer service, of which I have no first hand knowledge to comment, large numbers of NOLA residents will be going home by Thanksgiving.

7. Ninety percent, or more, of the residents that were displaced in NOLA will eventually return to the city in search of the now greatly expanded employment prospects in construction.

Read the whole thing. If you look solely at the questions of pumping water out of the city and rebuilding, the optimistic view may well be the better bet; it can be all too easy to underestimate the human, and specifically American, capacity for rebuilding when people need to get resettled. But stories like this one, from Thursday, make me wonder:

Four persons have died in what federal health officials think was likely a bacterial infection circulating in Hurricane Katrina's contaminated floodwaters in New Orleans, and new EPA tests show the water is full of sewage and lead.

Environmental Protection Agency Director Stephen L. Johnson said yesterday that the amount of E. coli and coliform, a bacterium found in sewage, in the water was at least 10 times EPA's recommended levels. Lead levels in the water also were elevated, he said.

Sure, the water can be pumped out of the city. But the 1-2-3 punch of bacterial infections, chemical contamination, and mold could make the city uninhabitable in practice for much longer. It took a long time to knock out all the buildings contaminated by mold in lower Manhattan after September 11, and Manhattan isn't surrounded by humid swamps (recall that even before Katrina, Governor Blanco was forced to abandon the Louisiana Governor's Mansion for the summer due to a tenacious mold problem). That problem will be multiplied by the need to inspect virtually every building still standing in the city to see which ones need to be knocked down. I want to be optimistic, but I'm not holding my breath.