September 02, 2005
Picayune, MS
Jon at Barlow Farms found a link to KY3 news' report on Picayune after Katrina on August 31. It's pretty bad. (You need Windows Media to play the embedded clip, but the transcript is just as transfixing).
Posted by daen at 10:31 AM
September 01, 2005
Bush and New Orleans
"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and will," said [Bush].
Well, Joseph Suhayda, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said in 2000 that
the 15-foot levee [that holds back Lake Pontchartrain] will protect the city from a minimum hurricane of Category 1 or 2 intensity and at best a fast-moving Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale. "A slow-moving Category 3 or any Category 4 or 5 hurricane passing within 20 or 30 miles of New Orleans would be devastating".
A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City."But by 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."
More recently, Congress cut the 2006 budget of the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers by $71.2 million. The South Eastern Louisiana Flood Control Project, which had been in financial trouble for several of the years of its existence from 1995, and which in 2004 left several contractor bills unpaid, got an extra $20 million this year, bringing it to a total of $36.5 million in 2005. But for 2006, the House of Representatives and Bush have suggested reducing it to $10.4 million. This still leaves bills unpaid, and so no new contracts can be awarded - in other words, it won't even clear the debts.
To say that no-one anticipated this is to fly in the face of all the known information about these levees and the work required to mitigate the damage which could be caused by severe flooding in New Orleans.
Sorry Mr President, what you say just doesn't hold water.
Posted by daen at 03:51 PM
August 31, 2005
Weird phone message ...
I've been getting a phone message which says "All circuits are busy right now, please try again later" while trying to phone my aunt and uncle in Picayune, Mississippi. But just now, for a bit of variety, I got a new one : "The area code you have dialled, 000, has been changed to 000. Please try again with the new area code." Hmmm ...
Posted by daen at 05:05 PM
Katrina check-in
The Katrina check-in website gives those of you who have been in Katrina's path the chance to "check in" and say you're OK.
If you're looking for someone, you can browse the names of those who have checked in, or post names if they haven't done so yet.
It's a bulletin board arranged at the top level by state and county, so it's pretty easy to find your away around, except if you're not sure which county your relatives live in ... a clickable map or dropdown listbox of towns in counties or zip codes would be useful ... Anyway, I posted twice, to Hancock County MS and "Elsewhere" MS. I hope that's OK, under the circumstances.
Posted by daen at 04:12 PM
Hurricane Katrina : can anyone help me find out if my family is OK?
If anybody has information about Mavis and Roy Smith of Leetown Road, Picayune, MS, please email me : kathelp@daen.dk. They are my uncle and aunt, and have been out of touch for 48 hours since Katrina went through.
Update 01 Sep 2005: They are OK, if a bit waterlogged and with some structural damage to the house.
Posted by daen at 03:15 PM