God I hope this story is overblown right now!!!

[GA Russell]

Thanks Guy.

  There should be no question in anyone's mind that in New Orleans, there were both people that chose to stay in New Orleans, and people who couldn't get out of New Orleans. 

I just want to point out that my issue with the people of New Orleans does not concern who left and who stayed for Katrina. My opinion is about choosing to live there in the first place.

Everyone regardless of economic class, except the children and (I suppose) the disabled and the very elderly, has had the opportunity ever since Hurricane Camille in '69 to do what I did - leave and not look back.

That they chose not to move to a safer location (and I imagine almost everywhere in the US is safer than a below-sea level bowl in the path of hurricanes every year) suggests to me that they were not victims in the same way that the World Trade Center deceased were victims.

By the way, I don't see the Politics Board, so I don't know what you people have been talking about over there. But my views about my hometown New Orleans have nothing to do with either race or the Bush administration.

[GA Russell]

what do you propose not to do for them that you would have done if they were less to blame?

I have spoken with two high school classmates tonight, and they agree with me that many, perhaps all, of the homes in the flooded areas will have to be razed. We believe that the sewage in the water will permanently damage, perhaps infect with disease, these homes.

I don't think the govt should rebuild New Orleans to the extent that it was a week ago. The country needs the port, and I expect the French Quarter will continue to be a tourist attraction. But I see the move of the past week of the population to Baton Rouge to become permanent. I believe that Baton Rouge will become the business as well as the political capital of Louisiana.

In answer to your question, if New Orleans were not below sea level and not in the path of hurricanes, I would have a positive attitude toward the govt helping in rebuilding the city. But as it is, I think it would be a mistake to spend the taxpayers' money this way.

[Guy Berger]

That they chose not to move to a safer location (and I imagine almost everywhere in the US is safer than a below-sea level bowl in the path of hurricanes every year) suggests to me that they were not victims in the same way that the World Trade Center deceased were victims.

It's been known for quite a while that Manhattan is more likely to be a target for terrorist attacks than, say, Omaha.

Guy

[Christiern]

I said "perhaps" tried, because I don't know how far these thugs have to go to qualify.

Dan Gould: "What is disappointing is that among all of the people on this board, a PhD candidate actually gives support to the idea that laws on the books might actually be folded, twisted and mutilated into forming the basis for Albertson's wet dream, otherwise known as a good old fashioned political show trial."

As for my "wet dream," I really don't think that the books need to be "folded, twisted and mutilated" in order to determine that Bush and his cohorts have been grossly negligent in their duties. Perhaps no laws were broken, but they are certainly morally bankrupt and they can now add a lot more blood to that which their Iraq adventure has put on their hands.

Whether or not the "books" will allow them to be tried, these are criminals who do not have the good of our country and its people at heart. Just think of how they lied to you--it's what they have been doing since 2000 and are doing at this moment. Think of Chertoff and Brown, who are currently going around spreading the latest Bush lies--these people have learned nothing! The consequences of their lies are immeasurable and mounting--their days of destroying our country and other parts of the world are finally numbered, and imagining them in a Nüremberg situation is not at all far fetched.

Do you still believe there are WMDs in Iraq?

Edited September 5, 2005 by Christiern

[ghost of miles]

What disappoints me is seeing some of the board's more reasonable conservatives buying the rightwing spin, based on outright lies, that it's the mayor and the state gov to blame for lack of response. Read that link. And shame on Newsweek and the WaPo for swallowing the "senior official's" b.s.

It's amazing that 80% of the city managed to get out. It's even more amazing that some intelligent people continue to insist that those who stayed behind generally wanted to... or that somehow the mayor should have been able to commander every single piece of transpo available in the city... go back and read the Freeper post that I put up earlier.

It's amazing that so many got out. It's amazing that so many died afterwards because half of our current administration was either on vacation or out to lunch.

[ghost of miles]

Ya know, why didn't Rudy Giuliani just shoot down those planes on 9/11? He must have known that NYC would be a target.

Tom Tomorrow:

The emerging narrative

Josh:

It's almost awe-inspiring to see the level of energy and coordination the Bush White House can bring to bear in a genuine crisis. Not hurricane Katrina, of course, but the political crisis they now find rising around them.

As we noted yesterday, the storyline and the outlines of the attack are now clear: pin the blame for the debacle on state and local authorities.

So, let's get all the facts out on the table now. And let's not be afraid to let them all fall where they may. There's no need to make saints of Gov. Blanco or Mayor Nagin. In such a storm of error as this, it would not surprise me if they made a number of them too. But the reason you have a federal government and particularly a FEMA in cases like this is that it is in the nature of local and state authorities to be at least partly overwhelmed in disasters of this magnitude. Read what Ed Kilgore wrote a couple days ago at TPMCafe

Anyone who's been involved in a disaster response episode will tell you the first few days are characterized by absolute chaos. Basic logistics are fouled up; communications systems are paralyzed; a thousand urgent needs must be triaged; a vast welter of well-meaning but tunnel-visioned federal, state and local agencies, plus private charitable organizations and volunteers, rush in; local elected officials are forced in front of cameras to inform and reassure the affected population. Somebody has to be in charge of the chaos, and that's FEMA's job.

This is just one of the many reasons why the White House's main excuse -- that the locals didn't tell us what to do -- is such a grim joke.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 12:53 PM | link

Tom Tomorrow:

And more

Washington Post:

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior officials and outside experts.

Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before it hit and trigger the government's highest level of response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.

Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the "ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic bomb had been dropped."

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious, troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some time to prepare. When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack," there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up study was never completed, according to a FEMA official involved.

"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior homeland security official whose office took on some of the preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and where the funding has been directed. The message was . . . we need to be better prepared against terrorism."

The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism, the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still charged with leading the government's response to disaster.

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot of what we were able to do then."

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 12:37 PM | link

Tom Tomorrow:

More and more

Orrin Hatch on This Week:

"The state government wasn't very well prepared, and the city wasn't well prepared. They're ten feet below sea level. They should have known that these things could happen."

Imagine someone saying, "New York City is obviously a prime terrorist target. They should have known that these things could happen."

I actually heard some right wing moron on the radio yesterday complaining about the damage done to the Superdome by the refugees stranded there.

As somebody said in email recently, it's as if conservatives are wired differently than you and I.

[BERIGAN]

What disappoints me is seeing some of the board's more reasonable conservatives buying the rightwing spin, based on outright lies, that it's the mayor and the state gov to blame for lack of response.  Read that link.  And shame on Newsweek and the WaPo for swallowing the "senior official's" b.s. 

It's amazing that 80% of the city managed to get out.  It's even more amazing that some intelligent people continue to insist that those who stayed behind generally wanted to... or that somehow the mayor should have been able to commander every single piece of transpo available in the city... go back and read the Freeper post that I put up earlier. 

It's amazing that so many got out.  It's amazing that so many died afterwards because half of our current administration was either on vacation or out to lunch.

←

Ghost it's late, so perhaps I am missing something on this now quite long thread, but did anyone here mention the Governor and whether she did or didn't declare an emergency on the 26th? The main question I had heard in regards to her(and not mentioned here I believe) was if she was slow in calling ALL the state's National Guard up.

My bitch has been with the mayor(Who honestly, along with the Governor, seem like swell folks) not doing anything except saying to his citizens,get out and that the Superdome was a last resort ...Busing as many people out before all hell broke loose would have been the smartest thing for him to do. Lives would have been saved for sure.

And do you really think Cheney , Rice or the guy in Greece for a wedding would have somehow changed the number of dead?

I was going to look for stories on the Governor, and saw this very interesting thread on the main page of Freerepublic about cached news stories before the storm hit....(oh, and if anyone makes a nasty remark after this post, no one had yet commented when I posted this)

Cached Katrina news reports BEFORE landfall (Aug 27-Aug 29)

Times-Picayune (cached) ^ | Aug 27-29 | Times-Picayune

Posted on 09/05/2005 1:43:56 AM PDT by xrhopsiomega

http://www.geocities.com/alpomega@sbcgloba...7_29_2005b.html

Here is a cached web page with of a bunch of news briefs from BEFORE Katrina reached New Orleans. It is interesting and a bit unsetteling to read it knowing the end result. However, it does provide insight into the planning and mindset before the hurricane struck. I have to admit that I had thought the planning at the time seemed well done.

Here are some quotes made before the hurricane hit:

Saturday, August 27, 2005

* The mayor said he would stick with the state's evacuation plan and not officially call for residents to leave until 30 hours before expected landfall, allowing residents in low-lying surrounding areas to leave first. But he recommended residents in low-lying areas of the city, such as Algiers and the 9th Ward, get a heard start. We want you to take this a little more seriously and start moving right now, as a matter of fact, Nagin said.

* Nagin said the city would open the Superdome as a shelter of last resort for evacuees with special needs. He advised anyone planning to stay there to bring there own food, drinks and other comforts such as folding chairs, as if planning to go camping. No weapons, no large items, and bring small quanties of food for three or four days, to be safe, he said. Police Chief Eddie Compass said he and Nagin will likely call a curfew at some point, and would station police officers at shopping centers to prevent looting. Looters will be dealt with severly and harshly and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, he said.

* LSU scientists took projected tracks of Hurricane Katrina on Saturday evening and produced a frightening scenario: A wall of water surging in from all sides pushing up against the urban levees.

[From all the worst-case predictions I've read, they only mentioned flooding from storm surges overtopping the levees. FEMA probably was correct in saying that no one expected to have the levees actually break.]

* The city has set up ten pickup areas to take people to emergency shelters. RTA buses will be picking up citizens for free and take them to these shelters.

[There has been a lot discussed about not busing the poor as planned. It could be that their busing plan wsa to only take people to the shelters]

Sunday, August 28, 2005

* New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin called for a first-ever mandatory evacuation of the city this morning...

...The city has 30 boats at its disposal, the mayor said.

* The governor also said that President Bush had telephoned shortly before the 9:30 a.m. press conference began. She said Bush said he was very concerned about the storm's impact and urged Blanco and Nagin to order the evacuation.

* "I want to emphasize, the first choice of every citizen should be to leave the city, he said. He noted that the Dome is likely to be without power for days and possibly weeks after the storm fits, and said it will not be a comfortable place."

* The mayor urged residents to check on their neighbors and offer them help, in particular senior citizens. This is an opportunity for us to come together in a way we've never done before, he said.

* While officials were mostly concerned about preparing for the storm's impact, there was also some discussion of its aftermath.[yikes]

* 'Louisiana's senators thank Bush, urge tour Louisiana's U.S. senators' - Mary Landrieu and David Vitter - today sent a joint letter to President Bush, thanking him for his declaration of emergency in the state and his public comments urging residents to flee Hurricane Katrina. They also urged the president "respectfully but in the strongest possible terms to tour the devastated area as soon as practical," a visit they said would reassure residents that federal agencies are focused on helping the area recover.[Wow. The exact same people who are now complaining the Presidents visit was a photo-op]

* About 26,000 New Orleans residents sought refuge from Hurricane Katrina at the Superdome, which authorities describe as the "shelter of last resort," Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said late Sunday. To help keep them fed and hydrated, the Louisiana National Guard delivered three truckloads of water and seven truckloads of MREs short for "meals ready to eat." That's enough to supply 15,000 people for three days,

[One last note: If the NO mayor kept calling the Superdome the "refuge of last resort", does it hold refugees or evacuees? Who would have thought linguistics would a big story in the USA's largest disaster?]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1477621/posts

Edited September 5, 2005 by BERIGAN

[BERIGAN]

Are these people in shock, denial, what????

September 5, 2005

Rescuers, Going Door to Door, Find Stubbornness and Silence

By JERE LONGMAN

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 4 - The boat pulled up to the living room window on Read Boulevard early Sunday afternoon, and a volunteer rescuer, Stanley Patrick, began yelling: "Mr. Robert! Mr. Robert! Can you hear me?"

There was no sound in response, only the lapping of water in this reeking New Orleans East neighborhood, where the rooftops of cars were still covered nearly a week after a levee broke and the city was inundated.

Mr. Patrick grabbed a sledgehammer, broke through the window of the tidy brick house and sloshed down a hallway into a back bedroom. It seemed unlikely that he would encounter anyone alive in this toxic water, in this fetid heat.

He found what he expected to find, an 83-year-old man, floating face down in stagnant water that had risen three and a half feet into the home. A Louisiana state trooper asked that the man not be identified in full because his family had not yet been notified.

Rescuers were told there might be a woman in the house, too.

"I didn't see her, but if he's dead, she's dead," Mr. Patrick said. "If he didn't leave, she didn't leave."

As rescue operations went on, the frustrations of the police and volunteers continued to mount Sunday, as a growing number of those who had stayed in their homes seemed to be dead, and many of those who remained alive refused to leave.

But Col. Terry Ebbert, director of the New Orleans Office of Homeland Security, said Sunday that he expected that nearly everyone would be removed from the city by Tuesday, as rescuers made block-by-block searches. He said he thought there were fewer than 1,000 residents left in the city. "We're going to remove them," he said.

"People don't want to come out," said Capt. Tim Bayard, commander of the narcotics division of the New Orleans Police Department, who is supervising the water rescue effort. "They say they have enough water and food to sustain themselves. They don't understand. It's going to take six to eight weeks before the electricity comes on."

The water has receded only about a foot in many places, he said, adding that it was still 20 feet deep in spots. "They need to come out," Captain Bayard said. But some residents fear that if they leave, their houses will be ransacked by looters, he said.

"They've already lost their cars," he said. "All they have left is their house. They don't want those animals stealing from them. Write that, animals. Anybody that would take advantage of this is hardly better than animals. Not the people who are taking food and water and clothing. Those stealing TV's and shooting at police. What can you do with a TV? There's no electricity."

Police have said that early rescue efforts were hampered when they encountered gunfire. It was also difficult to get enough of boats in the water because of bureaucratic foul-ups, Captain Bayard said. One day, as many as 300 boats were in the water, he said, but he could have used 1,000.

"There was a breakdown in communication and coordination, and some people wanting to be lone stars and not cooperate," he said, declining to lay blame but saying federal officials were not at fault. "We have the boats now. Unfortunately, people don't want to utilize them."

More than 10,000 people have been evacuated by boat, Captain Bayard said.

Captain Bayard said he was reluctant to force anyone to leave against their will. If a boat capsized in a struggle, police officers and evacuees could drown or be subjected to disease, he said. But if ordered to remove residents, he would do so, he said.

A volunteer rescuer, Morgan Lopez, said he and colleagues had all but forced four people from a home at Dwyer and Bundy Roads on Sunday, where a sea of raw sewage had reached the steps of the house. A woman, an 8-year-old child and the child's grandparents finally agreed to leave, Mr. Lopez said.

"We acted like we were cops," Mr. Lopez said. "We were not letting them stay in that stuff. They had a lot of new clothes. Maybe they were trying to protect that."

Mr. Lopez was one of about 40 workers from R&R Construction in Lake Charles, La., who volunteered their time in boats usually used for bass fishing.

Two other R&R workers, Mr. Patrick and Scott Lovett, were dispatched to Read Boulevard to look for what they thought was an older couple. A shotgun rested in the boat next to Mr. Lovett, who said shots had been fired near him on occasion during the past week.

"I don't feel like I'm in the U.S.," Mr. Lovett, 22, said. "I feel like I'm in a war. All the guns, the chaos."

Mr. Patrick, 44, an ironworker, said he had also rescued victims after Hurricane Andrew hit Louisiana in 1992.

The man on Read Boulevard may have tried to get into his attic and cut his way through the roof, but was perhaps too feeble or retreated in heat that would have topped 100 degrees, Mr. Patrick theorized, noting a ladder that led to the attic.

The house appeared to be on a slight incline, and perhaps the man thought he was safe, Mr. Patrick said.

"It's tragic," Mr. Patrick said. "The water rose in one night. These people probably didn't know. There's a lot more dead right here. I can smell it."

He predicted that the death toll would be "astronomical."

In coming days, the boat searches will shift from primarily a rescue mission to a recovery mission, once a sufficient morgue can be established, Captain Bayard said. Still, he said, the police, volunteers and the army would continue to look for survivors, and military trucks would patrol the streets in case those who had insisted to remain changed their minds - perhaps, he said, once they ran out of food or could no longer stand the smell of decay.

"It's frustrating because they don't want to help themselves," Captain Bayard said. "But if they are going to come out, we're going to be there to pick them up. We're not going to turn our backs on them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national...agewanted=print

[Cali]

What disappoints me is seeing some of the board's more reasonable conservatives buying the rightwing spin, based on outright lies, that it's the mayor and the state gov to blame for lack of response.  Read that link.  And shame on Newsweek and the WaPo for swallowing the "senior official's" b.s. 

It's amazing that 80% of the city managed to get out.  It's even more amazing that some intelligent people continue to insist that those who stayed behind generally wanted to... or that somehow the mayor should have been able to commander every single piece of transpo available in the city... go back and read the Freeper post that I put up earlier. 

It's amazing that so many got out.  It's amazing that so many died afterwards because half of our current administration was either on vacation or out to lunch.

←

Ghost it's late, so perhaps I am missing something on this now quite long thread, but did anyone here mention the Governor and whether she did or didn't declare an emergency on the 26th?

←

The information you're asking for is right there. Just click on "outright lies", if you really want to know.

[minew]

from Times Picayune

Officials were told Katrina posed serious danger to city, one says

By Mark Schleifstein

Staff writer

Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, said Sunday that officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security, including FEMA Director Mike Brown and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, listened in on electronic briefings given by his staff in advance of Hurricane Katrina slamming Louisiana and Mississippi and were advised of the storm's potential deadly effects.

Mayfield said the strength of the storm and the potential disaster it could bring were made clear during both the briefings and in formal advisories, which warned of a storm surge capable of overtopping levees in New Orleans and winds strong enough to blow out windows of high-rise buildings. He said the briefings included information on expected wind speed, storm surge, rainfall and the potential for tornadoes to accompany the storm as it came ashore.

"We were briefing them way before landfall," Mayfield said. "It's not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.

"I keep looking back to see if there was anything else we could have done, and I just don't know what it would be," he said. Chertoff told reporters Saturday that government officials had not expected the damaging combination of a powerful hurricane levee breaches that flooded New Orleans.

Brown, Mayfield said, is a dedicated public servant.

"The question is why he couldn't shake loose the resources that were needed,'' he said.

Brown and Chertoff could not be reached for comment on Sunday afternoon.

In the days before Katrina hit, Mayfield said, his staff also briefed FEMA, which under the Department of Homeland Security, at FEMA's headquarters in Washington, D.C., its Region 6 office in Dallas and the Region 4 office in Atlanta about the potential effects of the storm.

He said all of those briefings were logged in the hurricane center's records. And Mayfield said his staff also participated in the five-day "Hurricane Pam" exercise sponsored by FEMA and the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness in July 2004 that assumed a similar storm would hit the city.

FEMA's own July 23, 2004, news release announcing the end of that exercise summed up the assumptions they used, which were eerily close to what Katrina delivered:

"Hurricane Pam brought sustained winds of 120 mph, up to 20 inches of rain in parts of southeast Louisiana and storm surge that topped levees in the New Orleans area. More than one million residents evacuated and Hurricane Pam destroyed 500,000-600,000 buildings. Emergency officials from 50 parish, state, federal and volunteer organizations faced this scenario during a five-day exercise held this week at the State Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.

"The exercise used realistic weather and damage information developed by the National Weather Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the LSU Hurricane Center and other state and federal agencies to help officials develop joint response plans for a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana."

That plan assumed such a hurricane would result in the opening of 1,000 evacuee shelters that would have to be staffed for 100 days, and a search and rescue operation using 800 people. The storm would create 30 million tons of debris, including 237,000 cubic yards of household hazardous waste.

Mayfield said his concern now is that another named storm could hit either New Orleans or the Mississippi Gulf coast, as September is the most active month of the annual hurricane season.

"This is like the fourth inning in a nine-inning ballgame," he said. "We know that another one would cause extreme stress on the people who have been hurt by Katrina."

[minew]

Death toll numbers begin to trickle in

Forensic team faces challenge identifying victims of hurricane

By Laura Maggi

Staff Writer

BATON ROUGE - In the first announcement of what will undoubtedly be a growing tally of the people killed by Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, officials said Sunday that 59 bodies were in a state morgue and had been confirmed to have died from storm-related causes.

Health officials would not say how high they expected the death toll to go, but Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin have both said repeatedly that they expect it to be in the thousands.

Local officials have said there are about 100 bodies at a wharf in St. Bernard Parish, but the state has not confirmed those deaths, said Louis Cataldie, medical director for emergency operations for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.

Cataldie said any death that investigators determine would not have occurred if not for Hurricane Katrina will be attributed to the storm. "If you are on a respirator at home and the electricity goes out, you are a hurricane death," he said.

But people whose deaths are classified as murder - even if it occurred during the storm or the chaotic following days - will not be identified as hurricane deaths. Local coroners will be brought in to investigate those deaths, said Cataldie.

People who had identification on them when they died - such as most hospitable patients - will be easy for state officials to identify and notify family members, he said. But others, such as bodies that have been fished out of the floodwaters, could prove to be more of a challenge.

Because dental records and other key medical information may also have been lost during the storm, the process could rely heavily on the more technologically sophisticated methods used by the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, an agency brought in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For example, the mortuary team, which is often known by its acronym DMORT, can take a hairbrush brought in by a family member to see if the DNA matches any of the unidentified bodies at the morgue.

The morgue, which will be run by the federal team, has been set up at St. Gabriel, a town near Baton Rouge. Three DMORT teams were brought in to deal with the aftermath of the hurricane, including various forensic experts, funeral directors, death investigators and coroners, said Todd Ellis, the leader of the local regional unit.

Local emergency workers will be charged with collecting dead bodies and bringing them to a collection point, where team members will collect preliminary information, such as any identification records, and gather personal effects.

"From that point, we as DMORT teams will treat each of these individuals with the highest level of dignity and respect that they all deserve," Ellis said.

The teams will begin collecting forensic information as soon as the bodies arrive at the morgue site, including fingerprinting and DNA sampling, he said.

Once the facility is up and running, it can identify - or at least attempt to identify - 144 bodies a day, Cataldie said.

Cataldie said 10 bodies being held by the state were those of people who died while at the Superdome, most from respiratory failure. Nine more died at a temporary hospital set up at Louis Armstrong International Airport. "There were a lot of sick folks who couldn't make a journey," he said.

Twenty-six bodies were in refrigeration trucks at the morgue facility in St. Gabriel on Sunday, while another 22 were at a collection point at the split of Interstate 10 and the I-610. Another 11 bodies were identified by the Jefferson Parish coroner as being caused by the storm, Cataldie said.

Laura Maggi can be reached at laura_maggi@yahoo.com or (225) 342-5590.

[Dan Gould]

... and imagining them in a Nürenberg situation is not at all far fetched.

←

Nuremberg was never your model.

Stalin style show trials, followed by bullets in the back of the head is more like it.

[minew]

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- The Times-Picayune of New Orleans printed this editorial in its Sunday edition, criticizing the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina and calling on every FEMA official to be fired:

An open letter to the President

Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we're going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It's accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the government's shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You're doing a heck of a job."

That's unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn't be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.

[Christiern]

... and imagining them in a Nürenberg situation is not at all far fetched.

←

Nuremberg was never your model.

Stalin style show trials, followed by bullets in the back of the head is more like it.

←

• Unlike Bush, I don't believe in capital punishment--not even for people as heinous as those who control this regime.
  

[minew]

MEMO TO BUSH: FIRE MICHAEL BROWN

By Michelle Malkin (!)

· September 04, 2005 08:17 AM

During his visit to Mobile, Ala., on Friday, President Bush singled out Michael D. Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for praise:

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Really? "Brownie's" job is to direct the federal response to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Let's review his public statements during the past week:

- He admitted that he didn't act more aggressively because as late as last Sunday he expected Katrina to be a "standard hurricane" even though the National Weather Service in New Orleans was already predicting "human suffering incredible by modern standards."

- He proved himself utterly clueless about the disaster unfolding in New Orleans. He claimed that the federal relief effort was "going relatively well" and that the security situation in New Orleans was "pretty darn good."

- He blamed the flood victims in New Orleans for failing to evacuate on time, even though local authorities failed to make municipal vehicles available to residents who could not drive or did not own their own cars.

"It took four days to begin a large-scale evacuation of people stranded in the Superdome stadium and to bring in significant amounts of food and water to an American city easily accessible by motorway," the Observer notes. "Relief agencies took half that time to reach Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami. "

Although the delay was not entirely the fault of the Bush Administration, Brown's complacency clearly didn't help. And his bumbling statements after the hurricane struck have not inspired confidence.

This is not the time to give a weak performer the benefit of the doubt. The FEMA director's role in the ongoing recovery effort is too important to be entrusted to a clueless political hack with such poor judgment.

Rather than praise Michael Brown, Bush should fire him.

[Christiern]

Interesting.

You know you're in real trouble when even your apologists see your flaws.

[catesta]

What disappoints me is seeing some of the board's more reasonable conservatives buying the rightwing spin, based on outright lies, that it's the mayor and the state gov to blame for lack of response.  Read that link.  And shame on Newsweek and the WaPo for swallowing the "senior official's" b.s. 

It's amazing that 80% of the city managed to get out.  It's even more amazing that some intelligent people continue to insist that those who stayed behind generally wanted to... or that somehow the mayor should have been able to commander every single piece of transpo available in the city... go back and read the Freeper post that I put up earlier. 

It's amazing that so many got out.  It's amazing that so many died afterwards because half of our current administration was either on vacation or out to lunch.

←

I'm not sure who you are talking about.

I for one have said I'm not buying shit from anyone. The feds fucked up, but no way in hell can you believe the state and local government did everything they could.

They didn't, plain and simple.

[ghost of miles]

What disappoints me is seeing some of the board's more reasonable conservatives buying the rightwing spin, based on outright lies, that it's the mayor and the state gov to blame for lack of response.  Read that link.  And shame on Newsweek and the WaPo for swallowing the "senior official's" b.s. 

It's amazing that 80% of the city managed to get out.  It's even more amazing that some intelligent people continue to insist that those who stayed behind generally wanted to... or that somehow the mayor should have been able to commander every single piece of transpo available in the city... go back and read the Freeper post that I put up earlier. 

It's amazing that so many got out.  It's amazing that so many died afterwards because half of our current administration was either on vacation or out to lunch.

←

I'm not sure who you are talking about.

I for one have said I'm not buying shit from anyone. The feds fucked up, but no way in hell can you believe the state and local government did everything they could.

They didn't, plain and simple.

←

I'm certain the mayor and governor did not perform perfectly... pols at every level rarely do. But do you blame Napoleon for Waterloo, or some sergeant who couldn't hold a line? Custer for Big Horn, or some scout who didn't take out as many Indians as he could have? There is no way that anybody at the local level could have done much more than they did, in terms of what they were facing. From everything I've read, they did a pretty damned good job, for the most part.

The overriding issue here for me is whether we believe govt. is something there to help folks when they're overwhelmed, and to protect the public good in general, or whether we think govt. is the enemy of the people and something to use only for partisan hack payback and enrichment (i.e., the incompetent that Bush appointed to head FEMA). After listening to this "government is evil" crap for the past 25 years, I'm just fed up to the point of rage... esp. in regards to what we're witnessing now.

[Christiern]

September 5, 2005

After Failures, Government Officials Play Blame Game

By SCOTT SHANE

This article was reported by Scott Shane, Eric Lipton and Christopher Drew and written by Mr. Shane.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 - As the Bush administration tried to show a more forceful effort to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, government officials on Sunday escalated their criticism and sniping over who was to blame for the problems plaguing the initial response.

While rescuers were still trying to reach people stranded by the floods, perhaps the only consensus among local, state and federal officials was that the system had failed.

Some federal officials said uncertainty over who was in charge had contributed to delays in providing aid and imposing order, and officials in Louisiana complained that Washington disaster officials had blocked some aid efforts.

Local and state resources were so weakened, said Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, that in the future federal authorities need to take "more of an upfront role earlier on, when we have these truly ultracatastrophes."

But furious state and local officials insisted that the real problem was that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Mr. Chertoff's department oversees, failed to deliver urgently needed help and, through incomprehensible red tape, even thwarted others' efforts to help.

"We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water," said Denise Bottcher, press secretary for Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana. "They wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans expressed similar frustrations. "We're still fighting over authority," he told reporters on Saturday. "A bunch of people are the boss. The state and federal government are doing a two-step dance."

In one of several such appeals, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, called on President Bush on Sunday to appoint an independent national commission to examine the relief effort. She also said that she intends to introduce legislation to remove FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security and restore its previous status as an independent agency with cabinet-level status.

Mr. Chertoff tried to deflect the criticism of his department and FEMA by saying there would be time later to decide what went wrong.

"Whatever the criticisms and the after-action report may be about what was right and what was wrong looking back, what would be a horrible tragedy would be to distract ourselves from avoiding further problems because we're spending time talking about problems that have already occurred," he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

But local officials, who still feel overwhelmed by the continuing tragedy, demanded accountability and as well as action.

"Why did it happen? Who needs to be fired?" asked Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, south of New Orleans.

Far from deferring to state or local officials, FEMA asserted its authority and made things worse, Mr. Broussard complained on "Meet the Press."

When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away, he said. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA, Mr. Broussard said.

One sign of the continuing battle over who was in charge was Governor Blanco's refusal to sign an agreement proposed by the White House to share control of National Guard forces with the federal authorities.

Under the White House plan, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré would oversee both the National Guard and the active duty federal troops, reporting jointly to the president and Ms. Blanco.

"She would lose control when she had been in control from the very beginning," said Ms. Bottcher, the governor's press secretary.

Ms. Bottcher was one of several officials yesterday who said she believed FEMA had interfered with the delivery of aid, including offers from the mayor of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, and the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson.

Adam Sharp, a spokesman for Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, said the problem was not who was in command. FEMA repeatedly held up assistance that could have been critical, he said.

"FEMA has just been very slow to make these decisions," Mr. Sharp said.

In a clear slap at Mr. Chertoff and the FEMA director, Michael D. Brown, Governor Blanco announced Saturday that she had hired James Lee Witt, the director of FEMA during the Clinton administration, to advise her on the recovery.

Nearly every emergency worker told agonizing stories of communications failures, some of them most likely fatal to victims. Police officers called Senator Landrieu's Washington office because they could not reach commanders on the ground in New Orleans, Mr. Sharp said.

Dr. Ross Judice, chief medical officer for a large ambulance company, recounted how on Tuesday, unable to find out when helicopters would land to pick up critically ill patients at the Superdome, he walked outside and discovered that two helicopters, donated by an oil services company, had been waiting in the parking lot.

Louisiana and New Orleans have received a total of about $750 million in federal emergency and terrorism preparedness grants in the last four years, Homeland Security Department officials said.

Mr. Chertoff said he recognized that the local government's capacity to respond to the disaster was severely compromised by the hurricane and flood.

"What happened here was that essentially, the demolishment of that state and local infrastructure, and I think that really caused the cascading series of breakdowns," he said.

But Mayor Nagin said the root of the breakdown was the failure of the federal government to deliver relief supplies and personnel quickly.

"They kept promising and saying things would happen," he said. "I was getting excited and telling people that. They kept making promises and promises."

Scott Shane and Eric Lipton reported from Washington, and Christopher Drew from New Orleans. Jeremy Alford contributed reporting from Baton Rouge, La., and Gardiner Harris from Lafayette, La.

[ghost of miles]

Thanks for posting that, Chris. It makes it clearer than ever that FEMA and the Feds have screwed up royally. I've donated twice to the Red Cross... I sure hope their aid is being allowed through by these idiots. Hopefully the former FEMA guy that the Louisiana gov. appointed will get some things done.

[Christiern]

GULF COAST CRISIS: FEDERAL RELIEF EFFORT

Ex-officials say weakened FEMA botched response

By Frank James and Andrew Martin

Washington Bureau

September 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Government disaster officials had an action plan if a major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when Hurricane Katrina struck.

Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise."

More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the table-top scenario as 120 m.p.h. winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.

"It was very much an eye-opener," said Castleman, a Republican appointee of President Bush who left FEMA in December for the private sector. "A number of things were identified that we had to deal with, not all of them were solved."

Still, Castleman found it hard to square the lessons he and others learned from the exercise with the frustratingly slow response to the disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Katrina. From the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane survivors have decried the lack of water, food and security and the slowness of the federal relief efforts.

"It's hard for everyone to understand why buttons weren't pushed earlier on," Castleman said of the federal response.

As the first National Guard truck caravans of water and food arrived in New Orleans on Friday, former FEMA officials and other disaster experts were at a loss to explain why the federal government's lead agency for responding to major emergencies had failed to meet the urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the most dire of circumstances in a more timely fashion.

But many suspected that FEMA's apparent problems in getting life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from New Orleans--delays even Bush called "not acceptable"--stemmed partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have long warned that the moves would weaken the agency's ability to effectively respond to natural disasters.

Less clout, experience

FEMA's chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position; political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small, 2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee Homeland Security Department, which is more oriented to combating terrorism than natural disasters. All that has led to a brain drain as experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and current FEMA staff members say.

The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the 1990s for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for seemingly mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The growing anger and frustration at FEMA's efforts sparked the Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to announce Friday that it has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to try to uncover what went wrong.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) called on Bush to immediately appoint a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response.

"There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as possible as fast as possible," Landrieu said. "Unfortunately, that no longer seems to be their approach."

John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said he was bewildered by the agency's slow response this time.

It had been standard practice for FEMA to position supplies ahead of time, and the agency did preposition drinking water and tarps to cover damaged roofs near where they would be needed. In addition, FEMA has coordinated its plans with state and local officials and let the Defense Department know beforehand what type of military assistance would be needed.

"I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.

And there isn't an experienced disaster-response expert at the top of the agency as there was when James Lee Witt ran it during the 1990s. Before Michael Brown, the current head, joined the agency as its legal counsel, he was with the International Arabian Horse Association.

That loss of experienced personnel might explain in part why FEMA was not able to secure buses sooner for the evacuation of New Orleans, a step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation last year.

Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, said, "I have a hard time believing there is any game plan in place when it comes to coordinating or pulling together this volume of business," referring to FEMA's effort to obtain hundreds of buses to move tens of thousands of evacuees from New Orleans. "And what happens in two or three weeks down the road when all of these people are moved again?"

When FEMA became part of the Homeland Security Department, it was stripped of some functions, such as some of its ability to make preparedness grants to states, former officials said. Those functions were placed elsewhere in the larger agency.

FEMA capability `marginalized'

"After Sept. 11 they got so focused on terrorism they effectively marginalized the capability of FEMA," said George Haddow, a former FEMA official during the Clinton administration. "It's no surprise that they're not capable of managing the federal government's response to this kind of disaster."

Pleasant Mann, former head of the union for FEMA employees who has been with the agency since 1988, said a change made by agency higher-ups last year added a bureaucratic layer that likely delayed FEMA's response to Katrina.

Before the change, a FEMA employee at the site of a disaster could request that an experienced employee he knew had the right skills be dispatched to help him. But now that requested worker is first made to travel to a location hundreds of miles from the disaster site to be "processed," placed in a pool from which he is dispatched, sometimes to a place different from where he thought he was headed.

Pleasant said he knew of a case in which a worker from Washington state was made to travel first to Orlando before he could go to Louisiana, losing at least a day. What's more, that worker was told he might be sent to Alabama, not Louisiana, after all.

[ghost of miles]

This is so f&*#ed up:

Broussard, Jefferson Parish President. On Timmeh:

Sir, they were told like me. Every single day. The cavalry is coming. On the federal level. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. I have just begun to hear the hooves of the cavalry. The cavalry is still not here yet, but I have begun to hear the hooves and were almost a week out.

Three quick examples. We had Wal-mart deliver three trucks of water. Trailer trucks of water. Fema turned them back, said we didn't need them. This was a week go. We had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a coast guard vessel docked in my parish. The coast guard said come get the fuel right way. When we got there with our trucks, they got a word, FEMA says don't give you the fuel. Yesterday, yesterday, fema comes in and cuts all our emergency communications lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in. he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards said no one is getting near these lines.

...

The guy who runs this building I'm in. Emergency management. He's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in 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. And she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For god's sakes, just shut up and send us somebody.

[BERIGAN]

Thanks for posting that, Chris.  It makes it clearer than ever that FEMA and the Feds have screwed up royally.  I've donated twice to the Red Cross...

←

Looks like they are having bureaucratic issues as well--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article published Sep 4, 2005

Red Cross bureaucracy causing frustrations

By Billy Gunn

bgunn@thetowntalk.com

(318) 487-6378 It's been a week since Hurricane Katrina evacuees started arriving, dazed and heartbroken, fearing for loved ones and what the future holds.

Many escaped with little clothing, their kids and pets in tow, not much money in their pockets, jobs vanquished.

They grew roots quickly wherever in Cenla they landed: small churches and campgrounds, at least one hotel that let them live in lobbies and fed them.

It was the closest thing to home they've had, and Central Louisiana welcomed them with bountiful generosity.

However, some of the refugees and those who have helped them are frustrated with the Red Cross and its intractable bureaucracy, its tendency to look to the rule book before taking a step, whether it be registering evacuees for shelters and getting help from sorely needed volunteers.

Also, the Red Cross-mandated migrating of evacuees from small shelters to large is ripping some from the small venues where they feel safe to much larger ones where people are placed hundreds to a room with no privacy and a shortage of bathrooms.

Leann Murphy, CEO of the American Red Cross of Central Louisiana, said her agency is in "crisis mode," they're doing the best they can and that she understands the frustrations of evacuees and volunteers alike.

Just walk in the Red Cross' command central on Jackson Street, and one encounters a house almost mad: volunteers dodging each other, cellular phones' different tones sing, a closed door for a much-needed private moment.

But the enormity of the crisis, the influx of refugees (on Saturday the number at approved Red Cross shelters in Central Louisiana was 6,000, with thousands more staying elsewhere), doesn't seem to bring a change in Red Cross procedures.

'Ridiculous'

"The Red Cross, they are ridiculous," said Tim Murry, a manager at Alexandria's Holiday Inn Convention Center, where 100 to 200 evacuees have lived since Katrina's landfall.

The hotel, like many other places with no Red Cross assistance, has sheltered and fed the southeastern Louisiana residents, or former residents, since they arrived: some yesterday, some a week ago.

Murry said he and Raj Patel, whose family owns the inn, on Friday tried to get the temporary tenants registered with the Red Cross but were met with resistance because of the emergency agency's steadfast adherence to its rules.

Before registering, the hotel would have to demand that evacuees leave, then they'd have to find a registration center and fill out a form supplied by a certified Red Cross volunteer, Murry said.

As a compromise, Murry and Patel offered to bring registration forms to the hotel and have evacuees fill them out there to keep their tenants, many of whom have not a buck for gasoline, off the road.

And, they said, the Alexandria Riverfront Center is connected to the Holiday Inn, just steps away.

The Riverfront is one of four big Red Cross shelters in Rapides Parish that continues to take on evacuees; two busloads of New Orleans evacuees arrived Friday night.

But those staying at the Holiday Inn, where in banquet rooms they've made makeshift beds out of chairs, couldn't walk up stairs and register, Murry said.

"I just said screw it. I'm keeping them," Patel said. "The important thing is that they register with FEMA."

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is a critical link to those displaced and needing federal assistance.

Evacuees at the Holiday Inn said Red Cross volunteers did come and tell them about the procedures and what the agency required.

It wasn't a good exchange, said those who've constructed boundaries where families can keep a semblance of privacy in the inn's banquet room.

The Red Cross volunteer "came barging in here and said that we're destructing the hotel," said Christina Rosa of Metairie, who didn't remember the volunteer's name. "They said the hotel does not want you."

"We had problems with the Red Cross being kinda rude to us," said Sharon Sam of New Orleans.

Both women said the generosity of Central Louisiana and especially Patel and the Holiday Inn staff was a godsend: all were fed, local pastors came by to see check on them, local Salvation Army volunteers supplemented their needs, they felt safe.

But, Marco Sosa said, "This changed a lot of people's mind about the Red Cross."

Riverfront Center

In the Riverfront Center, hundreds lay on cots and milled around in the over-cooled complex Saturday, and Marion Smith missed the smaller confines of Northwood Elementary, where she and other St. Bernard Parish evacuees had stayed.

"I loved it there," she said. "It's so crowded here."

Then Cynthia Jate, who drove the St. Bernard bus passengers to safety, told Smith, "I got hold of your son. Pack your bags, he's coming (from Houston) to get you."

Stunned and teary, Smith said nothing, just listened.

"He said he's been to Marksville to Mississippi, Lafayette, lookin' for you," Jate said. "He's so tickled."

Jate told other St. Bernard residents "anything's better than here. You don't know these people.

"All the St. Bernard people, I'm trying to get them out," said Jate, clearly in charge.

A volunteer

Leatha Basco also is mad at the Red Cross.

Though disabled, she thought she could do something, anything, for refugees pouring in from the southeastern part of the state.

So, she left Forest Hill Friday morning and drove to the Rapides Parish Coliseum's Exhibition Hall, one of the big-venue Red Cross shelters, the one landmark she knew how to get to.

She put in a couple of hours, cleaning the restrooms and helping by lending her cellular phones to refugees desperate to find loved ones and wanting news on their homes.

Basco then attended training, where "they said that if you can't put in eight, 12, 24 hours (at a time), they don't want you. I just got up and walked out."

"There's a lot of people out there that give a little time," she said. "I guess I'm good enough to clean the toilet but not good enough for anything else."

Murphy, the Red Cross CEO, said her manpower resources are stretched thin, and that might deviate from agency rules and let volunteers work shorter hours.

The minimum-hours rule, she said, is in place for more orderly scheduling.

Town Talk reporter Mandy Goodnight contributed to this article.

http://thetowntalk.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...mplate=printart

[BERIGAN]

Health

Disaster Officials Collecting the Dead

By Steven Reinberg and Amanda Gardner

HealthDay Reporters

MONDAY, Sept. 5 (HealthDayNews) -- The grim task of dealing with the dead from Hurricane Katrina came into sharp focus Monday as authorities began collecting and counting the bodies strewn throughout still-flooded New Orleans.

And health relief efforts appeared to hit some red tape, as hundreds of volunteer doctors were reportedly stalled in their attempts to reach the survivors and others said their offers of help were basically ignored.

In the first official death count in the New Orleans area, Louisiana emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had verified 59 deaths -- 10 of them at the Superdome, the Associated Press reported. The Superdome had housed thousands of refugees in what soon turned into nightmarish conditions last week.

The U.S. Public Health Service said a prison morgue near New Orleans was expecting 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. And more than 125 were known dead in Mississippi.

The preliminary counts seemed to confirm what the nation's top health official had admitted Sunday: The dead will number in the thousands.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt told CNN he couldn't provide a precise number for victims of the deadly storm, but he added, "I think it's evident it's in the thousands."

And the secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, warned that there will be gruesome sights in the days ahead.

"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Chertoff told Fox News . "We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in the floods. It is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine."

Meanwhile, help for the living was an uphill battle in some places.

A convoy of 100 surgeons and paramedics in a state-of-the-art mobile hospital was marooned in rural Mississippi as of Sunday, AP reported, because Louisiana officials would not let them into the New Orleans area.

"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he told AP.

Other doctors also complained that their offers of help were turned away. A primary care physician from Ohio said he had called and e-mailed the HHS after seeing a notice on the American Medical Association's Web site about volunteer doctors being needed. An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN Sunday night where Leavitt was to announce a Web address for doctors to enter their names in a database.

In Biloxi, Miss., the kind of water-borne disease health officials have feared began to finally surface six days after Katrina hit, with officials closing a shelter there after more than 20 residents developed vomiting and diarrhea linked to what doctors believe may be dysentery.

Although residents had been warned to avoid drinking the water at the local school, some may still have done so, officials say. On the other hand, "Who knows what they swallowed before they got here, half of them were swimming in stuff that we don't even know what it was," Biloxi police Cpl. Kayla Robert told AP. All of the sick are being treated with antibiotics, officials said.

However, Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was touring the devastated areas, said her biggest concerns now are tetanus and childhood diseases.

"Tetanus is something we'd be especially concerned about," she added. Tetanus lives in soil and can enter the body easily through a scratch, and many survivors have endured filthy conditions.

Despite the fact that hospitals throughout New Orleans have at least been stabilized, and even with the arrival of military convoys carrying food and water to thousands of desperate people in the Convention Center, the health problems still are massive.

One expert thinks that a variety of health dangers are a significant problem for refugees along the 90 miles of Gulf Coast that took the brunt of Monday's storm.

The first problem is access to clean, potable water, said Dr. Eric A. Weiss, an emergency medicine expert at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also noted that "people, particularly elderly people, have been displaced from their normal medical care. They need access to their medications and to physicians."

Weiss downplayed concerns about diseases from the vast number of corpses floating in the water. "The danger is highly overrated," he said. "There is not a significant danger of disease from floating bodies."

But the enormous psychological impact of the week-long struggle for survival is now beginning to show, as experts had feared.

Two New Orleans police officers, including the department spokesman, Paul Accardo, committed suicide over the weekend by shooting themselves in the head.

And Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, just west of New Orleans, cried on NBC's "Meet the Press" as he told the following story:

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

http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/fee...cout527813.html

[ghost of miles]

I'm going to sit in for our weekday DJ today, and I'm ending the show with this song:

The City of New Orleans

by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,

Illinois Central Monday morning rail

Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,

Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.

All along the southbound odyssey

The train pulls out at Kankakee

Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.

Passin' trains that have no names,

Freight yards full of old black men

And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:

Good morning America how are you?

Don't you know me I'm your native son,

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.

Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.

Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle

Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.

And the sons of pullman porters

And the sons of engineers

Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.

Mothers with their babes asleep,

Are rockin' to the gentle beat

And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,

Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.

Half way home, we'll be there by morning

Through the Mississippi darkness

Rolling down to the sea.

And all the towns and people seem

To fade into a bad dream

And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.

The conductor sings his song again,

The passengers will please refrain

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?

Don't you know me I'm your native son,

I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,

I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

We'll pull together. It's terrible, but we will pull together somehow.