[Futurework] Days of Reckoning

[Karen Watters Cole]

A Shelbyville, Tenn. mortician, part of DMort, Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security, says during an interview they’ve been told to prepare for 40,000 dead.  http://www.t-g.com/story/1116806.html   When Galveston was flooded by the 1900 hurricane, and caskets floated to the surface, the 6,000 dead were buried at sea. But they washed ashore. So they lit funeral pyres on the beach, which lasted 30 days. Galveston now requires that caskets be lined with concrete.   At noon, CNN reported that there were already 5 deaths attributed to a “cholera-like” condition and officials are worried about TB spreading.   Toxic time bomb awaits New Orleans http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0907-03.htm and http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310814.ece   Here are 2 items that document more of the charges the science-bashing, military-complex rewarding Bush administration made decisions that some are already calling criminally negligent, or at best, “Unintelligent Design”.  kwc Iraq 100, Louisiana 8 By Will Bunch, Attytood, Posted on September 7, 2005 Is it possible to actually quantify how screwed up the priorities of the Bush cabal in Washington have been? Usually not. But when it comes to the issue of wetlands -- the natural buffer that could have protected New Orleans against a deadly storm surge liked the one that essentially wiped out the city last week -- the answer is "yes."   In 2004 -- at a time when George W. Bush was running for re-election and presumably courting votes in Louisiana, a potential swing state -- the White House proposed spending a whopping 12 1/3 times as much taxpayer money restoring wetlands in southern Iraq as he planned to spend on the same task in the Mississippi Delta.  Before Congress intervened, the Bush administration asked for $100 million to restore the Iraqi marshlands, drained and destroyed by Saddam Hussein, to its status as -- according to legend -- the Biblical "Garden of Eden."   The proposed funding that year for the Louisiana wetlands, heavily damaged by overdevelopment, was just $8 million. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the city once buffered by those disappearing wetlands is now Hell on Earth.   Even though the Iraq wetlands project didn't get the federal dollars, it did get the next best thing: American know-how. And so some of the best minds who were supposed to be studying and improving Louisiana's environment instead found themselves in the Persian Gulf. This is from an April 24, 2004, article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: Corps officials involved in restoring Louisiana's wetlands also have been sent to assist those fighting in and rebuilding Iraq, including oversight of a similar wetlands restoration project there, he said. Ed Theriot, a Vicksburg-based engineer who had directed the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study, was sent to Iraq four months ago to oversee the restoration of the "Garden of Eden" wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that were destroyed by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. While Theriot was pulled away from his work in the New Orleans area, his work in Baghdad was deemed highly successful.   Despite a balking Congress, the Bush administration seemed determined to fund the Iraqi marsh project -- pardon the awful pun -- come hell or high water, even if foreign allies had to pay for it. USA Today reported: The United States, Italy, Canada and others are offering aid to Iraq for marshland restoration. They also are offering expertise to maximize the chances of successfully returning the marshlands to their previous state. U.S. officials estimate that 25% to 35% of the marshes can be restored in two to three years. In his $20.3 billion request for rebuilding Iraq, President Bush asked for $100 million to restore the marshes, but Congress cut it entirely, along with some other programs. Officials remain confident, however, that they can transfer the money from elsewhere to pay for the restoration. "We need to restore the marshes," says Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Indeed, the project did eventually get major funding from Japan -- roughly $11 million -- and from Italy, some $1.3 million. Nothing wrong with that, although it does seem ironic in the wake of Bush's refusal to accept foreign aid last week to help out folks in Louisiana.   For years, federal officials have been warned that the lost of wetlands had made New Orleans more vulnerable to a hurricane than when Betsy struck the region in 1965. Sidney Coffee, executive assistant to the governor for coastal activities, said about 1,900 square miles of wetlands have disappeared from the area since the 1930s, and the receding continues at a rate of about 24 square miles per year. The erosion has a direct impact on New Orleans' ability to absorb the blow of a storm like Katrina, she said. For every 2.7 miles of wetlands, storm surges are reduced by about 1 foot, she said. Now, it's fair to note that even a massive influx of federal dollars in fiscal 2005 would not have brought back the wetlands in time for Katrina, a supposed once-in-a-lifetime event. Nor are we denying that the destruction of the Iraqi marches was a global environmental travesty. But once again, it's the priorities that show how screwed up the Bush administration truly is. Clearly, the White House had no concept of fiscal constraint when it came to throwing literally tens of millions of dollars at any problem in Iraq, 7,000 miles away. Apparently that's easy to do when you have $192 billion -- and counting -- to burn.   It was only here in America, on domestic programs, that the budget bean counters held sway. And now New Orleans -- a beloved American city that once truly was a garden of earthly delights -- has become a living hell.   Will Bunch is a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and author of the blog Attytood.   Article found at http://www.alternet.org/story/25107/ Original http://www.attytood.com/   Forwarded to me. Man-Made Mistakes Increase Devastation Of 'Natural' Disasters Sharon Begley, Science Journal, September 2, 2005; Page B1 While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made. As Theodore Steinberg argues, God is getting a bum rap. "This is an unnatural disaster if ever there was one, not an act of God," says Prof. Steinberg, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "If the potential for mass death and destruction from extreme weather existed anywhere in the U.S., it existed in New Orleans." In his 2000 book "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America," Prof. Steinberg documented how much of the toll from "natural" disasters, from the 1886 Charleston earthquake to 1990s hurricanes, has been exacerbated by human actions. The temporary lull in hurricane activity in Florida, from 1969 to 1989, spurred a reckless building boom, for example, putting billions of dollars worth of condos and hotels within reach of storm surges, notes Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would have caused an estimated $90 billion damage had it occurred in 2000, he calculated. It caused just over $1 billion, in today's dollars. It isn't only hurricanes whose destructiveness has been increased by human actions. Tornadoes turn mobile homes into matchsticks (one of Prof. Steinberg's first jobs was at a New York brokerage firm, where he followed the trailer-home industry). From 1981 to 1997, he found, more than one-third of all deaths from tornadoes occurred among people living in mobile homes; federal regulations didn't require them to withstand high winds, and a 1974 statute actually pre-empted stricter state standards with more lax federal ones. Throughout the South and Midwest, mobile-home communities and poor neighborhoods are also much more likely to be sited in flood plains. In New Orleans, the worst-hit parishes were the lower-income ones. But the city also ignored the power of nature. More than one million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity. "If these had been in place, at least some of the energy in the storm surge would have been dissipated," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis. "This is a self-inflicted wound." Studies estimate that for every square mile of wetlands lost, storm surges rise by one foot. Leaving aside whether the levees that broke in New Orleans could have been better constructed, their very existence contributed to the disaster. Built to keep the city from being flooded by the Mississippi, they also keep the Big Muddy from depositing silt to replenish marshes and the river's delta, as do projects that direct the river's water and sediment out to sea to create a deep shipping channel. The result is that much of New Orleans fell below sea level. Combined with the dredging to build canals, "the Gulf of Mexico is a lot closer to New Orleans than it was when Hurricane Betsy ripped through in 1965," says Prof. Steinberg. Now the gulf is in the city. The ultimate question is whether Katrina's power reflects human-caused global warming, or is at minimum a harbinger of the kinds of storms we can expect in a warmer world.  No single freak storm can be attributed to global climate trends. But for hurricanes to form, the surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic must exceed about 80° Fahrenheit. That is more likely in a warmer world. The best science to date suggests the frequency of hurricanes doesn't reflect global warming. Straightforward physics, however, says their intensity might. As the seas and air warm, there is more evaporation, which fuels storms, and more energy available to pump them up. A new analysis by atmospheric physicist Kerry Emanuel of MIT suggests the net power of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and Pacific typhoons), a combination of the energy they pack and how long they last, "has increased markedly since 1970." The power of storms in the North Atlantic has tripled, while the power of those in the western North Pacific has more than doubled. Similarly, a 2004 study from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that a warmer world is likely to deepen hurricanes' central pressure (a measure of their power) and intensify the rainfall they bring. Today's storms, the scientists write, "may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere." By continuing to blame weather extremes on random events, the "stuff happens" attitude, officials and city planners are ignoring their contributions to the disasters that have pummeled the planet and promise to become only worse. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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