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Easing of labor laws
stirs debate: much of the
reconstruction will be done by foreign workers http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1004/p01s01-woam.html Gulf Coast firms
losing Katrina contracts http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100301691.html Louisiana ecological
harm called unprecedented http://enn.com/today.html?id=8944 Pentagon Report Finds
War Delayed Katrina Relief: A confidential report commissioned by the Pentagon finds that
Katrina relief efforts “suffered near catastrophic failures due to endemic corruption,
divisions within the military and troop
shortages caused by the Iraq war.” Stephen Henthorne, a former U.S. Army War College professor and
deputy-director of Katrina relief efforts, authored the report. He found
that a "major factor in the delayed response to the hurricane aftermath
was that the bulk
of the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guard was deployed in Iraq." "The US military has long planned for war on two
fronts," the report found. "This is as close as we have come to
[that] reality since the Second World War; the results have been disastrous.
... Failure to plan, and train properly has plagued US efforts in Afghanistan,
Iraq and now that failure has come home to roost in the United States." (American Progress 100305) Katrina's
25 Biggest Questions
By
Mike Davis and Anthony Fontenot, Tomdispatch.com, Posted on October 4, 2005
We recently spent a week in New Orleans and Southern
Louisiana interviewing relief workers, community activists, urban planners,
artists, and neighborhood folks.
Even as the latest flood waters from Hurricane Rita recede, the city
remains submerged in anger and frustration. Indeed, the most toxic debris in
New Orleans isn't the sinister gray sludge that coats the streets of the
historic Creole neighborhood of Treme or the Lower Ninth Ward, but all the
unanswered questions that have accumulated in the wake of so much official
betrayal and hypocrisy. Where outsiders see simple "incompetence" or
"failure of leadership," locals are more inclined to discern
deliberate design and planned neglect -- the murder, not the accidental death,
of a great city. In
almost random order,
here are twenty-five of the urgent questions that deeply trouble the local
people we spoke with. Until a grand jury or congressional committee begins to
uncover the answers, the moral (as opposed to simply physical) reconstruction
of the New Orleans region will remain impossible. 1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th
Street Canal only break on the New Orleans side and not on the Metairie side?
Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?
2. Who owned the huge barge that was
catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the
Lower Ninth Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history? 3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish
east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud
Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land
apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods? 4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of
his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a
mandatory evacuation of the city? 5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security
Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National
Significance" until August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of
urgently needed federal resources? 6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid
of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art,
600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200
sailors eager to join the rescue effort. 7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based
hospital ship USS Comfort ordered
to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans
until September 5? 8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld balk at making public his "severe weather execution order"
that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the
Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests,
fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to
transfer the blame to state and local governments? 9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the
New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they
were parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents? 10. What significance attaches to the fact
that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is
Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has
long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city? 11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet
confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business
leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black
areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city? 12. Everyone knows about a famous train
called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by
rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not? 13. Why were patients at private hospitals
like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity
Hospital were left to suffer and die? 14. Was the failure to adequately stock food,
water, portable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a
deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer residents to leave
the city? 15. The French Quarter has one of the highest
densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and
water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn't
officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few
blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to
spoil.) 16. City Hall's emergency command center had
to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of
diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment
failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel
fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements
that would obviously flood? 17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard
immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why
wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals? 18. Why weren't evacuee centers established
in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be
employed as cleanup crews? 19. Is the Justice Department investigating
the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back
hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the
Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans,
meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal
shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated? 20. Who is responsible for the suspicious
fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar
areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the
Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs
along the river in Bywater? 21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted
urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard
helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who
towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television. 22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in
Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted
the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte,
for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000
evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals
by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money
to the Red Cross? 23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a
central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region?
Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial
February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city? 24. As politicians talk about "disaster
czars" and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects
and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new
urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive
participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future? 25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of
the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mike Davis is the author of many books
including City of Quartz, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and the just published
Monster at our Door, The Global Threat of Avian Flu (The New Press) as well as
the forthcoming Planet of Slums (Verso). Anthony Fontenot is a New Orleans
architect and community-design activist, currently working at Princeton
University. http://www.alternet.org/katrina/26349/ |
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