Deadly Katrina

Kanye West is firing off at America’s white leaders again a week after he shocked TV viewers on a Hurricane Katrina telethon by claiming President George W Bush was a racist.

The rapper ignored the telethon script and attacked Bush for not acting quicker to save African-Americans stranded by the storms in Mississippi and Louisiana.

And he isn’t finished yet - appearing on Ellen Degeneres’ US television chat show this morning (09SEP05), West insisted Bush and other politicians knew America’s Gulf Coast couldn’t withstand a hurricane a year before Katrina hit.

He said, “Back in the days when it was time to clean the kitchen I would try to sweep the dust under the kitchen sink instead of really taking care of it, and if you spilled something on that floor all that dust came right up in front of your face. That’s basically what the flood did.

“They have been trying to sweep us (African-Americans) under the kitchen sink and it was so in people’s faces and so on TV… that they couldn’t even hide it any more.

“Down there, people are living below the poverty level to start off with, before this happened.

“A year ago I was on tour with USHER and we had a hurricane hit Florida and everybody was saying, ‘If this hurricane went to Louisiana, if it went to Mississippi, they wouldn’t be able to handle it.’ (That was) a year ago - and there was nothing done about it.”

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President Bush’s job approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in the AP-Ipsos poll, reflecting widespread doubts about his handling of gasoline prices and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Complete Article

Colin Powell, the former secretary of state seen as a potential leader for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts, has joined the chorus of Americans criticising the disaster response at all levels of government.

Complete Article

The National Hurricane Center is reporting that there are currently 3 powerfull tropical storms in the Atlantic with two of them already having reached hurricane strength.

From The Wasington Post

Hurricane Maria intensified Monday over the open Atlantic, while the 14th tropical storm of the season developed south of Bermuda, forecasters said.

Maria is the fifth hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season, one of the busiest on record. Historically, only about four or five named storms form by this time of year, according to the hurricane center. Peak storm activity typically occurs from the end of August through mid-September.

National Hurricane Center

US President George Bush is to lead an investigation into how the Hurricane Katrina disaster was handled.

Source

Race was a factor in the death toll from Hurricane Katrina, Howard Dean told members of the National Baptist Convention of America on Wednesday at the group’s annual meeting.

“We must … come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not,” Dean said.

He added that instead of considering proposed estate tax breaks, the Senate should channel the money into disaster relief.

“Shall we give that to the wealthiest people in the country, or should we rebuild New Orleans?” Dean said.

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Patricia Edwards’ home is virtually bursting at the seams. After taking in 39 of her relatives fleeing Hurricane Katrina — 20 adults and 19 children — the washing machine runs nearly nonstop, mattresses are everywhere and meals require restaurant-sized pots.

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A prominent U.S. medical group voiced “deep concern” over delays in health care and epidemic prevention reaching Katrina victims, and urged U.S. authorities to accept Cuba’s offer of 1586 disaster-trained physicians to prevent a “second wave of sickness and death.”
Latest reports indicate the U.S. State Department is backing away from the offer, implying they are not needed.

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As the water level in much of New Orleans begins to slowly recede, officials are preparing to deal with thousands of dead bodies – bodies floating in contaminated water, hidden in damaged homes and even piled together in the freezer of the city’s convention center.

“DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies,” Dan Buckner, a funeral home director, said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

Complete Article

This is an older article from September 2 about the tales from some of the 50 British tourists that were evacuated from the New Orleans Superdome. It describes with grim detail the horrific conditions that they had to endure in that shelter until they were finaly escorted to safety by the National Guard.

From the BBC

Jamie Trout, 22, of Sunderland, told BBC News the five “horrific” days he and his two female friends had spent in the Superdome, before being freed by the US National Guard, had been “like something out of Lord of the Flies”.

“It was very dangerous - rioting, looting of vending machines, racial abuse, absolutely terrible sanitary conditions.”

They had been “intimidated by large groups of men” and, Mr Trout added, he had feared he would be killed.

The group had heard a child had been raped and found in the toilets with a broken neck, Mr Trout told BBC News.

“That was a really hard time. It made us all feel sick.

“The girls were terrified to go to the toilet.”

Former Royal Marine Darryl Hill - originally from Amersham, Buckinghamshire - runs a hotel in New Orleans.

“This far outweighs anything I saw when I was with the British forces in various hostile areas,” he told BBC Radio 4’s PM.

“The lack of support we’ve had, the lack of supplies flown in … now they are starting to arrive, but it has taken over a week. I think there should have been a much quicker response from the hierarchy.”

Mr Hill said some of what he had seen was “so raw and heart-touching it is hard to describe and hard to live with”.

“I saw a young lady, she had just given birth and she had to carry her new-born over her head.

“The water was up to her breasts and she was just walking through the water, crying for help.”

From Thisislondon.co.uk

The US government was accused of “criminal negligence” as hopes of finding survivors faded and the death toll from Hurricane Katrina continued to rise.

Holidaymakers returning to the UK spoke of the scale of the misery while one said leering police officers demanded young women flash their breasts in return for help.

Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Sean Penn, who has been assisting rescue efforts in New Orleans, said the US government did not “seem to be inclined to help”.

“We were pulling drowning people out of the water, it’s the ultimate distress and human suffering … dead bodies,” he told GMTV.

Penn said he had spent nine hours on Monday searching the water for people and during all that time he saw just three boats carrying US officials.

“There are people that are dying right now and I mean babies and old people and everybody in between - they’re dying. There are people dying and (the US government are) not putting the boats in the water, I think that’s criminal negligence. I don’t think anybody ever anticipated the criminal negligence of the Bush administration in this situation.”

The US authorities were also castigated by British bus driver Ged Scott, from Wallasey, Merseyside, who was on holiday in the New Orleans area.

He stayed in the Ramada Hotel during and after the devastation with his wife, Sandra, and seven-year-old son Ronan. At one stage, Mr Scott, 36, had to wade through filthy water to barricade the hotel doors against looters.

He told the Liverpool Daily Post: “I couldn’t describe how bad the authorities were. Just little things like taking photographs of us, as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own little snapshot albums.

“At one point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the hotel saying ‘Can you help us?’ and the policemen said ‘Show us what you’ve got’ and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts. When the girls refused, they said ‘Fine’ and motored off down the road in their boat.”

Update: Now you can also add former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan to the chorus of celebrities from the entertainment industry ctriticizing Bush.

From Reuters

Pierce Brosnan was the only big star on hand as the Deauville Festival of American Cinema got off to a quiet start over the weekend, and he took advantage of the spotlight to blast the Bush administration’s handling of the carnage caused by Hurricane Katrina.

“This man called President Bush has a lot to answer for,” the former James Bond actor told reporters Saturday. “I don’t know if this man is really taking care of America. This government has been shameful.”

Among the thousands of crushing moments from last week’s deadly hurricane, one image brought the anguish home to many: a tearful little boy torn from his dog while being shuttled to safety.

It tugged at the heartstrings, prompting an outpouring from around the country of people on the hunt for both the boy and his dog Snowball in hopes of a reunion.

The boy was among the thousands who ended up sheltered at the Superdome after the hurricane. But when he went to board a bus to be evacuated to Houston, a police officer took the dog away. The boy cried out _ “Snowball! Snowball!” _ then vomited in distress. Authorities say they don’t know where the boy or his family ended up.

Complete Article

With many blaming the growing scope of Katrina’s devastation on the Bush administration, Sen. Hillary Clinton called yesterday for a 9/11-style probe into how the federal government responded to the crisis.

“It has become increasingly evident that our nation was not prepared,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a letter to Bush asking him to set up a “Katrina Commission.”

“The slow pace of relief efforts in the face of a mounting death toll … seems to confirm that our ability to respond to cataclysmic disasters has not been adequately addressed,” she said.

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The 21st century was swept away here. The winds and the floods and the disasters that followed took it.

Some strange, more primitive time took its place, amid the useless computers and cars of the modern world. Those stranded were left behind to forage for food and water, share what little they have with neighbors, and find somewhere safe before night falls.

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From Reuters

A New Orleans official was overcome by emotion on national television on Sunday when describing how a woman was abandoned and eventually drowned after repeated promises she would be rescued.

“The guy who runs this building I’m in, the emergency management, who’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,” Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, said as he burst into heavy sobbing on NBC’s Meet the Press program.

“And he said ‘yeah mama, somebody’s coming to get ya, somebody’s coming to get ya on Tuesday, somebody’s coming to get ya on Wednesday, somebody’s coming to get ya on Thursday, somebody’s coming to get you on Friday.’

“And she drowned Friday night, she drowned Friday night. Nobody’s coming to get us.”

“Nobody’s coming to get us, nobody’s coming to get us,” Broussard said through tears.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina “will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history,” he said.

Broussard said the government must acknowledge the part it played in senseless deaths.

“It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans,” he said. “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.”

He demanded congressional hearings on what went wrong in the chaotic aftermath of the hurricane.

“They’ve had press conferences. I’m sick of press conferences. For God’s sake, shut up and send us somebody.”

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In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming “tribes” and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.

“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”

Complete Article

From Yahoo News:

A top New Orleans police officer said that National Guard troops sat around playing cards while people died in the stricken city after Hurricane Katrina.

“We expected a lot more support from the federal government. We expected the government to respond within 24 hours. The first three days we had no assistance” said New Orleans deputy police commander W.S. Riley.

Riley went on: “We have been fired on with automatic weapons. We still have some thugs around. My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard.

“The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep.

“For 72 hours this police department and the fire department and handful of citizens were alone rescuing people. We have people who died while the National Guard sat and played cards. I understand why we are not winning the war in Iraq if this is what we have.”

Edit: Earlier format was confusing.

Rescuers have plucked tens of thousands of terrified residents from the rooftops of their homes in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, capturing what may be the bulk of the survivors in readily visible locations. Now the more difficult door-to-door scouring begins, and it could take weeks, if not months.

Complete Article

From Reuters

New Orleans police killed four looters who had opened fire on them, a fifth looter was in critical condition but no more details were available about the incident in a city.

“Five men who were looting exchanged gunfire with police. The officers engaged the looters when they were fired upon,” said New Orleans superintendent of police, Steven Nichols.

UPDATE: There are contradicting versions about this story, AP is reporting that the men shot dead were not looters but contractors.

From The Australian

At least five people shot dead by police as they walked across a New Orleans bridge yesterday were contractors working for the US Defence department, according to a report by The Associated Press.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal, the new agency said, quoting a defence Department spokesman.

The contractors crossing the bridge to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to fix the 17th Street Canal, according to the spokesman.

Alot of people point out that hundreds of school busses could have been used to evacuate the people of New Orleans who didn’t have cars or other means of transportation before the hurricane struck.

I think that they do have a valid point on this issue and I’ve looked all over the net to try to find an answer to this question only in vain. Why weren’t the school busses used?

This is a heart wrenching clip from Fox News describing the grim situation that still prevails in New Orleans 6 days after Hurricane Katrina struck.

Geraldo Rivera from Fox News:

There’s no earthly answer that anyone can understand why these people after 6 days are still in this filthy miserable convention center, why are they still here?

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New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.

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For those of you interested, this is the full audio of the interview that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin gave to a radio station on September 2 in which he slammed federal authorities.

Download Audio (mp3 file)

People left homeless by Hurricane Katrina told horrific stories of rape, murder and trigger-happy guards in two New Orleans centers that were set up as shelters but became places of violence and terror.

Police and National Guard troops on Saturday closed down the two centers — the Superdome arena and the city’s convention center — but then penned in the storm victims outside in sweltering heat to keep them from trying to walk out of the city.

The refugees, who were waiting to be taken to sports stadiums and other huge shelters across Texas and northern Louisiana, described how the convention center and the Superdome became lawless hellholes beset by rape and murder.

Several residents of the impromptu shantytown recounted two horrific incidents where those charged with keeping people safe had killed them instead.

In one, a young man was run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer, in another a man seeking help was gunned down by a National Guard soldier, witnesses said.

“They killed a man here last night,” Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. “A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck’s windscreen and they shot him dead.”

Wade Batiste, 48, recounted another tale of horror.

“Last night at 8 p.m. they shot a kid of just 16. He was just crossing the street. They ran him over, the New Orleans police did, and then they got out of the car and shot him in the head,” Batiste said.

The young man’s body lay in the street by the Convention Center’s entrance on Saturday morning, covered in a black blanket, a stream of congealed blood staining the street around him. Nearby his family sat in shock.

“There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave,” she said through tears.

People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to the makeshift morgue.

One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the center, “They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here.”

The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, “We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq.”

“We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom,” one National Guard soldier told Reuters. “Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death.”

Complete Article

Thousands more bedraggled refugees were bused and airlifted to salvation Saturday, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.

No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina’s floods and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.

And the dying goes on - at the convention center and an airport triage center, where bodies were kept in a refrigerated truck.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Saturday that she expected the death toll to reach the thousands. And Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.

Touring the airport triage center, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., a physician, said “a lot more than eight to 10 people are dying a day.”

Complete Article

It began, fittingly enough, with jazz from New Orleans natives Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis. But “A Concert for Hurricane Relief,” a heartfelt and dignified benefit aired on NBC and other networks Friday night, took an unexpected turn thanks to the outspoken rapper Kanye West.

Appearing two-thirds through the program, he claimed “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” and said America is set up “to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible.”

The show, simulcast from New York on NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and Pax, was aired live to the East Coast, enabling the Grammy-winning rapper’s outburst to go out uncensored. Complete Article

Meanwhile Michael Moore also had a few things to say about all this when he wrote an open letter to Bush entitled Vacation is Over.

Update: Added video of the incident. Download video

As the struggle continued to rescue victims from floodwaters and evacuate people from New Orleans, two major fires raged along the waterfront Saturday morning.

One of them was engulfing an industrial district on the river and was threatening to proceed warehouse by warehouse along the stretch.

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Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far from the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.

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National Guard troops poured into this storm-staggered city yesterday as smoke fouled the air, corpses piled up in morgues, and bitter residents said President Bush was merely acknowledging the obvious when he said the US response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation was not adequate.

Four days after the killer storm roared ashore, the swath of destruction still seemed otherworldly and the emergency response to it continued to lag.

Sporadic gunfire was still heard in pockets of the city. About 100 patients and 900 staff members at Charity Hospital, the city’s largest public hospital, were stranded because relief workers feared violence would thwart their rescue. Bodies piled up in a flooded underground morgue.

At the downtown hospital, medical staff administered saline and intravenous nourishment to one another as food and water supplies dwindled to almost nothing.

‘’People will continue to die,” said Don Smithburg, chief executive of the Louisiana State University hospital systems. ‘’Our heroic staff just can’t continue to keep on keeping on.”

Complete Article

Now that relief is finally arriving in large numbers to New Orleans a debate is raging about how the emergency response to this disaster was handled.*

From CNN.com

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — When it comes to assessing the effectiveness of the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, two divergent — and incongruous — views have emerged over more than three long days of misery.

What are your views on this?

* Edited because of poor choice of words.

Is the Oil industry cashing in on this catastrophe?

According to this guy that seems to be the case…

Forget the isolated looters. The real villains of the New Orleans tragedy are the oil executives who have chosen this opportunity to gouge us all and put the nation’s economy at risk in order to rake in the bucks while the getting’s good.

Ten percent of American oil production is off line because of Hurricane Katrina. That has led to a nominal increase in the per-barrel world price of oil, since 10 percent of U.S. production represents only a single-digit portion of world demand. Yet gasoline prices in the US have soared, from about $2..40 per gallon before the hurricane hit to over $3.00 a gallon now nationwide?a jump of 25 percent.

Local gas station owners say that they have to raise their prices immediately because they only keep a few days’ supply on hand and need to have the cash to pay for the next delivery, which will be priced at the new higher wholesale rate. I am inclined to believe that, if their new price is only around 20-25 percent higher than before.

But clearly, somewhere between the oil coming out of the ground or into a port terminal, and those retail pumps, some businesses are cleaning up at the expense of the public.

Read that: the oil companies are gouging and profiteering on disaster.

So far, the media coverage has focused on the actions of individual looters in the destroyed city of New Orleans. To the extent that gas prices have received attention, the focus has been at the retail end.

Here is anoter article that seems to reaffirm that allegation entitled Pumping Us Dry.

Please comment.

I have been reading with alot of concern many comments from people saying that the world practically abandoned the US after Katrina but the reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. The size of the aid offers from most countries might have been small but one has to take into account that most of their economies are only a fraction of the size of even the poorest US state and foreign aid was not actively being seeked, at least initially.

From Bloomberg

At least 59 nations and international organizations have offered aid to the U.S. as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the federal government struggle to cope with rescue and relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today.

This is what a columnist from Pantagraph.com had to say about this:

This is not a time to be proud. This is a time to accept aid from other countries that have offered to help the United States deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

First and foremost, we need the help.

Accepting the offers made by more than three dozen countries could ease the U.S. burden and speed getting needed assistance to Katrina’s victims.

Even countries like Cuba and Venezuela are offering substantial aid (relative to their size).

Cuban offer:

Cuba is ready to dispatch 1,100 medics to the United States to provide urgent aid to those affected by Hurricane Katrina

Venezuelan offer:

A MRE press release adds that Venezuela reiterates, and formalize, an offer made by President Hugo Chavez Frias to send fuel and humanitarian aid to alleviate the effects of the natural disaster as a show of solidarity with victims, who face troubled times and the loss of loved ones and possessions.

The UN is also ready to provide any help that is requested.

From the Washington Post:

Secretary-General Kofi Annan told President Bush on Friday that a U.N. task force was already at work in anticipation of U.S. requests for assistance and expertise in dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Thanks to Europe the prices of gas have not reached even higher levels therefore averting a fuel crisis and I think that the least that they deserve from us for this help is a big thank you.

From Reuters:

Europe will tap it’s emergency stocks of gasoline to help the United States through an energy crisis triggered after Hurricane Katrina smashed into Gulf Coast refiners, EU governments said on Friday.

The West’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced that its members would release two million barrels per day (bpd) of oil over an initial period of 30 days.

EU members have substantial emergency reserves. France expects to provide about 92,000 barrels per day of gasoline, Britain would offer 73,000 bpd while Spain said would release 70,000 bpd.

And all that is in addition to the large outpouring of symphaty and pledges for help from alot of the people of the world which should not be minimised or dismissed because doing so is like slapping them in the face.

Once beautiful New Orleans could be facing a month or more before all the flood waters from Hurricane Katrina and ruptured levees can be pumped out.

Lowering the water level a foot per day was called an optimistic estimate on Friday, depending on how much of the pumping capacity can be restored and whether any more storms complicate the work.

Complete Article

Donations to charities that are helping Hurricane Katrina’s victims surged Friday in an outpouring that, if it persists, could set a record for private disaster relief.

Charity analysts said saturation news coverage and big corporate contributions were reasons for the sudden upswing in giving. Another, they said, was a perception among donors that government agencies weren’t doing enough.

“Seeing people dying evoked a really strong response,” said Stacy Palmer, the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a Washington-based trade publication. “So did the feeling that the government wasn’t doing enough. People figured that if they gave to private groups, maybe they’d get something done.”

Complete Article

Louisiana officials said they spotted a major oil spill from two storage tanks near the town of Venice on the Mississippi River on Friday.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said a flyover revealed a leak from tanks capable of holding 2 million barrels of fuel.

“There is oil leaking, but we don’t have access to the area,” said Jean Kelly, spokeswoman for the agency, adding that Homeland Security officials are restricting access.

Source