disconnect

After reading much news about the situation in New Orleans, today I found some aerial photography of the Mississippi coast. For those who don't know, Robyn and I spent our first anniversary in New Orleans, Biloxi and Gulfport last year. The day before our anniversary we went to the Grand Casino Gulfport, where I won about $80 playing poker over about 2-3 hours. Pretty good, considering my first time playing in a casino was the day before in the Harrah's in New Orleans (I think I won $3 there).

Anyway, here is the layout of the casino. You can compare that to this Google satellite map of the area, which you can contrast (rotated 90º) to this photo of the same area today (casino at bottom-center).

Starting from the bottom going up, you see some sort of ship or something washed ashore (it's visible on water in the Google image), and to the right of that a number of what appear to be shipping containers or freight cars blocking US-90.

Going up from that you see the parking garage and casino, largely intact but not looking real great. However, the entertainment complex is missing. Scrolling up some more we find it washed onshore about 250 meters to the west on US-90.

Of course, as bad as that is, the houses in the upper-center of the picture are in even worse shape.

If you'd like to see more aerial photos of the area, I found them here.

AP Caption: President Bush plays a guitar presented to him by Country Singer Mark Wills, right, backstage following his visit to Naval Base Coronado, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bush visited the base to deliver remarks on V-J Commemoration Day. (AP Photo/ABC News, Martha Raddatz)

My caption: "Thank you, thank you, that was one of my favorite songs. I've got time for a couple more, anyone got any requests? What's that? You're in the back, I can't hear you... 'New Orleans is sinking'? I'm not sure I've heard of that song... how about a different request? 'You idiot, send in the National Guard'? I'm not familiar with that one either, was that a protest song from the 60's? I'll have to look that one up on the Internets when I get back to Crawford."

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I'm holding off on saying any more because I don't want to politicize what's obviously an enormous human tragedy. Of course the first priority has to be helping people survive and rebuild. But because this kind of disaster will happen again, it's important that everyone understand that when you elect and install incompetent leaders, you get this kind of ham-handed preparation and bungled response to things that everyone knew would eventually happen. You saw it in post-war Iraq and you're seeing it in post-Katrina New Orleans. This is what I'm talking about:

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/12528233.htm:

The federal government so far has bungled the job of quickly helping the multitudes of hungry, thirsty and desperate victims of Hurricane Katrina, former top federal, state and local disaster chiefs said Wednesday.

The experts, including a former Bush administration disaster response manager, told Knight Ridder that the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting the global war on terrorism.

. . .

In 2004, the Corps essentially stopped major work on the now-breached levee system that had protected New Orleans from flooding. It was the first such stoppage in 37 years, the Times-Picayune reported.

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay," Jefferson Parish emergency management chief Walter Maestri told the newspaper. "Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

The Army Corps' New Orleans office, facing a $71 million cut, also eliminated funds to pay for a study on how to protect the Crescent City from a Category 5 storm, New Orleans City Business reported in June.

Being prepared for a disaster is basic emergency management, disaster experts say.

For example, in the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby, said James Lee Witt, who was FEMA director under President Clinton.

Federal officials said a hospital ship would leave from Baltimore on Friday.

"These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn't look like it was," said Witt, a former Arkansas disaster chief who won bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill during his tenure.

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2004-09-22/cover.html:

By ignoring the logic of fully-funded mitigation and other preparedness programs, Bush's first FEMA director earned some scorn among emergency specialists. "Allbaugh? He was inept," says Claire Rubin, a senior researcher at George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management. "He was chief of staff for Bush in Texas--that was his credential. He didn't have an emergency management background, other than the disasters he ran into in Texas, and he wasn't a very open guy. He didn't want to learn anything."

There's much more at Talking Points Memo and other sites about this sort of stuff. Once people are back on their feet again, this needs to be addressed once and for all.