News Roundup › Hurricane Katrina

The recovery contract was flawed from day one, the report says. MWH’s deal resulted from the city’s search in early 2007 for a single person who would be paid $150,000 year to oversee large capital projects. However, after four months of private negotiations with MWH, which was selected from among seven bidders, the firm had inked “a major contract estimated at the time to be worth up to $48 million,” according to the report.

Source: The Urban Conservancy | Archived Copy

Chalmette native Matt Faust’s heart-wrenching 6-minute short film has made it on to New Yew York Magazine’s list of Top 5 Favorite Short Films showing at Tribeca this year. Listen to Matt tell why he made the film when he presented it last October as part of the New Orleans Speaks Conference, co-sponsored by The Urban Conservancy.
— Editor

When he started it, Matt Faust envisioned his short film “Home” as little more than an exercise in self-prescribed, post-Katrina therapy.

With no formal background in filmmaking — and armed with just a collection of old photos, home videos and some computer expertise he picked up while earning degrees in Landscape Architecture at LSU — the Hannan High School graduate simply wanted to make a video that might help his family remember what was lost when their home on tiny Derbigny Street in Chalmette was destroyed by the storm.

“I felt like it was something I just had to do, for myself and my family, ” Faust said last week.

What he couldn’t have envisioned was that his wordless six-minute film would find its way to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, one of the nation’s premiere film fests, where it will screen this week in competition in the documentary-short category. “Read more.”:

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

Homeless-services agencies that work in New Orleans are rightly worried. In a city where rents have skyrocketed and housing is in short supply, they fear that developers who were required to set aside units for the most vulnerable citizens may shy away from tenants with histories of mental illness or homelessness.

Source: The New York Times | Archived Copy

“As soon as Vitter said he had just gotten off the phone with Rove and other Republican officials,” Landrieu says, “he started in on the first talking point to come out of the ordeal. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe the White House has already given David Vitter talking points to talk about this.’ We weren’t going to blame anyone. We weren’t going to blame the president. I mean, is there a Republican talking point for how to get people water? But that was Karl Rove.”

Source: Salon.com | Archived Copy

Beginning on Aug. 31, 2005, and continuing for at least five days, Gretna police, Crescent City Connection bridge police and Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s deputies turned back hundreds of people trying to walk across the bridge to escape the misery of New Orleans, which was flooded, blacked out and in short suppy of food and drinking water.

Source: City Business | Archived Copy

The study also features “Where did the Katrina money go?” — an in-depth analysis of federal Katrina spending since 2005. The Institute reveals that, out of the $116 billion in Katrina funds allocated, less than 30% has gone towards long-term rebuilding—and less than half of that 30% has been spent, much less reached those most in need.

Source: The Institute for Southern Studies | Archived Copy

Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. However, the city lacks the fundamentals, like functional schools and utilities, to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially unknown.

Source: The Brookings Institution | Archived Copy

The Ninth Ward of New Orleans is about to be struck by another disaster - not a natural one like Katrina, however, but by the human disaster of modern urban planning.

Source: Undernews | Archived Copy

On Sunday, I drove past streets named Abundance, Pleasure and Humanity to a memorial for Meg Perry, a 26 year old Common Ground Collective volunteer from Maine. Meg died on Saturday when the bus she was in crashed near downtown New Orleans. She had come to New Orleans in September, then left and returned with more volunteers. The memorial was in a community garden she had been working on in the Gentilly neighborhood. All around were empty houses. It was a small moment of mourning, in a city of mourning. Mourning that feels like it won’t end, because the disaster hasn’t ended.

Source: Left Turn Magazine | Archived Copy

Gulf planning roils residents

Ever since the water rose over Andrea Harris’ white bungalow on Elmer Street in Biloxi, Miss., during Hurricane Katrina, Harris has been keeping a scrapbook… Now her scrapbook is filling with new worries. At a town meeting Nov. 30, Harris, 43, and her neighbors received their first glimpse of new plans for Biloxi, developed by a state commission organized by Gov. Haley Barbour and a group of architects known as the Congress for the New Urbanism.

source=San Francisco Gate
link=http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/17/HOG09G87KB1.DTL

Levees Weakened as New Orleans Board, Federal Engineers Feuded

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and New Orleans levee officials joined forces in July 1985 to protect the city from a long-feared hurricane, the two agencies could not agree on how to proceed. It was the beginning of a dysfunctional partnership that ushered in two decades of chronic government mismanagement.

Source: LA Times | Archived Copy

Gray Line New Orleans Offers A New Blockbuster Tour
“Hurricane Katrina-America’s Worst Catastrophe”

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by a storm that will go down in history as America’s Worst Catastrophe.

Gray Line has always been the leader in creative and inventive tours, so it is logical they would offer the first Hurricane Katrina Tour to the public. This tour was created in an attempt to accurately inform visitors from around the world as to the factors contributing to this cataclysmic event. Participants will learn how oil and gas pipelines, manmade levee protection, and America’s disappearing coastline combined to create this massive hurricane destruction. The tour will emphasize New Orleans’ importance to the U.S. and global economies through its oil and gas production, traffic through the second largest port in the country, and its seafood harvest. Participants will see and believe not only the devastation, but also the rebirth and rebuilding needed to save America’s Most Interesting City!

“Since so many of our employees, including myself, lost our homes and possessions, this tour will be operated with the utmost sensitivity to the thousands of local residents still trying to get their lives back in order.” Gray Line New Orleans Vice-President Greg Hoffman explains.

Hurricane Katrina-America’s Worst Catastrophe will begin operating January 4, 2006 and will depart from the Gray Line Lighthouse located at the Toulouse St and the Mississippi River.

It will depart at 1pm Wednesday through Sunday in January and February and daily beginning March 1st, 2006. The cost will be $35 per person and $28 for children 12 and under. Three dollars will be donated to a non-profit organization directly affected by Hurricane Katrina. The customer will choose from 4 different organizations.

Source: Gray Line New Orleans | Archived Copy

Peering out from a white-fenced balcony that looks out on nothing much, Katrina evacuee Stephanie Gleason said, “To tell the truth, I don’t know where we live.”

There is no bus stop here. The nearest supermarket is a $20 cab ride away.

Gleason’s cookie-cutter apartment complex, Eagles Landing, feels more like a bird cage than a nest.

Flushed out of their city — one of the most dense and most vibrant in the country — many of the New Orleanians who came here car-less find themselves living amid Austin’s car-enabled sprawl.

More or less trapped, their lives are a quick, sharp study of the isolation of suburbia.

Source: Austin American-Statesman | Archived Copy

The case is likely to be one of many to be filed against FEMA and other government entities in coming months. Civil rights lawyers have been providing legal assistance throughout the Gulf Coast, investigating claims related to housing, employment, voting rights, education and environmental issues.

Source: New York Times | Archived Copy

Analyses of the failure of all levels of government to prevent or effectively manage the Katrina calamity in New Orleans have generally missed a crucial point. Alongside bias against poor people and African-Americans is automobile apartheid, born of fifty years of suburban sprawl. First-class citizens drive motor vehicles, second-class Americans walk, cycle, or ride public transit. Certainly many of the latter are poor, but millions more are middle-class Americans.

When emergency response largely ignores the plight of second-class citizens, no one should be surprised.

Source: Grist Magazine | Archived Copy

A Louisiana environmental group said Tuesday that the cake-like muck that Hurricane Katrina dumped in much of St. Bernard Parish is loaded with toxic substances in amounts exceeding federal and state recommended levels, and the group contends that federal and parish officials are not giving returning residents enough warning about potential health risks.

Source: The Times-Picayune | Archived Copy

In New Orleans: Ethnic Cleansing, GOP-Style.
In a recent email to Louisiana officials, FEMA curtly turned down the state’s request for funding to notify displaced residents that they could cast absentee ballots in the city’s crucial February mayoral election.

Source: Mother Jones | Archived Copy

A month after the creation of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission by Mayor C. Ray Nagin - before it has even had a chance to take up basic procedural questions - there are already signs the commission is in trouble. It is struggling to focus on major rebuilding issues rather than smaller complaints, and sharp divisions have begun to develop among its members.

Source: The New York Times | Archived Copy

“It was a sign of a new order in the Marigny Triangle, a high-and-dry maze of angular, colorful blocks in the historic music district near the French Quarter. While New Orleans drowned, burned and teemed with chaos in the days after Hurricane Katrina, a tiny crew built a self-sufficient, post-apocalyptic society.”

Source: The Dallas Morning News | Archived Copy

“Having lost the economic and demographic initiative to the hinterlands, cities have two alternatives. They can work to become more competitive in terms of jobs, attracting skilled workers and middle-class families, or they can refocus their efforts on providing playpens for the idle rich, the restless young, and tourists. All too often the latter strategy is what many municipalities appear to be adopting. A number of cities now regard tourism, culture, and entertainment as “core” assets.”

(Thanks, Sara)

Source: Metropolis Magazine | Archived Copy

“This is a list of “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” circulated by the House Republican Study Committee. Attributions included where available.”

Source: The Nation | Archived Copy

“Developers angling for New Orleans contracts dream of a new, whiter city in the hurricane’s wake.”

Source: AlterNet | Archived Copy

“No matter what all the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they’re done, they’re going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It’s the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.”

Source: The L.A. Times | Archived Copy