deja vu all over again

Well, it looks like the Gulf Coast is in for it again. Gustav is swelling over Cuba at a Category 4, and Ray Nagin has called it the "mother of all storms." And he might not be exaggerating. "Katrina had a footprint of about 400 miles, he said. Gustav is about 900 miles and growing, Nagin said." Katrina hit at a Category 3 (but a Category 5 storm surge); Gustav is expected to gain strength in the Gulf of Mexico this weekend.

It seems as though (the government at least) is taking this one much more seriously. There's all kinds of evacuation orders in place and plans for how to get people out of the city, especially the ones who don't have transportation. Nagin made the evacuation mandatory this evening, and his administration has said there won't be any refuge of last resort. He says to the people who stay: you "will be on your own."

This storm is exactly what this city does not need. All those plans I blogged about eight months ago? The ones that said the city would be 100-year-storm protected by 2010? Yeah, maybe the feds should have scrounged up some more spare change to get that done now. Because guess what? There are going to be people who stay. There will be fatalities. "Gustav's storm surge may be 15 to 24 feet high." Those levees couldn't handle Katrina's storm surge -- I guess we'll have to see if they've been repaired enough to withstand Gustav.

Well that didn't work out.

Life happened to me, and I forgot to blog about it.

I graduated. I got a job.

I'm going to try to get back into the habit of this old thing. My job involves reading the AP News wire, sometimes extensively, and a lot of pieces come across about the Gulf Coast and rebuilding and preparations for new storms. I wish I could fit more of it into my little newspaper. But I can't, so I'll try to compile (some) of it here.

I'm also thinking of creating another separate blog for less focused ... no, less specific entries. More general news and/or personal news entries. And maybe that will develop more of a focus, which would potentially lead in to a blog with my newspaper's official blogosphere.

Anyway.


EDIT: Funny story. Looks like I already have another blog, meant for posting less specific entries. http://wordsfillmyhead.blogspot.com/

recap rundown

I wish I could say that midterms overwhelmed me to the point that I couldn't blog, but that's not true. I got lazy. Actually I wrote an entry about a week ago but Firefox unexpectedly shut down, and I was too lazy to re-type it.

So I suppose a recap is in order, so that normal blogging routines can resume.

• The Corps is fixing some of its previous levee fixes. It had to essentially slap together some repairs to the levees before the 2006 hurricane system, and now it's taking the time to do it right. It makes sense, I suppose, that the whole system can't be built up to 100-year protection over night, but it seems rather wasteful to repair the same thing twice. (The fact that the government isn't giving enough money to protect the region makes it seem even more wasteful.)
• "A United Nations treaty committee ruled Friday that the United States' response to Hurricane Katrina has had a greater negative impact on displaced black residents and called on the federal government to do more to guarantee that they can return to affordable housing in their hometowns." Very interesting. This calls to mind the homeless camp on Claiborne Avenue. A lot of people criticize them for coming back without having secured housing, but I think you need to consider the spike in housing costs that happened after the storm that many people might not have expected.
• FEMA is still unprepared and is still missing deadlines. Big surprise. Whoever is elected president really needs to bump the agency back up to cabinet-level. Agencies can still coordinate with each other (as I presume was the goal of putting them under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security), but FEMA is responsible for managing emergencies, and that needs to be able to mobilize quickly and efficiently and without having to go through a lot of bureaucracy.
• They're starting to disband that homeless camp on Claiborne by taking away the people who are sick or disabled. But the eighth HRT group from Susquehanna just got back from its week during spring break, and I've already seen pictures of the area under the overpass. There might not be as many people, but they're still there.
• This is interesting. A poll said that 70 percent of displaced public housing residents don't want to go back to public housing in New Orleans. And most of the people who said the did want to go back to their old homes are already there. This seems to be in stark contrast with the rallies that were going on when we were there -- the government was going to tear down some large public housing units and build mixed-income units. A lot of people said this was going to eliminate housing for low-income residents, but what if they don't want to live in project housing in the first place?

More talk about clearing out the homeless camp under Claiborne Avenue. The city is changing nonprofit agencies to work with, moving from one that tried to put the homeless in permanent housing to one that puts them in a shelter. Sounds like they're taking the easy road, to me.

flood control in Pennsylvania

There's a proposal on the table in Pennsylvania to spend $100 million on flood protection, something that's stirring a bit of a debate in the central part of the state.

Essentially, none of the projects that would be funded are in central PA because "Harrisburg-area officials decided years ago they preferred to go with nonstructural flood-protection measures...such as the flood forecast and warning system, instead of levees, floodwalls or channels," according to the article. Other places in the state -- mostly western and northern parts -- will get funding for those types of structural protection measures.

When the Susquehanna does flood, it takes a lot of water. The Patriot-News reported that the river, which is normally about 4 to 5 feet deep, has to rise to 21 to 22 feet to breach its banks and flood the town of Shipoke. And "Most Shipoke residents wouldn't want a floodwall blocking their beautiful view of the river."

"Conventional wisdom today says that floodwalls only move the flood somewhere else. 'Based on what happened with the levees in New Orleans, I'm not seeing that it's worth looking at.'"

It raises an interesting debate, much like the one in Southeast Louisiana. The government has an obligation to protect its people, but they're choosing to live in places that are prone to disaster. (I know I'm ignoring the socioeconomic circumstances that only allow the poorest parts of society to live in the lowest, most disaster-prone areas. This is just for argument's sake.)

The difference between PA and LA is that the Pennsylvanians living in the low areas don't want structural flood protection, while the Louisianans in comparable situations are demanding that the levees be raised. Maybe it can be explained by the fact that the structural "protections" are already in place in Louisiana, so the people there have gotten used to the idea.

I don't really know.

the homeless colony on Claiborne

Apparently Mayor Nagin is going to try to do something about the homeless colony under the bridge on Claiborne Avenue.

Essentially, there is a road at ground level, and there's an elevated highway running over the top of it. The neutral ground in between the travel lanes is mostly used for parking, but there's one section that is home to an enormous homeless colony.

We drove by that spot nearly every day on our way to the Lower Ninth. It was emotional. There was a cold spell in January, I think, which caused a lot of problems.

I definitely think it's important to give these people a place to go, but we also need to address the underlying problem. The article said that many of the people have become homeless since the storm because rents have skyrocketed. There's a problem when people who could afford housing in the past can't anymore. This is when the government needs to step in. Simply putting them in a shelter isn't addressing the bigger issue.

cynicism and optimism

Since Super Tuesday, there's been an increased focus on the Gulf Coast. All four of the remaining candidates have at least mentioned rebuilding efforts in their campaigning since Tuesday, when it became clear that Obama and Clinton are still in a dead heat and that states like Louisiana (and Pennsylvania, further down the road) are going to have a say in the primary process.

I don't know if I'm just becoming too cynical, but I wonder if they would have come out with plans for restructuring FEMA and creating a "point person" for rebuilding efforts if Louisiana's primary didn't matter. It's interesting to note that "The two leading Republican candidates...have offered less specific recovery plans than the Democratic front-runners." Interesting because Romney has dropped out, almost ensuring that McCain will be the Republican nominee. And interesting because the Republicans held a caucus last month that pre-selected many of the party's delegates, so there is much less at stake for the Republicans, who have "offered less specific recovery plans."

Hm.

At any rate, pushing the cynic aside, it is good that the candidates are still paying attention to the Gulf. The editors at the Times-Picayune seemed afraid that after Edwards -- who started and ended his campaign in New Orleans -- dropped out of the race, the remaining candidates would forget about the issue. "People in the Gulf Coast expect the remaining presidential hopefuls...to show the kind of passion Mr. Edwards displayed when it came to what he called the 'moral responsibility' to help rebuild the lives of millions of Americans across the region."

Obama spoke at Tulane yesterday, an event that made me seriously contemplate flying to New Orleans for the day. I haven't watched the speech yet, but that's on my schedule for the afternoon, so I will have a recap later today or tomorrow. But the Times-Pic's coverage of his speech...wow. The man makes the cynic in me go away. I know full well that he's got speech writers, and that they research the issues and put in jabs at Brownie and Bush flying over Katrina's destruction. But he makes me believe and he makes me trust and he makes me think that maybe this country isn't quite so doomed, after all.

He's the kind of politician that silences the cynic in me, and I don't know if I've ever found a politician who could do that before.