glass half full

Yesterday I bemoaned Bush's small mention of the Gulf Coast in the State of the Union address. Today, the Times-Pic is lauding it.

I admit that I didn't realize the location for the North American Leaders' Summit this spring had not yet been announced. So to tell the world that New Orleans will host it during his address is a very cool thing.

I still stand by my statement that his assurances for the redevelopment of the Gulf are weak, however. Look at his rhetoric for economic stimulus or for international relations, and compare that to what he said about recovery in the Gulf.

double whammy

Another double-posting day - lucky you.

I figured after the depression that set in while reading the State of the Union, I should follow up with some exciting news I found on nola.com.

Two Katrina-themed films won major awards at the Sundance Film Festival. One - "Trouble the Water" - uses civilian footage from the storm from the Ninth Ward, and the other - "Fields of Fuel" - is about the shift from biofuel to green energy and the impacts of that shift (or the impact of that shift not yet happening) on Louisiana.

They both sound very interesting, and I hope that I will be able to get my hands on them once they are released on DVD.

The second one has a Web site. I'll post more information about the first if I can find it in the near future.

State of the Union

I'm reading the transcript of the State of the Union from last night (I can't stand the applause when it's live), and here's the first mention of the Gulf...

Tonight, the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf
Coast. America honors the strength and resilience of the people of this region.
We reaffirm our pledge to help them build stronger and better than
before.
And tonight I'm pleased to announce that, in April, we will host this
year's North American Summit of Canada, Mexico, and the United States in the
great city of New Orleans.

Not surprisingly, it really says nothing, especially compared with the threats and concrete proposals he makes about the economy, stem cell research, etc.

On a related tangent, he also said this about the environment:

Let us create a new international clean technology fund which will help
developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy
sources.
And let us complete an international agreement that has the
potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse
gases.
(APPLAUSE)
This agreement will be effective only if it includes
commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride.

Is he referring to the Kyoto protocol? Because I think that was the goal there, and he pulled out of that, so...yeah.

The whole thing frustrates me, to say the least.

NOLA news roundup

• New Orleans is putting in red-light cameras to target drivers who run red lights, speed through intersections or cut off pedestrians who have the right of way. Based on the driving that I saw, this will probably mean a huge jump in tickets, and I know a few drivers who could get hit by this!
• To provide Category 5 protection to the city, the Army Corps of Engineers is suggesting a government buyout of some of the lowest-lying areas. The Corps missed a Dec. 31 deadline to submit a comprehensive flood protection and coastal restoration plan to Congress, and everyone is upset about that. Add the proposition of government buyouts, and the Corps is (yet again) on a lot of people's bad sides.
• Houses that have been rebuilt have significantly greater value on the market than those that haven't. People are more likely to buy the houses that are fixed than to buy those that have only been gutted and de-molded. It's also interesting that the refurbished homes in the worst-hit places have gained back most of their property value from before the storm.
• People who own houses slated for demolition because they are "imminent health threats" must now receive notification from Mayor Ray Nagin explaining steps they can take to avoid demolition, and an appeals process is now required. Two thumbs up to that.
• New Orleans City Council has asked FEMA to extend the time period when the federal government will pay for Katrina-related demolitions and debris removal in the city. The current deadline is Feb. 29, and the council asked for a one-year extension. I hope they get it.
  

...and exhale

I haven't had time to breathe the past few days, let alone blog. But I'm back at
it now, and ready to finish my thought from the other day.

This editorial frim the Times-Pic discusses FEMA's new (and hopefully improved) "National Response Plan." The piece goes through the expected rants about the quality of the plan that was in place before the storm hit and the praise for creating something better. (Why it's taken two years and five months to get a new plan remains in question.)

The most interesting aspect of the editorial, to me, is the fact that the 427-page report has been whittled down to 90 pages and stresses the importance of change and flexibility in responding to disasters:

It also allows state and local officials to make changes, as needed, while
responding to a disaster. Mr. Chertoff called it a "living document" that will
emphasize change in response to lessons learned.

Coincidentally enough, I started reading "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell on the plane ride to New Orleans. One chapter discusses a U.S. military war game simulation that happened after the first Gulf War but before Sept. 11, in which a renowned officer from the Vietnam War was recruited tolead the (imaginary) opposition forces. The U.S. "team" created detailed strategies and an alphabet's worth of acronyms for systems and scenarios and plans. All decision-making was pre-planned or had to go through a vertical system of power. The enemy team found ways to combat all of the U.S. strategies by thinking quickly, adapting to moves the U.S. made, being flexible and improvising. The enemy team won, defeating the most powerful military in the world, mainly because the military was bound by too many rules and regulations to be efficient or effective. Leaders lost the ability to make decisions on the fly.

Fast forward to 2008. A new, shorter, more fluid system of responding to disasters seems to be right in line with Gladwell's argument. I don't know if the editors at the Times-Pic read "Blink," buttheir reasons for favoring the new plan -- aside from their firsthand experience with the futility of the previous plan -- are very reminiscent of the point Gladwell made in that chapter: Leaders must be able to lead in a time of crisis.

food for thought

No time to write a full entry right now, but I'll talk about this editorial sometime soon.

as promised

Here is the link to the article that we ran about the winter break service trips to New Orleans and to Nicaragua/Costa Rica.

And here is my editorial about the New Orleans HRT trip.

Tonight, HRT 7 is having a reunion at BJ's, which is sure to be a wonderful time. I can't wait.

musical notes

I can't seem to escape U2 and Green Day's song "The Saints are Coming." I'm taking a class on the impact of Katrina on society (to go along with the HRT trip), and we watched a slideshow during the first class. The song was the background music to the slideshow. Then, at trivia night that week at the bar, Mich played it in between questions. Yesterday, WQSU played it on the air. This morning it came on my Pandora internet radio station. Odd.

In other music news, the Times-Pic ran a New Orleans workout playlist in the living section today. It's all artists from the region. I'm definitely going to look into some of the songs...

'Light It On Fire' Cowboy Mouth
'In the Blood' Better Than Ezra
'Invincible Me' Supagroup
'Bayou Betty' Bonerama
'Funky Nuts' Dirty Dozen Brass Band
'New Bus Stop' Los Hombres Calientes
'Smoke My Peace Pipe' Wild Magnolias
'Look-Ka Py Py' The Meters
'What You Need' Galactic feat. Lyrics Born
'Get Ya Hustle On' Juvenile
'Walk With It' DJ Jubilee
'Gimme More' Britney Spears

Teaser

Today's NOLA news didn't give me any inspiration to write.

I'm currently addicted to reading the Times-Picayune's coverage of the storm from 2005. My journalism professor pointed it out to us at the time, and I remember glancing at the Web site a few times, but I'm fascinated by it now.

Tomorrow I'll post links to The Crusader, my college newspaper. We did an article for tomorrow about service trips that happened over winter break - including the HRT trip, of course - and I also wrote an editorial about my time there.

No Reservations NOLA

Two posts in one day? It can't be! I can hardly post every other day.

My normal television routine includes watching Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel while I eat and/or make dinner (when I happen to be home for dinner, of course). And as all stations do, DC was advertising one of its other shows during a commercial break -- Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, which is actually on the Travel Channel. I was aware of Bourdain's presence in the culinary world thanks to his appearances on Top Chef, and I like him. In this show, he goes to crazy places to try their food, and also to familiar places to try some not-so-ordinary food.

Anyway, the commercial listed a bunch of the places that will be featured in upcoming episodes, and New Orleans was one of them. This of course piqued my interest in/obsession with all things NOLA. I wanted to find out when the episode will air (Feb. 4 at 10 p.m., by the way) and stumbled across this blog entry from one of the producers of the show.

It turns out that producer Jared Andrukanis was living in New Orleans before Katrina and had a hurricane party rather than evacuate, and he ended up spending a good deal of time on a roof in the storm's aftermath.

I'm really excited to watch the show. Even though I only spent a week there, I have a connection to the city, and I'm trying to revel in that as much as possible. Silly as it sounds, i study the Lincoln commercial with Harry Connick Jr. to look for streets we drove by or places we visited.

An hour-long show is going to be an extreme version of that.

Dr. King

My college never ceases to amaze me, and today's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is no exception.

I have to preface this rant with the acknowledgment -- and appreciation -- that we even have a celebration. This is only the second year for Susquehanna to observe the holiday, and while that's a terrible reflection on the school, it is an improvement over years past.

Rather than cancelling classes, our school chooses to create a modified class schedule to reserve an hour and a half in the middle of the day for a convocation and remembrance ceremony. Yes, it is a fine way to encourage students, faculty and staff to attend the ceremony. They even shut down the cafeteria during the festivities.

There are also a bunch of volunteer activities going on today, and I think that's great.

But we had to go to class today. And even though classes were shorter and at different times than normal, we still had to go. That makes it really tough to actually commit to volunteer work or to do anything to honor the day.

Hands On New Orleans has put together a week of service projects to honor Dr. King's legacy. Today was the last day for that, but it's commendable for seeking to get people to not waste today and to actually do something good for a change.

I appreciate Susquehanna's efforts, but I really don't think it's enough to get people moving.

killing time between classes...

Seems to be an interesting news day in NOLA. Here's a smattering from the headlines...

• The president of Jefferson Parish said under oath in November that he didn't know who evacuated the parish's pump operators before Katrina hit. He also testified that he didn't know that the emergency plan called for their evacuation, and that he "didn't bother to ask his directors about their storm preparations." Apparently right after the storm, he said repeatedly that he had the operators' safety in mind when he told them to leave. The contradiction is obviously well-documented in the Times-Pic, and that'll probably cause him problems in the future. Residents of the parish are suing him for gross negligence.
• The New Orleans Police Department headquarters has moved out of their FEMA trailers and into an actual building. Hopefully this will help them crack down on the violence in the city.
• The city of New Orleans received a $1.14 million grant to go green. The money will aid in the reconstruction of city properties that were damaged or destroyed by the storms, and it will specifically be used to make those buildings more eco-friendly.
  
• The Army Corps of Engineers said that to raise the levees high enough to protect the city from a 100-year storm (the big one, with a 1-in-100 chance of hitting in any given year), it will need 20 Superdomes worth of dirt. The problem is where to take that dirt from. If you take it from the immediate area, it will create new, lower-lying levels than before. And it's expensive to haul in from elsewhere.
  

come one people now, smile on your brother

Even though I don't blog every day, I do really try to look at the headlines on nola.com daily. Sometimes I'll see an article and get inspired to write, sometimes I'll make a note and come back to an article when I have more time.

What's struck me the most in my perusal of the (online) paper is the number of murders and shootings in the city. Here's a sampling of today's headlines:

Shooting wounds man in LaPlace
Warrant issued in Christmas killing
Burned woman died of gunshot wound
New Orleans teen dead in Mid-City shooting

People warned us to be careful when we went out at night during our trip. We had barriers, like to stay within certain areas of the Quarter and between St. Charles and Magazine when we were going out near St. Vincent's. But I never felt like I was in danger. Maybe that's because I followed the rules. Or maybe I was just oblivious to what was going on around me.

I didn't really pay attention to the news in New Orleans before I left. So I didn't really know about the violence problems that are going on. I mean, you figure there is going to be crime in any city that size. It's probably because Philly is closer, but I feel like I hear about the murders in Philadelphia all the time on the news.

This editorial points out a bit of hope, though, for taking back control of the city. The Violent Offenders Unit has taken control of all murder cases and is doing very well in prosecuting them:

The unit won 26 guilty verdicts at trial in 2007 and had only four acquittals, which is an 87 percent conviction rate. Another 28 defendants pleaded guilty. The average sentence was 16 years in prison. In the case of Mr. Sartain, it was life without parole.

...

It is some of the most vital work being done in New Orleans. For this community to be safe, police and prosecutors must perform at a high level.

They aren't there yet. But after a chaotic two years, there are finally signs of progress.

I <3 Pink

The Make It Right foundation's pink house display is over, and that's a little bit sad for me. We had just finished touring the Lower Ninth, which was an incredibly emotional, moving experience for me. I had heard vaguely about the MIR project, but apparently Brad Pitt really blitzed the news etc. while we were in New Orleans. (And someone saw him on his motorcycle when we were working at the Community Center, and the V-Tech kids were apparently 2 minutes away from him while they were on their tour, but yada yada.)

It was very impressive to see in person. We climbed up the observation tower, which in retrospect we figured out that we were probably not suppposed to do, as we removed some caution tape in order to go up. But I don't regret it, because the view across the canal to the rest of the city was something that has really stuck with me. That community is physically separated from the rest of the city. I know that's an inevitability in a city the size of New Orleans, but it was (still is) hard for me to get over that. And when the people of the Lower Ninth think that the city doesn't want them back...I guess I can just understand why they might think that. But I think that efforts like the MIR project show that we, as a society, do need them to come back.

That's why the pink houses made such an impact on me, I think. After seeing such heartbreaking devastation, the pink village left me with such a feeling of hope. The pink was utterly absurd, of course, and the tents really didn't look all that much like houses, but I could imagine a community being rebuilt there. And that felt good.

So it's a bit upsetting to me that the tents are being taken down, but I understand that it's time. They need the scaffolding for Carnival, and that's a really important part of New Orleans culture. MIR has made $10 million, and that's amazing. Right now, 64 houses have been fully sponsored, and the 65th is more than two-thirds of the way there.

Anyway, the pink houses aren't really disappearing. The material is being used to make tote bags, and all the proceeds go to MIR.

Mine has already been ordered.

O Tannenbaum

Long time no blog! New Year's got the best of me, and then some. Oops.

I meant to write a post about this before I fell off the face of the planet for 5 days (aka drank myself into oblivion in Maryland), but that was the post that got deleted that time when Firefox quit on me.

Basically, everyone knows that the marshes and wetlands surrounding New Orleans (and the rest of the Gulf Coast, for that matter) provide a natural barrier against hurricanes. The creation of the levee system actually aided in the destruction of the wetlands - confining the Mississippi River as it enters the Gulf of Mexico prevents it from depositing sediment in the surrounding wetlands. That sediment is full of nourishment that is crucial in keeping the wetlands alive. "We cannot survive with levees alone, [...] The reason the levees are not working now is because of the destruction of our wetlands systems."

So that brings me back to my original point. The city is collecting Christmas trees "to help rebuild sediment traps destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge." The trees will be put in the water to trap sediment and block waves.

The program existed before and there were hundreds of thousands of trees in the water, but the hurricanes washed them away.

More information (and photo credit) at the Department of Environmental Quality here.

I think that's a really, really cool program. I wish I could donate my tree, but the drive from PA to LA would probably do more harm to the environment than good.