Random: August 2005 Archives

From the Nola.com weblog tonight:

I had to leave my students behind.

Much of inner city New Orleans is filled with indigent or low-income families with no transportation. These people didn’t stay in the city, for the most part, because they were “attached” to their homes. Most have little to attach to and no money or means to leave. Instead, many either rent one side of a shotgun double house or “stay” in one of the city’s five huge housing projects. And that’s where I had to leave my students: on the second floor, in their neighbor’s apartment in the Lafitte Housing Project.

Dwight and Dwan, twin brothers who just turned 17 years old, first became my students at one of the lowest performing middle schools two years ago. Their individual stories are sad before Hurricane Katrina and maybe too intensely painful for the average parent or reader. But their reality was to call Children Services themselves last Friday when they came home to find their circumstances unlivable, once again. That day, they asked if they could live with me, but it wasn’t possible Friday. We agreed to meet on Sunday and plan their future. Hurricane Katrina made all that impossible when I evacuated Saturday night.

We spoke several times trying to coordinate how to drop-off food for the storm but officials issued a curfew by 7p.m.on Saturday night making that impossible. I asked their neighbor to take them to the Superdome, but she said it was a bad experience two years earlier when they evacuated for a tropical storm and that they trusted God.

We spoke at 4:00 a.m. and the storm hit Monday morning at 5:00 a.m. We spoke a few hours later and I haven’t been able to reach them since. From a hotel room in Houston, I sit tortured in from of the TV hoping to see a shot of their building or a face. The news just reported that the Orleans Parish School System would be closed for the next two to three months. What I want to know is… will my students be alive.

And it's unfair, because I realize many more places than New Orleans got hit by Katrina... they just weren't as famous.

But New Orleans is the place that sticks in my mind, because I finally got to go there three years ago. We stayed in a beautiful B&B in the garden district; went on a walking tour of one of the old cemeteries which concluded in a visit to a voodoo priestess's home and temple; devoured beignets and drank sweetened coffee at Cafe du Monde; saw several JazzFest shows, including Jack Johnson and Galactic at a beautiful old theater, Charlie Hunter at a crowded and steamy warehouse district club, and Karl Dennison's Tiny Universe at the fairgrounds; ate everything from so-so sushi near the warehouse club to fried fish on Bourbon Street to wonderful French food in the Garden District; and when we were worn out with shlepping around in the heat being tourists, we took a streetcar to a park by the river and just hung out and read for a while, enjoying a (slightly cooler) breeze and watching families around us enjoy their afternoon picnics. I guess all those places are gone now or at least under a lot of water. I wish I could remember all the names.

Some links of interest...

• The Times-Picayune's ongoing newsblog on the crisis
• A great explanation of how levees fail, and what New Orleans can expect as it tries to recover, from somebody over at DailyKos

And this story makes me so angry. From Editor & Publisher:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "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. 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." 

Like there's money to pay for this disaster now? Such short-sightedness, and so many lives lost. 

Edited to add:

Of course, there's the other stuff I remember from New Orleans. We went for a walk from the B&B in our neighborhood. I remember being shocked to find that only a few blocks away, there were crumbling sidewalks and very ghetto-ey buildings, and very poor people just standing around. It was far worse than the worst areas of Oakland. We didn't feel like we should stick around.

The poorest people were the ones that got stuck in town during this hurricane, because they didn't have the money to leave. Paying $3000 for tickets to get your family to Houston was not an option for them. 

Some of the silver beads I've been creating in class... (they're not actually this big, though)

Spotted in the Safeway parking lot the other day...

The other week, the Onion ran an item with a headline saying something like "Restaurant Offers $12 Po' Boy Sandwich".

Today, at the Ferry Building, I saw that one of the takeout places was offering po' boys for $11.50.

As my coworker said, "You'll be a po' boy after ordering that!" 

So we moved into our house in April. Our inspection report contained a long list of electrical-related things that we needed to get fixed ASAP. It's now August.

No, it's not just that we've procrastinated, or that our money has gotten spent on expected plumbing issues (though that's true too). 

We're having the darndest time getting an electrician to actually help us. Even though we're willing to give them money and stuff.

The first one I called was upon extremely enthusiastic recommendation from my brother-in-law. He dutifully showed up, read our inspection report, walked through the house with me, took notes... and then took a ten-minute personal call on our front steps while I waited for him to finish. When he wrapped that up, he assured me he'd call me "Friday or Monday" with an estimate.

He never did, despite two messages from me and a call from my husband.

In the meantime, we got some of our other pressing household issues resolved, like a new foundation and (unexpectedly) a cleanout install and sewer pipe repair.

Finally, I was ready to try again. A friend recommended a second electrician. 

I'm sitting here fuming as the second electrician has apparently stood me up.

He was supposed to be here over an hour ago. Excuse me, hello? Can't you make a phone call? It's another electricity-and-wires-based technology, no? Surely you have some passing acquaintance with it?

For heaven's sake. It was easier getting our friggin' FOUNDATION redone! And these were both personal recommendations. If this is how they treat the friends of their customers who RECOMMENDED THEM, I hate to think how they treat hapless unconnected strangers.

Anybody out there reading this have a decent electrician who RETURNS PHONE CALLS that they can recommend? Because I'm about to blow a fuse...

This article about the bird flu is chilling.

If Asian bird flu mutates into a form that spreads easily between humans, an outbreak of just 40 infected people would be enough to cause a global pandemic. And within a year half of the world’s population would be infected with a mortality rate of 50%, according to two studies released on Wednesday.

And yet, the models show, if targeted action is taken within a critical three-week window, an outbreak could be limited to fewer than 100 individuals within two months.

It represents the first opportunity in history to make use of new knowledge and logistics to prevent a pandemic whose potential loss of life could dwarf the horrific 1918 influenza pandemic. But, the researchers caution, we are currently far from ready to take the necessary action.

“If an outbreak occurred tomorrow, it would be devastating,” warns Neil Ferguson from Imperial College London, UK, who led one of the studies. Nature and Science have released the two studies in tandem. The authors stress that an outbreak is no longer an “if” scenario - they are now talking about “when”.

Chevron, it seems, paid "security forces" who killed villagers in Africa.

Fourteen marines and their Iraqi interpreter were just killed in a bombing in Iraq. 

Bush said that Intelligent Design should be taught alongside the theory of evolution in school. (He also said he has "complete confidence in Karl Rove.")

Oy. 

Edited to add: Political Animal's Kevin Drum isn't quite as outraged as I am, because, as he points out, there's nothing new about that last story. He does go on to say...

Actually, what bugged me most about this whole affair was reading the faux outrage from Bush's conservative supporters in the blogosphere, as if they had no idea he felt this way before this week. Give it a rest, guys. Bush thinks creationism sounds great, Tom DeLay thinks the teaching of evolution was responsible for the Columbine shootings, and Bill Frist — a medical doctor! — is so scared of the Christian right that last December on "This Week" he hemmed and hawed and fidgeted like a naughty schoolchild while repeatedly declining to say whether he thought HIV-AIDS could be transmitted through tears or sweat.

Note to Bush supporters: You all knew what you were voting for when you put these guys in power. I'm happy to see you on the side of the angels here, but it's a little late to pretend to be shocked that the Republican leadership feels this way.

From Reuters

CHICAGO, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Atkins Nutritionals Inc., the company behind the low-carbohydrate Atkins Diet craze, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, blaming slumping demand and increased competition.

The company, which filed for bankruptcy on Sunday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, said there was still a bright future in weight loss and nutrition and it would focus on nutrition bars and shakes.

The Atkins diet, based on the research of Dr. Robert Atkins, promotes eating protein over carbohydrates and was so popular from 2002 through early 2004 that it was blamed for the bankruptcies of several pasta and bakery companies.

Ironically, a recent study found that protein may indeed help people lose weight. But we're talking low-fat plain yogurt, not bacon and hamburgers!