Filed under: Recovery & rebuilding, Katrina, News, Out and about, City life Last Saturday, the Common Ground Health Clinic in Algiers Point celebrated its second year of providing free health services to thousands of New Orleanians since its formation in the week after Katrina struck. Clinic supporters organized a block party at the corner of Teche and Socrates where the Clinic is located, serving up a barbecue and music and offering tours of the recently refurbished clinic (see photo below). In a city with an international reputation for low-quality health care post-Katrina, the two Common Ground-sponsorerd free clinics -- the first in Algiers, the second on St. Claude St. in the Lower 9th Ward -- are much-needed community institutions that have served thousands of people since opening. Ancillary programs like the Latino Health Outreach Program, a spinoff project that serves the needs of non-English speaking residents and workers, also spread the tattered net of social services in New Orleans a little wider. A staff member at the Algiers Clinic informed me that the Algiers Clinic sees between 20 and 50 people per day of operation; due to limited resources and red tape, the clinic is open on a limited schedule four days out of the week (Monday through Wednesday at various hours, and Saturday 12 - 3 pm). Despite ongoing shortages of medical services in the area, and despite the tremendous need for basic health care in the city, the Common Ground Clinics have had to fight for everything they have. Judging by the state of medical services here two years after the traumatic events of 2005, it looks like their struggle to provide free, basic health care to neglected or impoverished populations will remain an uphill battle. But the anniversary party demonstrated that the community still needs and supports the services they offer.

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Filed under: Out and about, NOLApic

This may not look like much, but it's scenes like this that make me adore this town. Here's a humble shotgun, could be almost anywhere in town, reasonably well-kept on the outside, with a sweet motorcycle out front. Homes like this may or may not survive the waves of rebuilding and gentrification that are beginning to sweep our area, but I for one would be happy as a clam in a house like this one. Put a bicycle out front for me, though.

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Here is a rave review of Terrence Blanchard's latest CD, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)." I've been hearing great things about this album. Blanchard is an eloquent spokesman for his hometown, whether he is talking about it or playing his horn. What struck me here is what a man of principle he is.

Louis Armstrong once rebuffed President Dwight D. Eisenhower, canceling a State Department tour over the school- integration controversy in Arkansas. "The way they are treating my people in the South," Armstrong told newspaper reporters, "the government can go to hell." Blanchard protested with absence last fall, opting out of a Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz reception hosted by the White House. "I couldn't go," he told me. "Couldn't act like it was fine."

Kermit Ruffins should take note. I mean, I love Ruffins' music, but, man, you can't hang out with George Bush after what he hasn't done for New Orleans. As Blanchard says in the Voice article. "This president has gotten away with a lot. And in New Orleans, he got away with murder." Right on. Can't wait to go buy this album.

They brought pots of food up from Louisiana after the planes flew into the Twin Towers because food is one way New Orleaneans show their love. There was a collection to purchase a firetruck for the first responders, and our hearts went out to them.

After 8/29, their hearts went out to us. A group of poets so esteemed it is nerve wracking even sending them an email came together this spring for a New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund benefit in New York.

In the last two years, the support has not stopped flowing back and forth between our two cities, and I commemorate their tragic anniversary today as they have honored ours.

Two coastal, vulnerable and culturally irreplaceable cities. There is no learning curve on describing our loss to one another.

"We never felt more connected as a country," is Oprah's comment on her 9/11 Anniversary special. On 8/29, I never felt more disconnected as a person.

My husband's mother, up north for the first time in her life after two years without a permanent home, is heartbreaking to walk with through an antique store. It's a day of, "Maw had one of these." or "We lost this set at the bottom of the locker."

Just try not talking with a New Orleanean in a store. It's virtually impossible. She'll brightly wave a tapestry at a clerk and say, "I lost one of these in the city." For Miss Gloria, there is still only one city.

Oprah said she feels 9/11 should be a national holiday of remembering the tragic day that the country came together.

Not to get all Kid Rock and Tommy Lee at the Video Music Awards, but I feel that 8/29 should also eventually be officially recognized.

It's the day the country, for so many of us, split in two.

Multiple articles all up in Mother Jones this week on Katrina. First up, "The Blame Game":

President Bush is fond of declaring that the government's most important job is to protect the American people from harm. When it comes to catastrophic events, whether natural disasters or terrorist attacks, this job breaks down into two equally important components: prevention and response. The anniversaries of both 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, set just two weeks apart and commemorating the untimely deaths of some 4,800 Americans, stand as painful reminders of how completely the U.S. government has failed at its most essential task.

John McQuaid also has thoughts on Global Warming's "gift" of future Katrina's:

It's relatively easy to prepare for a high tide. The far less predictable threat from rising seas will be storms. Not every hurricane is a Katrina, but rising sea levels increase the likelihood and the intensity of flooding even from smaller tropical storms and nor'easters. If there's an extra foot or two of water near your home, floods will be deeper, and high water that once came along just once every century may instead happen once a decade. If that weren't enough, many atmospheric scientists are now saying that a hotter planet will also add to hurricane strength, meaning more major storms, massive storm surges, and higher winds.

And then there are his thoughts on what we didn't learn from the killer storm and levee failure:

In front of us was an enormous mound of construction debris, about 60 feet high and a football field long, covered with thick, gray-brown clay. Trucks rolled through a FEMA checkpoint on the far side and then up to the top of the mountain. There, attended by bulldozers and scoopers, they dumped their cargo, the remains of the New Orleans that used to be: the Sheetrock, wood, concrete, wire, plastic, and steel that once composed the city's wrecked buildings, which are still being torn down or gutted. Like many spots in New Orleans, the dump, called the Old Gentilly Landfill, is grimy and workaday on the one hand, elegiac on the other. "I'm thinking about how many homes are in there," Waltzer told me. "Mine's in there somewhere. I never did find it. I used to trudge up to the top of this son of a bitch and look."

The view was troubling for another reason: It doesn't take a geotechnical engineer to see that piling billions of pounds of debris next to a hurricane levee will affect its stability, which depends on a complex, poorly understood interplay between the extreme pressures of rising floodwaters and the cohesion of the squishy Mississippi delta soils. Miscalculate and your wall will breach. And even if the levee itself holds, a flood that overtops it will wash over the landfill, sending the remains of the city coursing through the streets—again.

When residents of nearby neighborhoods raised these questions in the months after the storm, the state dismissed their concerns at first. The agency that built the levee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was in the best position to gauge the safety issues, but it stayed out of the dispute—technically, it turns levees over to local authorities after construction is complete. Frustrated residents—members of a nearby Vietnamese community, among the few damaged neighborhoods to return in force—hired Waltzer to represent them in their attempts to shut down Old Gentilly and another nearby landfill. Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California-Berkeley who had participated in a comprehensive review of the Katrina levee failures, volunteered to analyze the levee-dump relationship on behalf of the residents. He concluded that as the pile of debris grew, it would indeed cause mounting instability. The Corps still had ultimate responsibility for levee safety, so it agreed to upgrade the dump's safety standards—though not enough, in the view of Bea or the residents, who have continued to use every bureaucratic route available to try to close the dump.

Here's what the Dutch can teach us about storms like Katrina:

Over the past 50 years, the Dutch have built the world's most sophisticated system of flood defenses. I went to see them two months after Katrina. After weeks of looking at decidedly low-tech structures of mud, steel, and concrete, it was like materializing into a Star Trek episode. I was soon strolling under a giant canopy of tubular white girders in the Maeslant storm surge barrier, a gateway across a shipping channel into Rotterdam. Completed in 1997, it's the last piece of a massive project to fortify the coast, begun after a 1953 flood that busted hundreds of dikes and inundated the country's south, killing 1,835 people. The barrier is both functional and beautiful: From the air, it resembles a delicate butterfly. When a storm surge approaches on the North Sea, an electronic warning system activates the barrier automatically, and the two gates—the butterfly wings—swing out into the water on ball bearings 30 feet in diameter to close the channel and block the storm surge.

But it's not the machinery so much as the political and legal system behind it that offers lessons for America. After an intense debate following the 1953 disaster, the Dutch decided to junk the philosophy that had guided them for hundreds of years. Instead of building hundreds of miles of dikes around inhabited areas—the approach now employed in New Orleans—they decided to raise gated barriers across the three large estuaries where the sea enters Dutch territory.

MY favorite piece though is all about the Corps of Engineers and just how royally fucked up it is:

Corps officials say they've learned their lesson. But it's not clear they've had the opportunity do so, or the inclination. The Corps has been handed billions of dollars in emergency appropriations and has been working flat out since Katrina—first to clean up its own mess, then repairing and upgrading the levee system to meet the most basic safety standards, so New Orleans won't get washed away this year or next.

Of course, those tasks are simple compared to the longer-term challenges the agency faces. It will have to figure out how to protect sinking, exposed New Orleans in an era of global warming, rising seas, and, according to some scientists, bigger hurricanes. It will have to fortify other coastal communities as they too grow more vulnerable to high water. In its current form, the Corps isn't up to these tasks. But right now it's all we've got.

Why is our best always so bad?

Filed under: Recovery & rebuilding, Katrina, Family, News, City life

At last week's "International Tribunal on Katrina and Rita," one of the more striking parts of the event was the presentation of the second witness on the subject of Women's Rights. Ms. Stephanie Mingo, a resident of New Orleans for 40 years, lived in St. Bernard Housing project prior to Katrina. After the storm, she evacuated with four children and one grandchild in tow. Her mother died on the Gentilly bridge, unable to survive the physical and mental anguish of the storm's aftermath. Ms. Mingo's testimony was powerful and informative.

Ms. Mingo and her family evacuated, returned, and are now staying in the Iberville project. She doesn't like it there and wants to move back into her St. Bernard home. She has worked for the Orleans School Board for ten years -- "not that long" Ms. Mingo says -- and is determined to stay in her home town.

Her stubbornness in staying in a project known as much for trouble as for housing might seem odd to those of us who have never stayed in government housing, but it's the home that she wants to come back to. She loves her job as a food services technician at a local school, and isn't afraid of hard work. As Ms. Mingo said from the witness seat while testifying to the court, "When I tie these shoes, I'm not too proud to do anything." Her home and community were humble, but she managed to raise and put through college three of her kids, and the fourth is college-bound.

Public housing may be the upscale-white developer's nightmare, but a lot of hard-working, disciplined people lived there before Katrina, and want to return to their homes and communities which they are trying against all odds to preserve.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced yesterday that it will allow 60,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina and now living in FEMA-provided trailers on the Gulf Coast to move into hotel or motel rooms if they are concerned about formaldehyde gas in their trailers.

The policy shift, made two weeks ago but not widely publicized until now, follows a House committee finding in July that FEMA leaders had suppressed warnings about the presence of high levels of potentially cancer-causing formaldehyde, apparently to avoid legal liability.

The announcement brings full circle FEMA's costly and troubled housing response to the Katrina disaster. The agency hastily ordered $2.7 billion in manufactured housing, mostly through no-bid contracts, only to discover later that FEMA rules prevented the use of a third of the purchases in flood zones, where most victims lived, and that local communities would refuse to host large trailer encampments.

How naive is it to assume that of all parts of the government this agency would at least have a clue how to smarly respond in an emergency? I mean - isn't that its reason for existing?

Last week, according to LexisNexis, there were more than 2,000 newspaper and wire stories on Hurricane Katrina, along with blanket coverage on cable news.

This hurricane of hurricane retrospectives was no doubt long in the works, as editors like to put stories "in the can" for vacation time. The media seemed to cover every angle, particularly the Bush administration's missteps in response to the disaster. And while some might quibble with this or that characterization or selection of facts, ultimately the media were doing what they're supposed to do: hold government accountable.

But there was one thing missing from the coverage of this natural, social, economic and political disaster: the fact that Katrina represented an unmitigated media disaster as well.

Few of us can forget the reports from two years ago. CNN warned there were "bands of rapists, going block to block." Snipers were reportedly shooting at medical personnel. Bodies at the Superdome, we were told, were stacked like cordwood. The Washington Post proclaimed in a banner headline that New Orleans was "A city of despair and lawlessness" and insisted in an editorial that "looters and carjackers, some of them armed, have run rampant." Fox News anchor John Gibson said there were "all kinds of reports of looting, fires and violence. Thugs shooting at rescue crews." These reports actually hindered rescue efforts, as emergency crews wasted valuable time avoiding phantom snipers.

TV reporters raced to the bottom to see who could moralistically preen the most. Interviewers transformed into outright scolds of administration officials. Meanwhile, the distortions, exaggerations and flat-out fictions being offered by New Orleans officials were accelerated and amplified by the media echo chamber. Glib predictions of 10,000 dead, and the chief of police's insistence that there were "little babies getting raped," swirled around the media like so much free-flowing sewage.

And everyone wonders why newspapers are dying. Maybe it's because none of think we can believe them anymore.

The New Orleans rock group Rotary Downs has released a stunning collection of psychedelic art pop songs that plays like a brilliant mashup of Neutral Milk Hotel and Odelay-era Beck. Chained to the Chariot is a beautifully mixed album with incredibly catchy hooks and infectious melodies that roll around in your head and leave you humming long after hearing them.

I have missed these guys but it sounds like they - literally - have something for everyone on their new album:

Rotary Downs nearly lost their master recordings for Chained to the Chariot to hurricane Katrina. They were able to rescue the original tapes and relocated to Lafayette where the album was completed. The CD includes three tracks inspired by Katrina and its aftermath: one about staying in the city, one about leaving, and one about returning home.

You can listen to a bit on NPR.

Filed under: Recovery & rebuilding, Public figures By mid-August of 2005 there were 192 murders. I remember it being a deadly summer. With a smaller population, we are at 140 murders already for this year, 26 in this August alone. Mark over at m.d. filter sums it up pretty well on his site complete with quotes from our mayor and police chief. I often wonder what would have happened if Landrieu had gotten those few extra votes to become mayor. I know that no politician is perfect but I feel like he would have been more involved with stopping crime -- he would have had more to prove in the new position. As it is now, I feel like we not only have an incompetent mayor but one that doesn't care. I'm sorry that Nagin is not running for governor as that would have at least gotten him out of City Hall. We had a perfect opportunity after Katrina to quell crime here with the help of the National Guard. We blew it. Although i never would have said this three years ago, I think that the police need to knock more heads.

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