Levee meetings on TV denied

The Pontchartrain Levee District has voted down a request by St. Charles Parish Council to televise its meetings and distribute the tapes to other public bodies, saying it would be too expensive.

Times Picayune

Katrina's fury will hit IMAX in 'Hurricane on the Bayou'

When veteran IMAX director Greg MacGillivray (To Fly!) began shooting his large-screen documentary about Louisiana's vanishing wetlands last summer, what was once a plea for conservation became Hurricane on the Bayou.

USA Today

Feds to Foot Bill for Hurricane Cleanup

The government will keep covering the full cost of clearing the bulk of hurricane wreckage in the Gulf Coast for the rest of the year, the White House said Thursday.

Fox News

Louisiana Senator Faults Army Corps in Work on Flood Prevention

New Orleans still faces serious street flooding in coming storms because the Army Corps of Engineers has fallen behind in repairing the city's hurricane protection system, Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, said in a letter to be sent today to President Bush.

Extensive flooding could occur even in heavy rainstorms, Mr. Vitter said, and a hurricane could have enormous consequences for the restoration of New Orleans. "The threat is, we get significant flooding because of corps failures this hurricane season, and it kills our recovery," he said.

from the NY Times

Power outage an omen, official says

Late Tuesday afternoon, as temperatures climbed to 95 degrees, power surged and then ebbed at homes in Gentilly and around Esplanade Avenue. And then finally, about 4 p.m., it went out. For more than four hours, 7,000 to 10,000 customers sweated it out on their stoops as Entergy worked to restore power after shutting it off for safety reasons.

The outage, and others in recent weeks, underscore the system's fragility after Hurricane Katrina, officials said. Repairs made after the storm to get power restored are considered temporary. The system no longer has back-up redundancy, and won't until millions of dollars are spent to repair the system, officials said.

from the Times Picayune

Waters recede in Wilkes-Barre, levees hold

Water levels in the flooded Susquehanna River unexpectedly receded early on Thursday, removing the threat of catastrophic flooding in the historic town of Wilkes-Barre.

A second crest of 35 to 37 feet, which had been predicted by the National Weather Service and emergency officials, did not materialize around 2 a.m. EDT.

from ABC News

Riverside neighborhoods emptied Wednesday as a swollen Susquehanna River threatened to reach its highest level since Tropical Storm Agnes devastated the region in 1972.

Between 100,000 and 175,000 people in 14 communities – perhaps up to half of Luzerne County’s population – were ordered to leave their homes Wednesday. National Guardsmen and police patrolled downtown Wilkes-Barre and other towns, enforcing a 9 p.m. curfew.

from the Times Leader of Pennsylvania

Water, water everywhere

Someday, having that perfect Bayside view may not be all it is cracked up to be.
Scientists are predicting the Bay's waters could rise by 3 to 4 feet in 100 years, flooding up to 4 miles of low-lying Baylands in a climate-change scenario not unlike the images of sinking cities in Al Gore's bracing documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
What no one knows, however, is when. Predicting the future of climate change is notoriously difficult, especially when it comes to variables such as greenhouse gas emissions, melting ice sheets, rising tides, shifting winds and other atmospheric conditions.
Worldwide, modest global warming has caused the sea level to rise 6 to 8 inches in the past century, at a stable 2 mm per year. But by 2100, that number could increase by an additional 3 feet, according to a March 2006 report from the California Climate Change Center.

from the Oakland Tribune

Drought is fuel for wildfires in West

A lingering drought has created ideal wildfire conditions across much of the West and Southwest this summer, alarming forestry officials, who already are dealing with an unusually high number of fires.

Nationwide as of the weekend, officials have reported more than 54,000 fires charring more than 3.2 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Both figures were the highest in at least a decade for this point in the year. The 10-year average for the same period was 39,000 fires burning about 1 million acres.

from the Boston Globe

Venerable Church Burns in New Orleans

Newly burned-out lots pockmark the city, evidence of a fearsome new challenge as firefighters here say they are confronting a tough post-Hurricane Katrina landscape of abandoned buildings, water mains cracked by the storm and fire engines with smaller crews.

Historic structures are burning to the ground — the latest was the Coliseum Place Baptist Church, a venerable red brick church that until Friday had towered over Coliseum Square in the Lower Garden District since 1855. Preservationists here described the loss as heartbreaking; it followed a February fire that destroyed a cherished World War I-era theater in the same square.

from the NY Times

9 reportedly dead in Northeast flooding

Storms swept into the Northeast on Wednesday, forcing thousands of people from their homes, including more than 2,200 who fled from a rising Maryland lake. A section of interstate highway was washed out in New York state and at least nine deaths were blamed on the stormy weather. Three people were missing.

The highway washout in New York reportedly killed two, while the weather was blamed for one traffic death in Pennsylvania and one in Maryland. A 15-year-old boy drowned in a lake in Pennsylvania's Luzerne County and his mother's boyfriend drowned trying to rescue him, police said.

from the AP via the Times Picayune

Scientists gather in N.O. to shape coastal restoration

A group of nationally recognized scientists met Tuesday in New Orleans to discuss how to help federal and state officials in assuring the quality of the design of the proposed $1.2 billion federal-state coastal restoration program, including how to dovetail restoration projects with plans to protect Louisiana's coastal communities from Category 5 hurricanes.

The new Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Science Board will advise top Army Corps of Engineers officials and the restoration program's new Science & Technology Program Office, which will soon be opened at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

from the Times Picayune

From Colorado with love

Not all New Orleanians live in New Orleans. Some have always lived elsewhere but visit New Orleans when they can and, through some inexplicable bonding, come to feel something deeper and more personal than a tourist's connection while they're here.
So it is, apparently, with Kim Fancher, an interior designer of upscale vacation homes in the ski resort town of Frisco, Colo. Her visits to the city have made her a lover of New Orleans. She has ridden in the Orpheus and Zulu parades. A blue fleur-de-lis flag, the symbol of New Orleans' recovery, flies at her Colorado home.

Yet the condition of the city still breaks her heart. So Sunday she watched as volunteers unloaded two 18-wheelers stuffed with toilets, doors, windows, appliances and other building materials she arranged to have donated to the people of Chalmette by Colorado homebuilders.

from the Times Picayune

Insurers Drop Policies on Eastern Seaboard

The letter begins: "We're writing to you with what we know is unfortunate news about your Allstate Insurance."
Startled, Marie Collins reached for her glasses, then a magnifying glass, and pored over the letter, realizing with a sinking feeling that this wasn't a standard mailing from the company that insures her home.

It was a cancellation. Her home was being dropped, the letter said, because it's in the path of future hurricanes.
But Collins doesn't live in New Orleans or even Florida. She lives in New York.

from the LA Times

Lengthy drought takes toll on local earthen levees

Darryl Ward routinely walks the levee along the edge of Lake Pontchartrain in Bucktown, using the solitude to pray.

But when Ward changed his routine one day this week by veering away from the water to stroll the levee's gravel crown, his sacred reverie was shattered by what he found: a series of holes and horizontal cracks scattered along the surface of the big dirt levee east of Cherokee Avenue.

from the Times Picayune

Strengthening levees not worth the expense, corps says

Protecting vast tracts of agricultural land with bigger, stronger levees along the upper Mississippi and Illinois rivers would not justify the multibillion-dollar expense, according to a new federal study. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has concluded that the existing flood protection system along nearly 1,100 river miles north of Cairo, Ill., generally holds its own most of the time, although some segments have "varying structural integrity."

By contrast, building up levees to protect against a so-called 500-year flood would cost more than $8 billion. Even upgrades to survive less-severe 100-year floods would cost roughly $3.7 billion.

from the St Louis Post-Dispatch

As Population Shifts, One Parish's Businesses Boom

It can be quite a feat to find a parking space these days at American Factory Direct, a furniture store brimming with merchandise like $8.99 mini-lampshades with beaded gold fringe and $2,900 dining room sets with bronze medallions and bird's-eye maple inlays. "A lot of people are buying a whole houseful," said Billie Comeaux, who owns the store with her husband, Bob. Since the hurricanes, in fact, people have bought so much furniture that the Comeauxs have quintupled the space in their warehouses, doubled the size of their staff (to 130) and started "burnout sessions" for overstressed employees.

from the NY Times

FEMA quietly posts flood maps

Two months after issuing a written guidance on the south shore's future elevation standards, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has released maps showing homeowners how high they would have to rebuild if governments adopt the rules. Without fanfare, FEMA posted the satellite-generated maps for Jefferson, Orleans, upper Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes online June 14. Diana Herrera, a FEMA natural hazards program specialist, said the maps were hand-delivered to the four parishes before being posted online. FEMA planned no public notice of the new resource on its Web site.

from the Times Picayune

view the Flood Maps

Timeline of levee decisions promised

The Army Corps of Engineers will publish a chronology of the decision-making involved in the construction of the New Orleans area levee systems by the end of the year, the agency announced Friday.

from the Times Picayune

Celebrating Teamwork

Terri Dreyer said she is amazed and heartened by the passion and fierce sense of neighborhood ownership that New Orleanians have displayed since Hurricane Katrina devastated most of the city. Dreyer, an architect, is volunteering with the nonprofit group Cityworks, which is trying to catalog and map the efforts of individual neighborhood associations.

Her group was part of a convention of like-minded organizations Saturday at City Park's Botanical Garden. Organizers said the "Festival of Neighborhoods" was a first: a collaboration of 100 neighborhood associations and governmental and nonprofit groups aimed at helping those rebuilding from Katrina.

from the Times Picayune

Long-lasting effects from Katrina start to emerge

On the Gulf Coast, keeping your sanity carries the same odds as keeping your house did last Aug. 29.

The Weather Channel lacks footage to show the quiet mental toll that prolonged recovery is bringing. Along with insurance disputes, FEMA, job changes and a new hurricane season, residents battle inner challenges. In demographics, new census figures just now are showing what locals have known for months. The same is true of the statistics beginning to appear that show the disaster's impact on mental health.

The suicide rate in Harrison County is triple the same time frame last year. So far, 16 people have committed suicide this year, compared to about five in 2005. Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove also hears reports that suicide attempts are up.

from the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson Mississippi

LI prepares for a big hurricane

As they quicken the pace of preparing for a hurricane, Long Island emergency management officials are sobered by the destruction and chaos along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, but they are also facing down some hard statistics.

This year, the Northeast stands a 12 percent chance of being struck by a Category 3 or higher hurricane, compared to a 4.5 percent chance in a typical year, according to Colorado State University's widely cited annual hurricane forecast.

from Newsday

Police vow to swarm city's at-risk areas

With its forces augmented by the arrival of National Guard and State Police reinforcements, the New Orleans Police Department will begin deploying a "massive physical presence" in Central City, Algiers and parts of Uptown today in an aggressive effort to spot and disrupt suspicious activity, the NOPD said Thursday.

Times Picayune

Grants to Aid Libraries on Gulf

Communities along the Gulf Coast that lost public libraries in the hurricanes last year will get up to 22 bookmobiles or temporary library buildings under a $12.2 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that was announced yesterday. In addition, up to eight libraries will receive $5 million for repairs and reconstruction from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, which was founded by two former presidents, George Bush and Bill Clinton, to help the Gulf of Mexico region recover. The libraries will be chosen by the Americans for Libraries Council, a nonprofit group that is administering the rebuilding grant.

from the NY Times

Environmentalist warns of Katrina-type flooding

Parts of Baltimore, Annapolis and the Eastern Shore could be completely flooded by a hurricane in the coming years because of rising sea levels caused by global warming, scientists say.

The Examiner

New Orleans gripped by depression epidemic

NEW Orleans is experiencing what appears to be a near-epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, one that mental health experts say is of an intensity rarely seen in the US.

TheAge.com

New Orleans police get reinforcements from National Guard

Nine months after they rode to the rescue in the desperate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, National Guard troops carrying M-16s returned to the city Tuesday to reinforce a depleted police force and battle a surge in violence.

Chicago Tribune

Hurricane relief work will last for years

One wonders what havoc the 2006 hurricane season will cause in their paths. How will that affect the ongoing recovery work done by religious folks from throughout the country?

from The Patriot News

'Obfuscation' By FEMA Hurt Katrina Victims

U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. issued a 44-page decision Friday on a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims seeking disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The case had forced FEMA to make numerous changes in its housing aid programs for Gulf Coast residents in recent months, widening eligibility guidelines, clarifying public notices and extending a hotel subsidy program until FEMA could determine whether people displaced by the storm qualified for other rental aid.

from the Washington Post

Call for more time on flood maps

A group of California lawmakers wants more information and more time before the federal government releases flood maps that could cost Central Valley residents hundreds of dollars each in insurance premiums. In April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked counties, cities and flood districts throughout the Central Valley to prove their levees can withstand anything short of a 100-year flood.

from the Stockton Record

FEMA Halts Evictions From Trailers in Mississippi

In yet another change of housing plans for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has suspended the eviction of 3,000 families who are living in government trailers in Mississippi. The move is the latest in a series of announcements and reversals that have caused confusion and occasionally panic among families unable to live in their ruined homes in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast. For several months, FEMA has repeatedly changed deadlines, sent conflicting letters to applicants, and declared people ineligible for housing assistance for the lack of signatures or failures to appear in person for property inspections.

from the NY Times

Let a Hurricane Huff and Puff

On the Gulf Coast of Texas, Jim Hayes is building houses on concrete stilts that he says will shrug off winds of more than 130 miles an hour and will easily survive the worst hurricane flooding. Near Orlando, Fla., modest but striking cottages are being built with safe rooms and ballistic nylon storm shutters. In the Florida Panhandle, Jason Comer is putting up a village of gleaming white mansions with eight-inch concrete walls and heavy, ridged concrete roofs.

from the NY Times

A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide

Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the commander of the Police Department's Mobile Crisis Unit here, spends much of each workday on this city's flood-ravaged streets trying to persuade people not to kill themselves. Last Tuesday in the French Quarter, Sergeant Glaudi's small staff was challenged by a man who strode straight into the roaring currents of the Mississippi River, hoping to drown. As the water threatened to suck him under, the man used the last of his strength to fight the rescuers, refusing to be saved.

from the NY Times

Housing aid plan challenged

A collection of nonprofit advocacy groups filed a complaint Tuesday about the way the state plans to spend $10.4 billion in federal aid to repair and rebuild communities devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, saying not enough of the dollars will help low- and moderate-income families.

from the Times Picayune

City leaders balk at FEMA advisories

A showdown of city, state and federal officials may be shaping up over city leaders' reluctance to adopt new flood-elevation advisories proposed by FEMA, which call for new buildings and those undergoing major renovations to sit at least 3 feet above the ground.

from the Times Picayune

In Louisiana, a Sinking Island Wars With Water and the Government

All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe ran without even dampening their feet. You should have seen it. But you can hardly imagine it, much less see it, because where gardens sprouted and children sprinted just 30 years ago, there is now a grass skirt of mushy marshland, and beyond, the rippling open waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Water," the tribe's conflicted chief, Albert Naquin, said. "All water."

from the NY Times

In New Orleans, Money Is Ready but a Plan Isn't

Billions of federal dollars are about to start flowing into this city after President Bush on Thursday signed the emergency relief bill the region has long awaited. But, with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, local officials have yet to come up with a redevelopment plan showing what kind of city will emerge from the storm's ruins. No neighborhoods have been ruled out for rebuilding, no matter how damaged or dangerous. No decisions have been made on what kind of housing, if any, will replace the mold-ridden empty hulks that stretch endlessly in many areas. No one really knows exactly how the $10.4 billion in federal housing aid will be spent, and guidance for residents in vulnerable areas has been minimal.

from the NY Times

Medical Blessing

t began as a tiny medical outpost in eastern New Orleans.

Today the clinic in the 5500 block of Read Boulevard serves thousands of patients and has mushroomed into a collection of modular buildings with eight exam rooms and a room for minor surgery.

In an effort to restore some semblance of the health-care services obliterated by Hurricane Katrina, Operation Blessing, in partnership with the International Medical Alliance, set up the free clinic in April -- and it's thriving.

The 12-by-60-foot mobile home clinic, with a 15-person waiting room, three small exam rooms and a tiny pharmacy, has expanded into a 30-person waiting room, which often is full. It has a larger pharmacy, a mental health counseling room, offices and restrooms, plus a dental center with three exam rooms and an X-ray room.

from the Times Picayune

Population count to help city recover

The most extensive effort yet to count the elusive post-Katrina population began last week with workers hanging surveys on doorknobs in Metairie. It's the first large-scale attempt to go door to door counting residents, a strategy designed to provide a clearer picture of who now lives in the New Orleans area than the common measures used so far: analyzing postal change of address forms, electricity hookups and school enrollment, and conducting telephone surveys.

from the Times Picayune

Corporation will be set up to deal with hurricane properties

Lawmakers have agreed on how to deal with the scores of hurricane damaged properties expected to be bought by the state through the Louisiana Recovery Authority's housing program. Under a bill by Sen. Lydia Jackson, D-Shreveport, which was sent to Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Sunday, a nonprofit corporation will be set up under the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency to receive the property and decide what to do with it.

from the Times Picayune

U.S. Report Faults Nation's Preparedness for Disaster

States and cities in hurricane zones generally have better plans to deal with disaster than do other regions, but the nation's overall level of preparedness is still far from sufficient, a new report by the Department of Homeland Security says.

For the nation as a whole, the report rates only a quarter of state emergency operations plans and 10 percent of municipal plans as "sufficient" to cope with a natural disaster or a terrorist attack. That is the highest of the three ratings defined by the analysis, above "partially sufficient" and "not sufficient."

from the NY Times

Various recovery planners might coalesce

An impasse over how to proceed with post-Katrina neighborhood recovery will be resolved within days if behind-the-scene negotiations with Mayor Ray Nagin and New Orleans City Council members don't hit new snags, a Louisiana Recovery Authority board member said Thursday.

Times Picayune

Long-awaited removal of New Orleans' flooded cars to start Monday, state says

The hundreds of thousands of flooded and rusting cars that still litter much of Katrina-devastated New Orleans may finally begin disappearing on Monday, when a state contractor is scheduled to start towing them at a rate of 200 vehicles a day, the Department of Environmental Quality announced today.

Times Picayune

New Orleans' Water Problems Are Underground, Too

Pipes cracked by Hurricane Katrina are leaking two-thirds of pumping output, weakening pressure and wasting millions of gallons a day.

LA Times

American History Museum Plans Katrina Exhibit

Back in April we noted that the National Museum of American History will be closing at the end of the summer for a two-year renovation project. Today we're hearing a little more about what the museum plans to feature — aside from the Star-Spangled Banner Project — when it opens back up in 2008.

DCist.com

Mosquitoes breed in Katrina-flooded pools

In a large aboveground pool here [New Orleans], entomologists are breeding front-line mosquito fighters.

AP via Seattle PI

Louisiana Katrina Area Gets FEMA Grants

Today that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has made federal disaster aid in the form of Public Assistance available to reimburse Louisiana for disaster relief. Louisiana will be the recipient of eighteen grants in association with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita totaling close to $59 million for necessary infrastructure improvements for Louisiana schools, hospitals, and other public facilities.

Bayou Buzz

Little Is Left but Stillness

Lower Plaquemines Parish, the long marshy finger of Louisiana sticking into the Gulf of Mexico, has become a silent, melancholy monument to Hurricane Katrina, like one of the smattering of European villages preserved for memory's sake since World War II.

The people — shrimpers, oystermen, workers for offshore oil fields — are resilient. But resiliency has its limits in a place that reverted late last summer to its diluvian origins. Here, where the hurricane first struck the American mainland, the 120-mile-an-hour winds pushed the Breton Sound back over the earth.

from the NY Times

Parched

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew through the New Orleans area, dumping nearly 1 1/2 feet of rainwater, many prayed for drier days to make work easier for rescuers and give their submerged city a chance to dry out. "Be careful what you wish for," said state climatologist Barry Keim. In a ironic twist after most of New Orleans sat submerged in water for weeks, the eight months since Oct. 1 have been the driest south Louisiana has seen in the 111 years that the state has kept rainfall records, he said.

from the Times Picayune

Museum Collecting Katrina Artifacts

A severe storm alert, an evacuation-route marker and a sign bearing the high-water mark of flooding in New Orleans are among about 60 objects around which the National Museum of American History plans to build an exhibit on Hurricane Katrina. Some artifacts from the killer storm that laid waste to the New Orleans area and southern Mississippi were presented to the museum yesterday.

from the Washington Post

5,000 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Are to Be Razed

Federal housing officials announced on Wednesday that more than 5,000 public housing apartments for the poor were to be demolished here and replaced by developments for residents with a wider range of incomes. The announcement, made by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso R. Jackson, provoked strong criticism from low-income tenants and their advocates, several of whom noted that thousands of public housing apartments had been closed since Hurricane Katrina. But local officials have for months said they do not want a return to the intense concentrations of poverty in the old projects, where crime and squalor were pervasive.

from the NY Times

from USA Today

from the Times Picayune

Lives Suspended on Gulf Coast, Crammed Into 240 Square Feet

If you were to fly over rural Hancock County here, you would see more than 9,000 of them, white rectangles clumped in sun-bleached parks and scattered in piney woods like pieces of a trashed picket fence. Pick any one, and contained within that FEMA trailer are lives in claustrophobic suspension.

Paulette Shiyou invites you into her family's trailer with a natural hospitality that has remained intact. Her husband, Hugh, offers a can of beer, and her son, Cody, itching to show you his card collection, his rock collection, his pocketknife, kicks off his sneakers.

from the NY Times

Costly New Orleans Levee Repairs May Be Inadequate

This report on PBS' NewsHour (6/12) focused on New Orleans rebuilt levees. You can access the audio file or a transcript. It includes interviews with Maj. Gen. Ronald Johnson, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Raymond Seed, University of California, Berkeley, and Ivor Van Heerden, LSU Hurricane Center.

go to the NewsHour page

The Terrible Opportunity

Driving the Mississippi Coast in February, I found a way to map the destruction from Hurricane Katrina: look for Waffle Houses. The buildings, at one time identical, now spoke objectively of their zip codes. Off Exit 16 on Interstate 10, in Diamondhead, the Waffle House was open and doing a brisk business. They were out of Philly cheese steak, and the staff was a little behind in their cleaning, but the food was hot and the ladies behind the counter had the wherewithal to sing along with a Lucinda Williams song on the radio. In D’Iberville, the place was trashed; the damaged facade said waf. On Beach Boulevard in Biloxi, the Waffle House had no facade or any walls at all. The tall roadside sign, with its yellow squares and black letters, stood alone next to an empty brick bunker of a foundation. Live-oak trees and billboards were about all that survived along Beach Boulevard, where the slow lane was for gawkers who couldn’t believe their eyes and the fast lane was for locals who couldn’t bear to look anymore....
read more in the Oxford American Magazine online

New Orleans schools aim higher

The last lesson Gil Wilson taught before Hurricane Katrina still fills a chalkboard inside abandoned Lafon Elementary School. Recently, on a warm Sunday morning, he donned a jacket and tie and interviewed for another job within the same school system.
Silver-haired and 54, Wilson lost his job when the Orleans Parish public school system shut down after the hurricane. He and the rest of the city's teachers and families face the task of rebuilding New Orleans' public schools — even as the ghostly ruins of the old system surround them.

from USA Today

Wal-Mart Ramps Up for Alberto

With Florida in the path of the season's first tropical storm, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. ramped up its emergency operations center Monday for the kind of disaster relief effort that won it praise for responding faster than the government last year after Hurricane Katrina. Wal-Mart's emergency management director, Jason Jackson, said last year's successes raised expectations from the private sector in times of disaster. Because of that, he said, the world's largest retailer would coordinate more closely with government agencies, the American Red Cross and even business rivals.

from Forbes

Healing after the hurricane

Jake Kerth is caught squarely between devastation and progress. His barbershop was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, so he’s cutting hair in the back of his home in Waveland. The house has been stripped to the floorboards and studs, and it reeks of bleach sprayed on the walls to kill deadly mold. The floor of his back patio is covered in debris, construction equipment and clipped hair.

from the Lawrence Journal-World

AFL-CIO plans New Orleans boom

In what may be the start of the city's development boom, the AFL-CIO plans to invest $1 billion to develop 10,000 affordable homes and a new downtown hotel. The investment, confirmed Monday by the AFL-CIO, is the labor coalition's most ambitious funding project ever. It also is one of the largest yet for New Orleans and seeks to bring new housing to a city where Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 100,000 homes.

from USA Today

100-Ton Symbols of a Recovery Still Suspended

To understand a little about this small crustacean of a city nine months after Hurricane Katrina, you have to accept a counterintuitive concept: Boats in the trees.

About two dozen shrimp vessels, some of them 80 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons, list in suspended state amid scrub oak and pine, many yards from the bayou where they belong. Removed from the blue and shoved into the green, their white masts and rigging rise like bleached treetops in a forest.

from the NY Times

In Mississippi's Ruins, a Bright Spot Beckons

Along the altered waterfront, amid the ruinous handiwork of a hurricane nine months past, something bright and riotous upsets the dark stillness. Garish, glorious, improbable, a fair.

Cleanup efforts continue at Beauvoir, the historic home of the only president of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, along U.S. 90 in Biloxi. The home was severely damaged in Hurricane Katrina. More Photos »
It laughs and shouts into the nighttime quiet of the once-buzzing U.S. 90, the preferred route for voyeurs of Gulf Coast disaster. The road through Biloxi offers the footprint slabs of vanished restaurants and the toppled slabs of a disturbed cemetery, the trashed gaudy casinos of the New Mississippi, the crushed courtly mansions of the Old.

from the NY Times

Education Secretary announces big charter school grant

The charter school movement, already bolstered in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina devastated public schools in and around New Orleans, got another boost Monday when federal officials announced a $23.9 million grant to create new charter schools in the state.

from the Times Picayune

Books for Understanding New Orleans

The Association of American University Presses announces the publication of "Books for Understanding: New Orleans" a free online guide to some of the best books about the Big Easy. The guide is available at: http://www.aaupnet.org/news/bfu/nola/list.html. The list marks the Association's 2006 annual meeting, held in New Orleans from June 15-18. More than 500 scholarly communications and publishing professionals will gather to further professional development and create collaborative relationships. AAUP wanted to recognize the importance of the meeting's location in the city so recently devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and still struggling to procure the resources needed to recover, re-plan, and rebuild.

read more

Locking out New Orleans' poor

Almost a year after Katrina, public housing residents can't return home. Critics blame government negligence -- and hushed plans for big redevelopment.

from Salon.com

ZEN to perform 27 hour Jam to benefit New Orleans Musicians

On July 1st through July 2nd, the hottest new jamband on the scene, ZEN, will be holding the “ZEN All Together Music Marathon.”

from all about jazz

Hello Alberto: 1st named storm of 2006 Atlantic hurricane season threatens Fla.

Most of Florida's west coast was under a tropical storm watch Sunday as the first named storm of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season spun over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to bring heavy rain in the next few days.

Canadian Press

Big Opportunity in the Big Easy

June 1 marked the official beginning of hurricane season in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. But many coastal residents are still focused on recovery and clean up from last year's deadly storms. Recent reports warn that the levees around New Orleans remain "inadequate," and communities are hurrying to rebuild homes, schools, and businesses before hurricane activity peaks in August and September. One of the greatest challenges they face is to rebuild wisely-not just quickly-and in a way that will provide a cleaner, more livable environment.

from the Worldwatch Institute

Owners find insurance won't rebuild homes

The owners of the sagging, flood-stained home aren't in. Above the front door, a banner explains their absence, and the lack of progress: "Allstate paid $10,113.34 on this house for storm damage."

Like the home next to it and the one after that, the house was disemboweled nine months ago by Hurricane Katrina. The force of the gushing water punched the refrigerator into the kitchen wall, and it still sits leaning through the house's broken ribcage. Inside, mud has hardened into a crusty carpet, covering a designer sofa and a leather swivel chair.

AP via CNN

Gov. Barbour urges Corps and Hancock Co. to finish Katrina cleanup

Gov. Haley Barbour is urging the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Hancock County leaders to finish removing Hurricane Katrina debris before a June 30 deadline that calls for the county to start footing the cleanup bill.

from AP via The Sun Herald

X-ray seen as symbol of recovery

In this hi-tech age, a new X-ray machine is not usually a cause for much excitement. But in St. Bernard Parish, home to 67,000 residents and a vibrant medical community before being wiped out by Hurricane Katrina last August, this week's arrival of an X-ray machine is indeed a cause for celebration. In its simplest terms, the machine means folks won't have to leave the parish for confirmation of a broken bone. But in the bigger context, it marks another small step in the parish's long road to recovery.

from the Times Picayune

Sister Gertrude Morgan's house

Pushed off its piers in the flooding after Hurricane Katrina, the house that sheltered New Orleans preacher and folk artist Sister Gertrude Morgan for the last decades of her long life is among many in the Lower 9th Ward scheduled for demolition.

The house faced North Dorgenois in the 5400 block before rushing water knocked it into the house next door. Now, the piggy-backed houses face the corner of Flood Street, aptly enough, among miles of smashed buildings where generations of families once lived, played and worshipped.

from the Times Picayune

Feast or famine

"If none of the dynamics change," said Tom Weatherly, vice president of communications and research for the Louisiana Restaurant Association, "then it's going to be tough for our restaurants to survive." Operating a restaurant in the months since New Orleans began its post-Katrina rebirth has been no picnic. Persistent staffing shortages in particular have dogged the industry since Day One.

from the Times Picayune

Making all things new

Beginning just days after Hurricane Katrina struck the city last August, some New Orleans churches began to mount relief operations that continue to this day.

from the Times Picayune

In the early morning light one day last week, Inman Houston, a Southern Baptist seminary student and a staffer at First Baptist Church New Orleans, climbed onto a makeshift table and called for prayer among a crowd of ragtag volunteers gathered in a 9th Ward parking lot. More than 100 men and women dressed for the heat in shorts, tool belts and work boots fell silent and stood temporarily bareheaded as Houston asked God to bless their work and the tattered neighborhood.

from the Times Picayune

Addition of pumps delayed, corps says

The goal of adding more pumps by Aug. 1 to better drain the 17th Street Canal if new floodgates must be closed against a storm surge this hurricane season has fallen further behind schedule and now isn't expected to occur until Sept. 8, the Army Corps of Engineers confirmed Thursday.

from the Times Picayune

Too Bad Hippocrates Wasn't an Engineer

In ancient Babylon, they knew from accountability. Under the Code of Hammurabi, "If a builder build a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death." What's more, "If it kill the son of the owner, the son of that builder shall be put to death."

Engineers these days don't have that worry. Mistakes may carry legal penalties and a measure of shame. The people who die are those who depend on the engineers' work.

from the NY Times

Corps should release flood maps

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently took the blame for the failure of the New Orleans levees after Hurricane Katrina roared through the Gulf Coast last year. Such refreshing candor is welcome and rare regarding the post-Katrina response debacle. The Corps should be equally candid about the risks posed by the leaky 75-year-old Herbert Hoover Dike that surrounds Lake Okeechobee.

from the Miami Herald

Mississippi Charm, With a New York Twist

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi was pleased to see people in Central Park yesterday enjoying one of his state's most prized culinary exports, fried catfish. But he was somewhat taken aback that the down-home delicacy was getting an uptown twist. "They're having catfish and red wine," Mr. Barbour said with dismay.

from the NY Times

Millions of gallons of water seeping away

About 85 million gallons of drinking water -- more than two-thirds of the total pumped into the pipes -- are leaking into the ground every day through breaks in New Orleans' hurricane-fractured water system, even after crews this week plugged a 15 million-gallon-per-day crack using a process that cut water pressure, in some cases to a dribble, from Uptown to Gentilly.

from the Times Picayune

Safe Water?

No more than 5 feet of storm surge will be allowed into any part of the damaged 17th Street or London Avenue canals until a final round of test results are analyzed to determine whether the floodwalls can handle more water, Army Corps of Engineers officials said this week.

from the Times Picayune

To stay or go? More people deciding

New Orleans homes for sale have reached a new peak and the city is reporting an escalating number of residential building permits, two seemingly conflicting facts that combined suggest homeowners are accelerating their decisions on whether to rebuild or get rid of their Katrina-flooded homes, the Brookings Institution said Wednesday.

from the Times Picayune

Designing the Future of New Orleans

Can houses and apartments rise gracefully above floodwaters while maintaining New Orleans’s famous neighborliness? Can higher ground successfully accommodate more of the city’s citizens in an environmentally sustainable way? Both students and professionals offered a wealth of answers in the 544 entries for two competitions initiated by Architectural Record in a partnership with Tulane University’s School of Architecture.

from Architectural Record

Study Sees Increase in Illegal Hispanic Workers in New Orleans

About a quarter of the construction workers rebuilding New Orleans are illegal immigrants, who are getting lower pay, less medical care and less safety equipment than legal workers, according to a new study by professors at Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley.

from the NY Times

from the Washington Post

Hurricane scale is called misleading

Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in the nation's history, has ignited a lively debate among meteorologists and other weather watchers: Should the well-known hurricane ranking scale be revised? After all, while Katrina packed a fiercely destructive storm surge, its winds ranked it as a Category 3 storm, according to the Saffir-Simpson scale's criteria. That's still a major hurricane, but two steps away from the scale's highest ranking and in a category that is not uncommon.

from the Times Picayune

Hispanics move into hurricane regions

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drove an estimated 450,000 people from their communities along the Gulf Coast last year, but in the storms' wake Hispanics moved in--perhaps 100,000 or more. New government estimates show a region hit by population losses four months after the storms. Orleans Parish in Louisiana lost 279,000 people, and nearby St. Bernard Parish lost 61,000, or 95 percent of its residents. Hispanics, however, swept in by the tens of thousands, according to estimates released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

from the Chicago Tribune

Census outlines face of today's New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina drained the New Orleans metropolitan area of almost 40% of its residents and left the region with a whiter, wealthier and older population, according to the first Census Bureau estimates since the devastating flooding.
The special survey released today shows the New Orleans area, made up of seven parishes, became 73% white in the months after the hurricane Aug. 29, up from about 59% before the storm. The black population dropped from about 37% to 22%. The median age increased by about four years, and the median annual income rose from $39,793 to $43,447.

"This confirms what some people thought: There was a selective out-migration of poorer minorities," says William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

from USA Today

from the NY Times

from the Times Picayune

Federal agency enters debate over landfill

In a letter that echoes many of the concerns about a new landfill voiced by community and environmental groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has asked the Corps of Engineers to either require that a liner be installed at the Chef Menteur Landfill or to greatly restrict what can be dumped at the eastern New Orleans site.

from the Times Picayune

Thieves are stealing pieces of the city's soul

In Holy Cross, the corner of the Lower 9th Ward given the best shot for rebirth, a silent rage rises up from the still-empty houses at the latest indignity of post-Katrina life. "Keep Out Grave Robbers," blares one in a collection of hand-painted signs scrawled on houses in the neighborhood, reflecting both its defiance and despair. With looters having stolen what they can from in and around the houses, residents say thieves are now picking apart the houses themselves, making off with architectural detail work.

from the NY Times

Even New Orleans' luckiest worried after Katrina

Even New Orleans residents who fared the best in Hurricane Katrina are losing sleep and worried about the future, a survey presented on Monday showed.

About two-thirds of those contacted in Orleans parish, the district around New Orleans, were somewhat or very worried about their future over the next five years and 38 percent were sleeping worse than before the storm hit last August 29, the University of New Orleans study found.

from Reuters

from the Times Picayune

Residents Demand to Move Home

New Orleans residents of public housing are demonstrating, demanding to be allowed to come back to the city. They are living in tents outside of the fenced off areas, and breaking in to clean up their damaged and looted apartments.

from the Washington Post

from the NY Times

The gathering storm

This short article from Nature, the very reputable British science journal, describes recent research on the relationship between hurricane intensity and ocean temperatures, and the reports coming out about New Orleans' levees. It has links to other articles, including an interview with an engineer reviewing the Army Corps' levees program.

from Nature

A Checkered Past

By now it's clear that Hurricane Katrina did not drown New Orleans by herself. The city flooded because its levees and floodwalls failed in the face of a challenge they should have contained. Those walls against the water were tangible expressions of a community's trust. People trusted their homes, belongings – their very lives – to a hurricane protection system that was 40 years in the making and then undone in a day.

from the radio program Living on Earth

Harvey Canal vulnerable till 2007 storm season

A symbol of New Orleans' inadequate hurricane protection, the 17th Street Canal stays bathed in light while crews work around the clock to close the drainage outlet before the next storm surge fills Lake Pontchartrain. Across the Mississippi River, another waterway remains just as vulnerable to a hurricane's monster tide. Yet owners of homes and businesses east of the Harvey Canal must endure another nerve-wracking hurricane season before the precarious hole in the West Bank's federal levee system is plugged.

from the Times Picayune

New Orleans Schools Charter a New Course

Long before Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, the city's public schools were a disaster. For decades, New Orleans students, most of them poor and African American, posted dismal results in classrooms run by badly trained teachers. Inept and corrupt education officials nearly bankrupted the district and left old, neglected campuses to fall apart. In a country with many struggling urban school systems, New Orleans was widely considered the worst.

from the LA Times

New Orleans revisited

The reelection of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Saturday briefly put his city in the spotlight again. Nine months after Katrina, though, the media and most of us have moved on.
We were there in early May to help St. Paul-based Public Strategies Group produce a working conference on ways local government could do a better job. In the process our group spent hours with the Katrina Krewe picking up trash in a mid-city neighborhood. We drove up and down countless streets, seeing what a place looks like with three-fourths of its homes uninhabitable, with 8 million tons of debris stacked or strewn in yards and streets.

from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees

In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged today that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete and inconsistent patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction, and not built to handle a hurricane anywhere near the size of Katrina.

"The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," said the draft of the nine-volume report.

news story from the NY Times

news story from the Times Picayune

Executrive Summary (68pp) of the report

Army Corps of Engineers' page with the chapters from the report

Feds Cite Some Progress in Hurricane Prep

In the chaos after the next big hurricane, the demands on Washington will be many: More protection against looting and violence, temporary housing for victims, a quick way to sign people up for aid. In short, for everything that went wrong during Hurricane Katrina to go right next time.

from the Washington Post

Satellite Imagery Shows a Sinking New Orleans

A study in the upcoming issue of Nature suggests that parts of New Orleans are sinking faster than previously thought. This NPR interview with the scientists involved in the study discusses the results.

from NPR

This article from CNN discusses the same research report

from CNN

Looking Out for Pets in the Next Disaster

When the tornado picked up Dorothy in Kansas and whirled her to the land of Oz, she was able to take her dog, Toto, along. Many of those who fled Hurricane Katrina last year were not so lucky, including an evacuee who arrived at a Red Cross shelter here with her two Chihuahuas and burst into tears when she learned that pets were not allowed.

from the NY Times

For Many, Education Is Another Storm Victim

For hundreds of children at Renaissance Village, this is their lost year. After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, they have landed in a vast gravel moonscape of government trailers, lacking even a playground.
At Renaissance Village, a FEMA trailer park in Baker, La., some children spent the last school day playing.
All day they play video games, ride bikes or sit at a picnic table, watching men play horseshoes. They are not in school.

from the NY Times

Habitat for Humanity opening 3 houses in Musicians' Village

Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, Fredy Omar -- singer and leader of an award-winning Latin band -- fretted while his New Orleans landlord "went crazy." First, the landlord insisted that Omar, who temporarily relocated to San Francisco, continue to pay rent even though Omar couldn't live in the rental unit. "Then he kicked me out," Omar recalled. Although he was upset at the time, this sort of misery no longer concerns the seasoned musician, who today will celebrate the completion of his house: one of the first three Habitat for Humanity homes built as part of its "Musicians' Village."

from the Times Picayune

'Tempest' performed by lake is a shore thing

The setting is an inlet on Lake Pontchartrain, just before Lakeshore Drive meets Elysian Fields. The stage is sand and the sound effects include the sound of water lapping at the feet of the actors. It's breezy, there is no canopy but the sky, darkened clouds with shards of sunlight breaking through.

from the Times Picayune

Global Green, Brad Pitt Announce New Orleans Design Competition

Global Green USA and design jury chairman Brad Pitt announced today the final details for The Sustainable Design Competition for New Orleans. The historic Holy Cross Neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward is the focus of Stage 1 of the competition. Architects, urban planners, designers, ecologists and students are invited to put forward a creative yet practical vision for New Orleans.

from Building Online

New Orleans storm activity peaks in August and September

After months of hand-wringing and calendar counting, the long-dreaded first post-Katrina hurricane season officially begins today. But if this year is anything like every year since 1855, don't expect to see many hurricanes in the Gulf for the next month or so. In more than 150 years, not a single hurricane has come near New Orleans in June. During the same period, only four tropical storms have hit the city in summer's first weeks. As for July, only three of 28 hurricanes have hit the New Orleans area in that month, with the only serious storm being a Category 3 that hit land in 1916.

from the Times Picayune

Pumps won't be ready for summer

It won't be possible to provide the maximum promised pumping capacity at the new floodgates on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals during what are usually the most active months of hurricane season this year, and perhaps not until the start of the 2007 season, Army Corps of Engineers officials confirmed Wednesday.

from the Times Picayune

An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One

Most people believe that a single Category 3 hurricane, Katrina, devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 of last year. The flood protection system for the New Orleans area was designed to protect the city from a direct hit by a fast-moving Category 3 storm. Yet Hurricane Katrina, a Category 4 storm that did not strike the city directly, overwhelmed systems in dozens of places and cost more than 1,500 lives and billions in property damage. Why?

from the NY Times