Post-Katrina Injustice

On this week's Living on Earth host Steve Curwood talks with social scientists Beverly Wright and Robert Bullard about the issues of environmental justice and discrimination that the poor and black people in New Orleans are facing in the rebuilding efforts following Hurricane Katrina.

transcript and audio at the Living on Earth website

As Houses Rise in the Wild, So Do Fire Concerns

Dennis Watkins wanted a piece of the good life. Several years ago, the Frito-Lay salesman and his wife bought a three-acre plot of land in the San Jacinto Mountains. In May, they completed their house -- a 3,000-square-foot ranch-style abode, 3,500 feet above the smog of western Riverside County.

"We built our dream house," Watkins, 54, enthused as he surveyed his estate. "We planned to retire here. After 14 years living in tract housing with no back yard, we loved the space."

from the Washington Post

NASA looks at sea level rise, hurricane risks to New York City

New York City has been an area of concern during hurricane season for many years because of the large population and logistics. More than 8 million people live in the city, and it has hundreds of miles of coastline that are vulnerable to hurricane threats. Using computer climate models, scientists at NASA have looked at rising sea levels and hurricane storm surge and will report on them at a science meeting this week.

Cynthia Rosenzweig and Vivien Gornitz are scientists on a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and Columbia University, New York City, investigating future climate change impacts in the metropolitan area. Gornitz and other NASA scientists have been working with the New York City Department (DEP) of Environmental Protection since 2004, by using computer models to simulate future climates and sea level rise. Recently, computer modeling studies have provided a more detailed picture of sea level rise around New York by the 2050's.

During most of the twentieth century, sea levels around the world have been steadily rising by 1.7 to 1.8 mm (~0.07 in) per year, increasing to nearly 3 mm (0.12 in) per year within just the last decade. Most of this rise in sea level comes from warming of the world’s oceans and melting of mountain glaciers, which have receded dramatically in many places since the early twentieth century. The 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that a global warming of 1.4° to 5.8° C (2.5° -10.4° F) could lead to a sea level rise of 0.09-0.88 meters (4 inches to 2.9 feet) by 2100.

from NASA news

Mud gusher buries homes, factories

Not long ago Khaarul bin Arafin was a taxi driver, but he lost his car, his house and nearly everything he owned to a vast expanse of mud.

So instead of earning a living by driving tourists around, he now collects contributions from day-trippers who come from the nearest town, Surabaya, to stare at the disaster.

"I only managed to get a few possessions out before the house was buried, so I have lost everything," the 41-year-old said. "We heard a lot of promises about when this mess will be sorted out, but the mud only seems to spread. People are getting really angry."

The gigantic lake of mud that spurted up from deep underground to engulf hundreds of homes and 19 factories in East Java is a depressingly familiar crisis for the geologists and engineers who have been trying for months to stop it, so far without success.

from the San Francisco Chronicle

Report: Corps needs to be candid about New Orleans' future risk

A new independent appraisal of the work to restore and analyze the catastrophic failure of levees during Hurricane Katrina says engineers have not been candid enough with the public about the risks of living in this low-lying city.

The report also said the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers needs to do a better job of establishing the parameters for what it will take to build a system to buffer New Orleans against future big storms.

Engineers with the National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council released their observations Wednesday after sifting through a 6,000-page interim report commissioned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the deluge of New Orleans.

from the Times Picayune

read the NAS report

Missed message, chance along Gulf

The Littles and the Kitchens watched helplessly as Hurricane Katrina battered their homes. Both families waited patiently for an insurance adjuster to settle their losses. Both were sorely disappointed with the outcome.

Then, their paths diverged.

Richard and Cindy Little, a white couple living in a predominantly white neighborhood, filed a complaint with the Louisiana Department of Insurance. Eventually, they won full reimbursement for their repairs.

Doretha and Roy Kitchens, a black couple living in New Orleans's predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward, simply gave up and took what their insurer gave them. They didn't know they could appeal to the state.

from the Boston Globe

Hawaii quake damage to top $46 million

Preliminary damage estimates from the earthquake that shook Hawaii this weekend hit $46 million Tuesday, prompting President Bush to declare a major disaster and pave the way for federal aid.

Damage to seven schools and a harbor on the island of Hawaii, known as the Big Island, accounted for most of the preliminary figure, said Janet Snyder, a spokeswoman for Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim. Damage to businesses, homes, roads and bridges accounted for the rest.

"These figures are going to change radically, I believe," because information continued to stream in, Snyder said.

The damage estimate included $31 million for schools, $8 million at Kawaihae harbor, $4.89 million to businesses, $650,000 to homes, $800,000 to roads and $750,000 to bridges, Snyder said. A statewide figure, including damage to the other islands, was not available.

from CNN

Sewage may be coast's savior

Tens of millions of gallons of treated sewage from New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish would be pumped into severely eroded coastal marshes to the east of the city under a plan to revitalize 10,000 of acres of wetlands by giving them a nutrient-rich jolt of wastewater.

The $40 million project would create the largest "wetlands treatment" system of its kind in the world, according to New Orleans and St. Bernard officials and state scientists familiar with the plan. It is being pursued by the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board in conjunction with St. Bernard.

The project, which is still being refined, calls for diverting sewage plant discharge that now ends up in the Mississippi River and instead pumping it into wetlands in the vicinity of Bayou Bienvenue. That area once was a dense cypress forest that served as a buffer against Gulf of Mexico hurricanes. But in recent decades, lethal doses of salt water intruded into the wetlands and levees cut off nutrients from the Mississippi. The 30,000-acre area has degenerated into scrub marsh broken up by large swaths of open water.

from the Times Picayune

Rising Rent

After putting her two-bedroom apartment in the Bywater on the market last month, Nicole Hartford's phone rang off the hook. More than 25 people wanted to rent the apartment, even though Hartford was asking $900 a month, almost twice what she got for the space before Katrina.

The winning applicant was Marilyn Johnson, an unemployed fast-food worker who was desperate for a place to live. Johnson and her family were recently evicted from their temporary home in Lafayette, where they had evacuated after the hurricane, and were living in a hotel in New Orleans while looking for permanent housing.

Hartford said she decided to rent the apartment to Johnson because she felt sorry for her and because Johnson could afford to pay top dollar; she had a federal Section 8 voucher worth $964 a month in rental assistance.

from the Times Picayune

Land Lost

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped away 217 square miles of Louisiana's fragile coastline, with each turning huge swaths of land to water overnight, accelerating a process that already posed grave threats to coastal communities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

Survey scientists compared satellite images taken in 2004 with similar images from October 2005 to match areas that were wetlands, undeveloped dry land and farmland with what looked like open water several weeks after the storms.

The survey underscores the state's repeated demands that federal officials speed efforts to rebuild the Louisiana coastline, both to protect fragile fisheries and wildlife and to augment the buffer of plants, soils and barrier islands that can slow the approach of killer storm surges.


Indeed, Gov. Kathleen Blanco last week brandished the study, then not yet publicly released, to buttress her lawsuit attempting to block the federal Minerals Management Service from holding additional offshore oil lease sales. The governor seeks to force the agency to first perform a proper environmental assessment of the effects of oil and gas production on the state's wetlands.

"I am using every tool available to me to fight the federal government and will not allow them to continue to disregard the safety and environmental health of our fragile coastline any longer," Blanco said in a statement.

from the Times Picayune

More disaster risk reduction needed

The United Nations relief chief wants world leaders to improve efforts to deal with natural hazards and their impact on hundreds of millions of people.

Undersecretary-General Jan Egeland said Tuesday: "Country after country is proving that you can relatively easily prevent loss of life, you can relatively easily prevent the worst consequences of natural disasters."

But, he told reporters at U.N. World Headquarters in New York, "we all have to do more and last year showed that in both the poor countries and the rich countries more has to be done."

Along with other heads of U.N. agencies, Egeland has been championing disaster risk reduction ever since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when experts said many thousands of the more than 200,000 dead could have been saved if early warning systems had existed and allowed them to escape to higher ground in the hours between the earthquake that triggered the giant waves and their landfall.

from UPI

Surprises in a New Tally of Areas Vulnerable to Hurricanes

Using a formula based on storm intensity, flooding potential, population, evacuation routes and other factors, coastal scientists at Florida International University have determined, “to nobody’s surprise,” that New Orleans has the top spot on the list of East Coast and Gulf Coast areas most vulnerable to loss of life and property damage in hurricanes.

But their second choice is far less obvious: Lake Okeechobee, Fla.

Few people can recall what happened in 1928 when a hurricane sloshed the lake’s water into a powerful surge that broke the earthen dike around it. As many as 2,500 people died in the resulting flood, most of them impoverished farm workers. The hurricane remains the second deadliest ever in the United States — only the 1900 hurricane that killed about 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex., was worse.

from the NY Times

After Tsunami, Intentions to Build but No Road Yet

A $245 million stretch of blacktop intended to be the signature good-will gesture from the American people to the Indonesian survivors of the 2004 tsunami has instead become a parable of the problems of Aceh Province’s recovery.

Construction of the 150-mile road along the devastated coast has yet to start, stalled by a host of obstacles like acquiring right of way through residential and farm land, and, particularly, through several hundred graves of mystical and religious significance.

Though villagers welcome the idea, some have reservations about an American-style thoroughfare with a wide shoulder on either side that will replace the existing ribbon of mostly churned dirt and mud. Villagers say they fear speeding traffic — they have thrown rocks at fast-traveling cars of foreign aid workers — and want to be able to sell snacks and tea from stalls snug by the roadside, as they have always done.

from the NY Times

Problems plague New Orleans schools recovery

Inside a dimly lit auditorium at Rabouin High School on Thursday, sealed boxes of classroom supplies were mounded on the stage while more than 100 students who were supposed to be in class giggled, socialized or just cruised the aisles, under the eye of security guards.

This was not a loosely guarded study hall or lunch period or even an assembly. A month into the new school year, there simply were not enough teachers or substitutes in Orleans Parish public schools for classroom work to have hit stride.

The students didn't lack just teachers. Enrolled at Reed High School, in eastern New Orleans, the students in Rabouin's auditorium also are without a campus until renovation of the flooded school is complete. Meanwhile, they are being bused to Rabouin under the rubric of a time-sharing "platoon" system, in which two schools share a campus until the damaged school completes repairs. Reed students use the Rabouin building from 7 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Rabouin then takes over its campus until 7:30 p.m.

from the Times Picayune

New Orleans Population Is Reduced Nearly 60%

The city’s population has dropped by nearly 60 percent since Hurricane Katrina, far more sharply than recent optimistic estimates had suggested, according to an authoritative post-storm survey released this week.

The population of New Orleans is now only 187,525, well under half the pre-storm population of 454,863, according to the survey, commissioned by several state agencies. The United States Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised those who carried out the door-to-door population count this summer.

“We actually knocked on doors and asked how many people lived there,” said Dr. Alden Henderson of the centers. About 490 households were surveyed, and researchers went to more than 1,100 dwellings, he said.

from the NY Times

Grant applicants coming home

Almost three-fourths of New Orleans homeowners applying for federal grants say they will use the money to rebuild their flood-ruined properties rather than take a buyout or relocate, a figure that far surpasses the state average and may signal the potent recovery of a city still largely mired in decay.

The data, released Tuesday in the most detailed report so far of the intentions of homeowners who have applied to the state's $7.5 billion Road Home program, suggest the potential for the widespread rebirth of New Orleans, even as blight continues to pervade neighborhoods 13 months after the flood, the top official of the Louisiana Recovery Authority said.

"I think that's good news," said Andy Kopplin, the LRA's executive director. "I think it says that folks want to stay in New Orleans, and those who have been dislocated want to come back home, and that's a very positive statement."

from the Times Picayune

Post-storm mental health plan comes with a catch

The federal government has funneled more than $50 million to post-Katrina mental health programs in Louisiana, but the money comes with strings attached. For example, state officials said they're not allowed to spend it on doctors.

Instead, the money is earmarked for traditional social service work, what the field calls "crisis counseling," which can't go beyond five meetings and can't include anything physicians would label treatment.

The money flows freely, however, to newly minted bureaucratic positions, a telephone hot line, massive literature dumps, therapy sessions featuring muffins and coffee, and the recruitment of victims, according to public records and interviews with professionals involved in the project.

from the Times Picayune

Pine beetles just taste of warming's effect: B.C. forestry official

The mountain pine beetle infestation that has devastated B.C. forests is likely to be followed by other new pests taking advantage of rising average temperatures, says the president the Forest Products Association of Canada.

Avram Lazar says the B.C. beetle infestation is almost certain to move across the Rockies into the boreal forest. He believes it shows the need for more public focus on adaptation to climate change.

“We're a little obsessed with this because were paying the price right now,” said Mr. Lazar in a discussion with reporters. “The mountain pine beetle would've died if we hadn't had the last 12 winters being the warmest 12 winters on record.”

from the Globe and Mail Canada

More Hurricane Research Needed

The National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation (which in turn is the main government body for funding of non-medical basic and applied science) has made recommendations that Hurricane Research become a national priority. Given the impact in terms of dollars and human welfare, and the major cities in the US at risk from Hurricanes, they say it makes sense to put more money and other resources into this topic.

read their media advisory here