New Orleans, Bad Policies, Katrina, Iraq and Blood Profits, & more, from HPN
HPN NEWSFriday September 2, 2005
New Orleans rocked by huge blasts
The New Orleans riverfront has been hit by a series of massive blasts, and fires are raging in the area.
… the blast is believed to have involved a chemical factory.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4207202.stm
Iraq Mess Adds to the Problem
by Juan Gonzalez
The battlefields of Iraq seem far removed from the awesome devastation and near-biblical floods unleashed on New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi Delta by Hurricane Katrina.
But these two tragedies are more closely connected than most of us realize.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0901-25.htm
Federal Government Wasn't Ready for Katrina,
Disaster Experts Say
“ … the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting the global war on terrorism.
The disaster preparedness agency at the center of the relief effort is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which was enveloped by the new Department of Homeland Security with a new mission aimed at responding to the attacks of al-Qaida.
"What you're seeing is revealing weaknesses in the state, local and federal levels," said Eric Tolbert, who until February was FEMA's disaster response chief. "All three levels have been weakened. They've been weakened by diversion into terrorism."
See: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0901-01.htm
New Orleans – Background Information
Much of the city is located below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, so the city is surrounded by levees. Until the early 20th century, construction was largely limited to the slightly higher ground along old natural river levees and bayous, since much of the rest of the land was swampy and subject to frequent flooding. This gave the 19th century city the shape of a crescent along a bend of the Mississippi, the origin of the nickname The Crescent City. In the 1910s engineer and inventor A. Baldwin Wood enacted his ambitious plan to drain the city, including large pumps of his own design which are still used. All rain water must be pumped up to the canals which drain into Lake Pontchartrain. Wood's pumps and drainage allowed the city to expand greatly in area. However, pumping of groundwater from underneath the city has resulted in subsidence. The subsidence greatly increased the flood risk, should the levees be breached or precipitation be in excess of pumping capacity (as was the case in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). There were many warnings in the late 20th century that a major hurricane or a Mississippi flood could create a lake in the central city as much as 9 m (30 ft) deep, which could take months to pump dry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans
A Flood of Bad Policies
While Katrina's dead have not yet been counted, it's not too soon to hammer home a point: government policies have real consequences in people's lives.
http://www.alternet.org/story/24923/
How to Create a Crisis
The deplorable looting in New Orleans puts an ugly public face on a crisis that Bush administration policies have made worse.
http://www.alternet.org/story/24926/
Nowhere to run
Posted by Jan Frel on September 1, 2005 at 8:45 PM.
Unlike, say, the death of the Pope, the recovery efforts related to Hurricane Katrina offer no distraction for George Bush -- indeed, he can find the effects of his falied and bankrupt policies from the past five years in the facets of this disaster.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/themix/#24943
Katrina, Iraq and Blood Profits
Six Feet High and Risin'
By RON JACOBS
Beside the fact that the closing guitar riff from Led Zeppelin's song "When the Levee Breaks" keeps running through my head, there is the very real possibility (as mentioned by the editors of Counterpunch in its August 31, 2005 edition) that the unfolding tragedy in New Orleans and Mississippi may wake up the people of the United States to the fact that the only people in the world who seem to be doing exceptionally well are those who run the energy industry.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Katrina and the Army Corps of Engineers: Manufacturing Disaster
By EVAN JONES
The overnight transformation of a vibrant social ecology that was New Orleans into a post-historic wasteland has led to an explosion of opinion. Could it have been prevented, or at least the damage inhibited?
In short, the Army Corps asked for some dough to patch up a city under obvious threat, and Washington deemed that there were higher priorities.
http://www.counterpunch.org/jones09022005.html
The War in Iraq Costs
$190,765,549,880 (and climbing every second)
Instead, we could have built
1,717,664 additional housing units .
http://www.costofwar.com/index-public-housing.html
***************************************************
“Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense,
a theft
from
those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and are not clothed. “
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower; Address 'The Chance for Peace,' April 16, 1953
posted by Annamarie at
4:51 PM
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