NOLA still a total mess

[Jason McCullough]

Depressing as hell (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383661/index.htm). It's still a mess over rebuilding and they're fucking up the replacement levees. I didn't know that the damage is something like 80% due to the levees being badly designed.



All the while, the administration made no public effort to grapple with the emerging consensus that the flood-protection system it was slowly ponying up for was deeply flawed. According to Robert Bea, the Berkeley engineer, current levee designs contain decades-old misconceptions. Back in the 1950s, Congress asked the Weather Bureau to compare the likelihood of flooding in different parts of the country. The agency developed a unit of measure called the "standard project hurricane," and calculated the likelihood such a hypothetical storm would hit a given area.

But Bea says that calculating the chances of a particular city getting hit by a standard hurricane is beside the point. The real issue is determining what you need to do to protect that city from the biggest hurricane it's likely to see. "It's as senseless as saying storms are three times as likely to be dangerous over here, so we need three-foot storm walls," Bea explains. "There's a three in each statement, but they have nothing to do with each other."

Nevertheless, Bea says that after Betsy flooded New Orleans in 1965, the Corps incorporated this standard-hurricane yardstick into its engineering plans. The Weather Bureau flagged this fundamental error as far back as 1979, he says, but the Corps has not yet taken the necessary step of reevaluating its levee designs.
Equally dismaying, in Bea's view, is the Corps' handling of the uncertainties inevitable in planning for unpredictable events like hurricanes. "In the offshore [oil] business I come from, we design major structures in the Gulf for a 100-year wave height." Because that height is an estimate, engineers add a safety factor of four to six for manned structures - that is, they build the structure to withstand a wave that is four to six times as high as the theoretical maximum. (Katrina did not wreck any of his platforms, Bea notes.)

By contrast, he says, the safety factor for New Orleans levees is 1.3. Surprised by this low standard, Bea and the NSF engineering team traced it back to the 1940s, when the Corps used a 1.3 safety factor to protect agricultural land - cows, in other words - against flooding. By applying the same standard to city levees, he says, the Corps has effectively been treating the people of New Orleans "as if they were as valuable as cattle."

In spring, Bea visited a levee section under repair in eastern St. Bernard Parish and learned from the project manager that the levee was not going to be sheathed in concrete: "It was just a hill of dirt." From the Corps he learned that the levee was simply being rebuilt to its previous design.

"At that point they kind of shorted out intellectually. I suddenly saw how the engineers in the New Orleans district got trapped into this. These are not noncaring people, they're not evil, and they're not stupid. When they were first building the levees [in the 1960s], there was 100 miles of marshes between them and the Gulf of Mexico. Now those wetlands have disappeared. By letting the marshes wash away, we're turning New Orleans into a coastal city. They need seawalls there, and they're not getting them."

The levees could be rebuilt from the ground up, Bea says, "but someone in the federal government would have to ram through the solutions, and I'm not seeing that person." In a 6,000-page report released June 1, the Corps formally admitted its mistakes were responsible for the levee failures.
"When that happened, I didn't see the President get up and say, 'We're not going to let this stand,' " Bea says. "Did you?"

[arctangent]

It would be a lot cheaper in the long run to resettle everyone now living in low-lying areas in NO to higher ground than to rebuild the entire city to a hurricane-safe level.

[DeepT]

I was thinking about this the other day. Its a good thing that we have had no Hurricanes this year. It is a good thing there has been a high altitude wind stream sitting over the Caribbean sea acting like a band-saw which has decapitated every tropical system entering the area. It has been there all season.

I wonder how much longer our luck will hold.

[AndrewM]

It would be a lot cheaper in the long run to resettle everyone now living in low-lying areas in NO to higher ground than to rebuild the entire city to a hurricane-safe level.

I think all the parts above sea level are already developed, so you'd have to get them to move somewhere else. But yeah, I think there are federal programs based on this idea, where they buy flood-prone land from people to keep it from being redeveloped.

[Enidigm]

We need central leadership during a time that we have none? Is it much of a suprise? US leadership positions - on both federal and state levels - have been filled with demagogues and ideologues whom have little capacity for governance. Bush is so used to letting the "system" - all the hardworking people beneath him - fix everything for him he's like a fish out of water when that system fails and the necessary leadership has to come directly from his pen.

[JeffL]

It's easy to blame Bush, and his folks did screw up, but this has been an issue that has been known for a long time and been brought up for years and been ignored beyond talk for years. I honestly don't know why. When I lived close to NO people were talking about what a disaster this would be, the probability that the levees wouldn't do their job, the lack of an evacuation plan that anyone would follow, etc. but that no one was doing anything about it, and that was many years ago. Again, I have no idea why it was never considered a high enough priority for real action to be taken.

[Enidigm]

It's easy to blame Bush, and his folks did screw up, but this has been an issue that has been known for a long time and been brought up for years and been ignored beyond talk for years. I honestly don't know why. When I lived close to NO people were talking about what a disaster this would be, the probability that the levees wouldn't do their job, the lack of an evacuation plan that anyone would follow, etc. but that no one was doing anything about it, and that was many years ago. Again, I have no idea why it was never considered a high enough priority for real action to be taken.

There's no doubt that's true. Someone on a state or federal level has to take charge of the situation now, though.

[shift6]

Except for Clinton who had no ability to make any changes whatsoever. How dare you threaten the sacred cow, jeff!

[Rimbo]

The problem with NOLA is the same problem you have with e.g. food aid certain third-world countries; corruption permeates the state and local governments so thoroughly, and the criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large, that almost no amount of aid can actually get through.

We've seen this all within the past year; just ask people who opened their cities for the refugees, only to see their crime rates triple overnight. Remember the police going through the stores "making sure nobody was looting" with a handful of their favorite DVD's and electronic components, just like everyone else. (Hey, I bet if you wave that copy of "Bad Boys 2" at the other looters, they might stop what they're doing. For two seconds.) Look at how the state and local government allowed this situation to exist for 40 years without forming any kind of plan. Look at how they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off when the levee broke.

And the bozos who live there actually re-elected chief headless chicken, Ray Nagin.

Why the hell would they expect anything to get done now, when he was completely unable to do anything positive before?

[bago]

Grabbing fat sacks of federal cash is an american tradition! Why do you hate america?

[RepoMan]

I wonder how much longer our luck will hold.
Probably the rest of the year and maybe into next year. But I bet 2008 is a fucking doozy.

And yeah, it looks like New Orleans was becoming a feral city even before Katrina. I love the headlines today about how high the Texas crime rate has been, because in New Orleans they would just bounce criminals right back out onto the streets, and now those felons are shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that they're actually getting busted!

I think the bottom line is simply that no one cares enough to spend the money to make New Orleans truly secure. No one cared before, and no one cares now. The writing's on the wall -- bad decisions made decades ago caused the wetlands to wash away, and building 20 foot seawalls is more than anyone at the federal level wants to bother with. (And obviously the state itself can't afford it.)

Sorry NOLA, nice knowing you. I give you two more big hurricanes before you're nothing but a decaying shantytown.

[Rimbo]

And yeah, it looks like New Orleans was becoming a feral city even before Katrina.

FWIW, I think a large portion of GWB's inattentiveness to the plight of NOLA stems from this point of view. I myself have a lot of trouble mustering up concern for the town's future: I'm concerned about the innocent victims, but there wasn't a whole lot of innocence left.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

So they were all just banbers anyway?

[Jason McCullough]

The criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large

Really? What percentage is that?

[Rimbo]

New Orleans has a high violent crime rate. Its homicide rate has consistently ranked in the top five of large cities in the country since the 1980s along with Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Louisville. In 1994, 421 people were killed (85.8 per 100,000 people), a homicide rate which has not been matched by any major US city to date. source (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8999837)

[Phil_Stein]

Also from Rimbo's article:

"But in recent years, the city’s homicide rate has climbed again to nearly 10 times the national average."

It certainly appears they had a major crime problem pre-Katrina...

[Unicorn McGriddle]

A sample of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Rimbo reveals that two-thirds of them are serial killers. We should execute them all.

[Ben]

We've seen this all within the past year; just ask people who opened their cities for the refugees, only to see their crime rates triple overnight.

Cite?

[Jason McCullough]

source (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8999837)

Oh forgive me, a 0.8% murder rate (probably the result of 0.1% of the population or less) certainly justifies declaring the entire area hopelessly corrupt and evil. The other 99.2% will just have to eat it.


The problem with NOLA is the same problem you have with e.g. food aid certain third-world countries; corruption permeates the state and local governments so thoroughly, and the criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large, that almost no amount of aid can actually get through.

[Rimbo]

Cite?

The news articles about this were ubiquitous post-Katrina.

[MikeSofaer]

The other 99.2% will just have to eat it.Don't be silly. Had there been even ten righteous men, the city would have been spared.

[Supersport]

Except for Clinton who had no ability to make any changes whatsoever. How dare you threaten the sacred cow, jeff!


It has been 6 years since Clinton was in office. When are people gonna give it a rest?

10 years? 20 years? 30 years?

Really call a spade a spade here and stop trying to deflect the arguement via Rush Limbaugh tactics and just admit that Bush, FEMA, State and Local governments screwed up bad.

[Rimbo]

Oh forgive me, a 0.8% murder rate (probably the result of 0.1% of the population or less) certainly justifies declaring the entire area hopelessly corrupt and evil. The other 99.2% will just have to eat it.

Of course; as everyone knows, Louisiana passed a law abolishing all other forms of crime in the New Orleans area in 1973 with the "Angel Act." From that point on, all other forms of crime -- from violent acts such as rape and assault to shoplifiting, jaywalking and petit theft -- stopped within three years.

However, other states began to feel jealous (and oddly suspicious) whenever Louisiana would report their crime rates. As a result, in 1981, they passed the "Crime Rate Fudging Act of 1980" (yes, I know, don't ask) whereupon they would take the national averages and submit values +10%/-5% for all statistics, using the Commodore PET housed in the LSU Supercomputing Center.

The lone exception to this was murder, which due to nepotism and corruption, was somehow allowed to not be banned, and for which statistics remain accurate.

So, of course you're right; I'd just forgotten my Louisiana state history.

[Damien Falgoust]

Cite?After Welcoming Evacuees, Houston Handles Spike in Crime (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/05/AR2006020500884.html)

After Katrina, New Orleans Crime Moves to Other Cities (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1320056)

Katrina's Latest Casualty: When it comes to violent crime, New Orleans' gain may be Houston's loss (http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1154134,00.html)

[Stroker Ace]

That explains Miami's crime rates too: displaced New Orleanians.

[Damien Falgoust]

"While Houston’s murder rate is up 23 percent for all of 2005, it spiked 70 percent in November and December compared to last year’s levels. At least 35 percent of Houston’s December increase in homicides—five of 14 over last year’s level—directly stemmed from the presence of Katrina evacuees." Cite (http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2006-01-04ng.html).

[Stroker Ace]

Those numbers are small enough to be insignificant, the refugees are arguably under stressful conditions, etc. etc.

[Damien Falgoust]

Keep making them excuses, bubba.

I found this article (http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_houston.html) particularly interesting. For instance:

Numbers are one thing, but fear is another. By late autumn, New Orleans’s underclass wars had come to Houston. The Big Easy’s style of crime isn’t what Houston is used to. Houston gangs—which include international drug traffickers—are violent, to be sure, but their violence makes a rough kind of sense, having to do with money, position in the gang hierarchy, and the ruthless protection of turf and of affiliates. Though New Orleans’s gangs, like Houston’s, traffic in guns and drugs, their main concern seems to be violence for the sake of violence. “Murders are just the way this group of individuals resolves conflicts,” notes James Bernazzani, the FBI’s special agent for New Orleans, who has studied New Orleans’s gang culture carefully. “They graduate from theft to robberies to homicide” as they move through adolescence, he reports. One Houston police officer who has done prison details since Katrina mused to me that “hardened Houston criminals” have complained to him of how gratuitously violent the prisoners from New Orleans are. “That’s an insult,” Houston prisoners snarl when someone asks them if they are from New Orleans.

[Jason McCullough]

No one is disagreeing with "New Orleans has a ludicrously high crime rate." I'm wondering how you get from there to:


The problem with NOLA is the same problem you have with e.g. food aid certain third-world countries; corruption permeates the state and local governments so thoroughly, and the criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large, that almost no amount of aid can actually get through.

In other words, screw 'em, they're all filthy criminals.

[Damien Falgoust]

In other words, screw 'em, they're all filthy criminals. In other words, you don't know how to paraphrase properly, because that isn't anything close to what Rimbo actually said.

If NOLA's government cannot be described as "hopelessly corrupt and evil," I'm not sure any local government can.

[Jason McCullough]

Ok, I guess I have to write better.

No one is arguing the NOLA government is corrupt - I'm wondering how the hell this:


the criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large

turns into this:


that almost no amount of aid can actually get through.

[arctangent]

That doesn't explain this statement, though:


and the criminal element is such a high percentage of the population at large

[Squirrel Killer]

I do so love watching all these guys trolling waiting for someone to slip on the "THAT'S RACIST!" trap. Good show.

[Rimbo]

Jason's absolutely correct that I didn't explain how I got from said lack of innocence to the problem of getting aid through. A problem which I will now rectify by this link (http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/06/14/fema.audit/index.html).

To ensure that the aid got to the victims as quickly as possible, FEMA chose to allow large-scale fraud to occur with the debit-card program. As a direct result of that, future aid to the region and to other regions is going to be hampered by questions about the large-scale fraud that occurred in this instance. This short-term solution has the potential for a long-term negative effect.

So from the beginning to the end, the system is wrong: We have federal government officials who are either short-sighted or apathetic; we have state and local government officials too busy lining their pockets to take an interest in the public welfare; we have civil servants who are too busy participating in the looting and general misbehavior to do anything about it (which was their modus operandi even before the hurricane); and we have "victims" who, on a large scale, used the aid for fraud.

Even if you replace the federal government officials with competent federal government officials, the aid isn't going to get through.

(Also to Jason's credit, I did say that I'm having trouble generating sympathy for NOLA due to the well-documented and well-known lack of innocence among the innocent victims.)

[Phil_Stein]

I think the other issue that the crime data speaks to is this:

Now that a large portion of NO's former population is elsewhere, how many of them would WANT to be back in a rebuilt NO, given that the old one was crime ridden, poor, and run by corrupt politicians, and given the likelihood that a rebuilt NO will just be a smaller version of the same.

[Met_K]

Considering a large portion of NO's former population are leading to Elsewhere becoming crime ridden, poor and run by corrupt politicians I'd be more than glad if they went back to a rebuilt NO.

[Jason McCullough]

I understand the government complaints, I just don't get how "some people committed fraud" is a sufficient condition to make the entire project of aid for rebuilding pointless.

[Rimbo]

I understand the government complaints, I just don't get how "some people committed fraud" is a sufficient condition to make the entire project of aid for rebuilding pointless.

If you gave a beggar money to buy food and later found out he bought drugs with it instead, would you give him money for food again?

[Ben Sones]

Nope. Next time, I'd just give him food.

[Rimbo]

Nope. Next time, I'd just give him food.

Bingo.

Now suppose the number of people you're going to help number in the millions, and they all have different needs; some have enough food, but no homes; some have a place to live, but need medication; some need food...

...and some of them are drug users who haven't had a fix in seven days and are about to kill somebody if they can't fucking GET SOME FUCKING DRUGS RIGHT FUCKING NOW

[Jason McCullough]

I really don't think New Orleans is populated entirely with drug-addled beggars.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

Banbers, Jason. And they're not all banbers, just enough of them that we are justified -- nay, we are REQUIRED to kill them all.

[Rimbo]

I really don't think New Orleans is populated entirely with drug-addled beggars.

I never said it was.

[Jason McCullough]

Then why is a drug-addled beggar your analogy?

[Rimbo]

Then why is a drug-addled beggar your analogy?

If you find out that one drug-addled beggar took your money and bought drugs with it, you can buy him a sandwich next time. What's more, the next beggar you see, you're more likely to buy him a sandwich or a blanket than just give up cash. It depends on the beggar, what the beggar needs. And plus, you have to take the time to buy a sandwich, because you probably don't have one available.

When you have thousands or millions of people displaced by an event, they don't all need the same things. So just giving them all sandwiches isn't helpful. The only thing you can give them is something they can trade for what they need... in other words, money, or something with monetary value.

So the option to "give him a sandwich" doesn't work on a large scale. Given that you no longer have that option, you do have other options equivalent to "give them a sandwich"... but the logistics get ridiculous. Look at all the problems related to the housing vouchers, for one example.

So you've still got this problem that, if you give aid to the NOLA survivors, what isn't skimmed by the local government and "redistributed" by the local civil servants will then be used for mass fraud.

Only a small percent of the aid money actually ends up aiding the people who need the aid. The rest...

Now here's where it gets tricky.

In this case, your "aid" ends up funding and propping up the very things that created the situation in the first place. We saw this in Ethiopia, where millions of dollars in aid money ended up funding the very war that led to famine in the first place; we're seeing it in NOLA now, where the corrupt politicians and civil servants continue to hold their jobs and fail to build levees that can keep NOLA safe, and the criminal element continues to act like a bunch of criminals and make upstanding citizens' lives even harder.

At some point, your aid money does more to fund the bad guys than it does to help the good guys, which just makes life worse for the good guys.

[Jason McCullough]

Ok, I get it now - "the structure results in the money only making things worse?"

I dunno how the Ethopia-Eriterian war factors in though.

[shift6]

It has been 6 years since Clinton was in office. When are people gonna give it a rest?

10 years? 20 years? 30 years?

Really call a spade a spade here and stop trying to deflect the arguement via Rush Limbaugh tactics and just admit that Bush, FEMA, State and Local governments screwed up bad.
Of course they did. In addition to every administration for the last 30 years.

Did you even read the post to which I referred?

[Supersport]

Of course they did. In addition to every administration for the last 30 years.

Did you even read the post to which I referred?

To be honest Shift, I really don't know if you are taking a stab at Clinton or being sarcastic.

If your being sarcastic, then my apologies.

If your taking a stab at Clinton, then my answer still stands.

Anyhow, I like the part about Ray Nagin being on vacation. I wonder if the small business owners and homeowners have that luxury as well?

I am so fed up with leaders not leading by example. I made up my mind about a year ago that in 10 years (enough time to build the nest egg I will need), I will start running for political office.

[Squirrel Killer]

I am so fed up with leaders not leading by example. I made up my mind about a year ago that in 10 years (enough time to build the nest egg I will need), I will start running for political office.
I'm not up on my comparative politics enough to know anything lower than the Bundestag, but in the US, there are low enough elected offices that you don't really need to save money to start a political career.

[Rimbo]

Ok, I get it now - "the structure results in the money only making things worse?"

I dunno how the Ethopia-Eriterian war factors in though.

Ehrm, sorry... I was referring to the efforts to aid Ethiopia in the 80's. Live Aid and all that. Like Bono talks about here in this MSNBC interview. (http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8332675/)

[Jason McCullough]

Oh, that. Yeah, that was a mess.

[shift6]

To be honest Shift, I really don't know if you are taking a stab at Clinton or being sarcastic.

If your being sarcastic, then my apologies.

If your taking a stab at Clinton, then my answer still stands.
YOU ARE BECOMES YOU'RE. I DO NOT HAVE A "BEING SARCASTIC". THANK YOU INTARWEB.

Anyway, I was taking a sarcastic jab at a couple of QT3 posters who, in general, villify Bush to no end (which is fine) while claiming that WJC didn't make any major mistakes or miss any opportunities in office ever, and that everything we heard bad about him was because of evil Republicans blarghblarghblargh. I think WJC did a great job overall.

[Unicorn McGriddle]

It's like the light fantastic... the being sarcastic.

[Ben]

only to see their crime rates triple overnight.

Cite?

[Supersport]

I'm not up on my comparative politics enough to know anything lower than the Bundestag, but in the US, there are low enough elected offices that you don't really need to save money to start a political career.


Completely agree with you squirrel. However, when I do go, I want it to be a full time job so I need to be secure in my finances before undertaking that endeavor.