The cleanup from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was 45 percent finished in jurisdictions that called in the corps, and nearly 70 percent complete in communities that employed private contractors, state records showed. The imbalance remained even when New Orleans, where the cleanup has been particularly complex and slow, was removed from the tally. Across the Gulf Coast, the cleanup was, on average, about 60 percent done, records showed.
nyt

This is the sort of idea that the CPC should be taking into the second half when it comes to questions like healthcare and education - private sector providers tend to be a tad more efficient. That matters.

Yes, school buses work rather better when they leave town early and often taking the poor out of harms way. New Orleans taught some lessons but I suspect the biggest lesson was to follow the plan.

Rita, with wind speeds of 165mph, is expected to make landfall southeast of Houston, near the coastal city of Galveston, the scene of a hurricane that killed up to 12,000 people in 1900. Standing in its presumed path are three of the country’s five largest refineries.
times of londonLooks as if the folks in Texas have learned the lessons Katrina taught. They are in full evacuation and they are making sure the sick, the old and the poor are at the front of the line.

But you can’t evacuate oil refineries.

Update 21/12/05: “While looking for something else, I discovered your web site “Archive for the ‘Rita’ Category” (URL = http://jaycurrie.info-syn.com/?cat=20). In it you list the number dead from Galveston, Texas’ 1900 storm at 12,000. Please correct that to 6-8 thousand.

Sign me a Galvestonian with great-grandparents who remember that storm.

Bush must really have it in for the Gulf coast.

Let’s hope this hurricane breaks down before it hits. But it does not look like it will. The good news is that evacuation should be relatively easy simply because there are not that many people in the storm’s path. And most of those are emergency workers who have the sense and the means to get out of the way.

The chronology of the phone calls described by Broussard came under particular scrutiny by bloggers.

Rodrigue said he didn’t see or hear Broussard’s comments on Meet the Press. When told of the sequence of phone calls that Broussard described on Meet the Press, Rodrigue said “No, no, that’s not true.”

“I can’t tell you what he said that day, why he was confused, I’m assuming he was under a tremendous amount of pressure,” Rodrigue told MSNBC.

“I contacted the nursing home two days before the storm [on Aug. 27th] and again on the 28th of August,” Rodrigue said. “At the same time I talked to the nursing home I also talked to the emergency manager for St. Bernard Parish,” Rodrigue said, “to encourage that nursing home to evacuate like they were supposed to and they didn’t until it was too late.”
msnbc

It is, of course, all still Bush’s fault…

Steyn argues that at the national level Katrina will have exactly zero consequences for the 2006 or 2008 elections. I am inclined to think this is too soon to say, but that’s why Steyn makes the big pundit bucks.

However, as the mayor of New Orleans has just bought a house in Dallas and the evidence mounts that the actual plan for evacuating New Orleans was simply ignored by the mayor and his cronies, there is a sense that the get Bush frenzy of the last two weeks is abating along with the water. Which sets the stage for Bush to recover - or not.

The question is not really Bush’s standing; rather it is the standing of the professional political class in America which has proven itself monterously incompetent at every level. For the people on the ground who are actually dealing with the hour by hour refugee and recovery operation the rush to blame may suggest a pox on all their houses.

Cultural disintegration is present when two or more strata so seperate that these become in effect distinct cultures; and also when culture at the upper group level breaks into fragments each of which represents one cultural activity alone.
t.s. eliot, notes towards the definition of culture

Eliot is writing about culture in an artistic literary sense; but his observation seems apt for the chasm opening between right and left in American politics and the great divide between the political activists in both parties and the public at large. Katrina underscored drifts which began with the Bush/Gore election and which have been widening ever since.

Democratic politics make certain baseline assumptions. They assume rough agreement as to what the broadest aims of government should be, they assume agreement as to the relative status of persons, they assume disinterested motivation in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary - disagreements are about means, not ends. Most importantly, democracy assumes a shared culture robust enough to tolerate its more disparate strains.

For politics to work, the idea of a winner take all world is subsumed to the idea of pragmatic compromise.

The American political class and its media and entertainment arms seems to have lost sight of the essential civility which has to underlie a working democracy.

For the left the world is seen in terms of things which are Bush’s fault, things which might be Bush’s fault and things which might hurt Bush. Katrina went from a natural disaster to a racist dereliction of duty faster than the hurricane swept past New Orleans.

For the right Katrina served to underline the implicit liberal bias in the press and the gormlessness of state and local government.

In neither case did statesmen seem to be seeking to get on with the actual job of saving lives, cleaning up and considering how best to deal with a million refugees and a ruined city and region. The blogs were as bad if not worse than much of the mainstream media in looking for ways to spin a natural disaster for partisan advantage.

It may well be that the political cleavages in the United States have grown so vast that the committed on either side have become Eliot’s two cultures. Certainly it is possible for a politically active American to gain all his or her information from sources which reflect only their particular political position. And, increasingly, as red and blue extend from states to neighbourhoods, it is possible to almost never meet anyone whose politics are different from your own.

I wonder, though, if those two cultures have not, in their passion for purity and isolation from any contaminating thought which might challenge their orthodoxies and articles of faith, inadvertently created a third culture. The culture which, when faced with a million refugees does not wait for the finger pointing to end and the federal/state/municipal aid to arrive but rather gets to work finding clothes, toys, food, water, shelter and whatever else people need, one person at a time.

Despite the best efforts of pundits, bureaucracy, the chattering classes and assorted preachers, a million people were evacuated and have, somehow, managed to survive for two weeks away from their homes. This has not happened by accident and there is nothing in the least political about it. People, individuals, business owners, community groups, fire brigades, housewives, school boards, churches, volunteer organizations and local governments have spontaneously created the basics for a million of their fellow citizens. Some of this was planned, much of it was not.

Fifty years ago, art and literary criticism was read by hundreds of thousands of people. T.S. Elliot, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Clement Greenberg and a host of other commentators made good livings discussing novels and paintings seriously. But, slowly, the critical conversations became more and more technical. The academics drowned wit in waves of footnotes. Criticism became polemical and, shortly afterward, irrelevant to all but tenure committees. The public moved on.

As the left and the right of American political culture cease to be able to speak to each other for lack of common premises there is the very real danger the public will move on again. When you have worked twelve hour days for two weeks as a volunteer finding people shelter in your town, politicians arguing over when an emergency order should have been or was or might have been signed begins to look entirely divorced from your reality.

Unlike literary criticism in our world, politics will not cease in America; but it may be transformed by the first leader who manages to combine realism with a strong sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with politics as usual.

America has a rich tradition of populism and insurgency. From Teddy Roosevelt forward there have been men who simply stood outside the pieties of the existing political system and insisted that Americans deserved better. The gusts of warm air blowing from Washington and the zephyrs of accusation rising from Louisiana look like the sniping of politics as usual to the media partisans on both sides. What they may be missing is the growing realization of Americans that all the chat in the world is not rebuilding a single home or bringing a hot meal to one child.

Common wisdom has Katrina as a blow to Bush and a boon to the Democrats. In fact, it may well be the storm which destroys the rickety edifice of culture war polemics, celebrity finger pointing, (thanks Sean), CYA emergency response and, with luck, the dysfunctional political cultures which support them.

To the envy of the rest of the world, the American Constitution begins with the words, “We the People”. Right now, throughout the South and on up the Mississippi watershed, the people are helping the people deal with a natural catastrophe. As they do they may well be asking how well their politicians and media have served them during this crisis.

Politicians of every party should worry when people start asking questions like that. In the end, it is not any particular politician or political party which is held to scrutiny - it is the entire system and the class of professional politicians which it supports. At the moment that system is about as popular as a ball of fire ants on a New Orleans roof.

Blame enough for all!

“In response to that, consumers were beginning to look at other vehicles outside of large SUVs. The SUV boom has definitely changed. The whole segment has thinned out into several different segments,” he said.

GM reported that despite its elite credentials, the Chevrolet Suburban saw sales drop 28 percent during August. Ford said sales of the full-size Ford Expedition plunged 40 percent.

Toyota Motor said sales of its heavily promoted Sequoia dropped 32 percent in August. Nissan reported sales of the Armada, which is built in a portion of Mississippi spared by Hurricane Katrina, fell seven percent.

Reviewing the August sales figures, analysts at Merrill Lynch said that Katrina could accelerate “consumers’ natural migration away from large SUVs”.

The big auto makers can see the writing on the wall. Ford plans to halt production of the giant Ford Excursion at the end of September.

“There is no question that the demand for traditional sport utility vehicles has been affected by rising gas prices,” Steve Lyons, group vice president in charge of Ford sales and marketing in North America, said recently.
afp

This is a rather obvious story. It is also a repeat of the early 1970s when, in response to an oil shock, consumers dumped the gas guzzlers and bought Honda Civics.

Peak Oil alarmists would like to believe that the world, and suburban North Americans in particular, are going to hit a gas wall where there will simply be no supply at any price. People with a tiny sense of reality recognize that the racheting up of oil prices - with or without taxes - will ensure that people make car purchase decisions rationally. Which will mean a trend away from SUVs and towards more gas efficient cars. They will also look at hybrids and SmartCars and, in extremis, the bus.

Long before the silliness of Kyoto has much bite simply having the gas prices rise will save us Rick Mercer’s tonne.

Now, those are the short term purchase decisions. A little further down the track comes the question of where people are going to want to live. The SUV is part of a gas fueled orgy of anti-urban behaviour. Its natural habitat, the suburban cul-de-sac, is the actual belly of the beast. Ask this question: if gas gets to a couple of bucks a litre do you want to live 40 miles and an hour commute from work?

Creating density in the burbs, probably around light rapid transit stops, is going to be the next reaction to the $200.00 fill up. And that is a long term story with the entire premise of endless, ugly single family development being radically revised.

Sprawl was drowned in New Orleans. With a bit of luck it will suffer a similar fate elsewhere.

Ultimately, survival in a a disaster is a combination of luck, preparation, planning and strong individual iniative. It is not a matter of sitting on a curb hoping help will show up and then complaining when it doesn’t. Like most people I hope that my city, province and country (as well as the international community if it is a world class disaster) will be rushing in to help me and my family and my neighbours.

But I don’t count on it.

With the best will in the world, perfect conditions and a tail wind, government can and will help as quickly as possible. However, do the math: even if my city has a million gallons of fresh water warehoused for an emergency, distributing that water in the wake of an earthquake or tsunami is going to take days. So why not have several water containers already filled and in the backyard? Dropping food to the survivors is a great idea and one which can work well. But a carton of beef stew in cans and few dozen powerbars, some trail mix and so on in a place which is accessible even if your house or appartment collapses make sense. A decent first aid kit, a tarp, a roll of 8m plastic, a bit of rope, a small stove and some blankets and you have improved your chances and your family’s chances of surviving until help can arrive.

That’s the start. Now what? Know your neighbours. Know who lives where and who will need help. But also know who has resources you don’t. Whether it is a chainsaw or a come-along or first aid skills or walkie talkies. In my neighbourhood there are a number of house which have been built on bedrock - they are likely to survive an earthquake where the houses built on fill will not. This makes a difference. There are houses heated with natural gas which are going to be a fire hazard and some which are not. There is an ongoing emergency preparedness process which anyone can become a part of.

In an emergency recovery and survival happens person by person, family by family, block by block: waiting for the government to organize all this is an invitation to tragedy.

Which brings us back to politics. The essential debate going on in the United States at the moment is about whether or not people are entitled to instant response from their government. Are they entitled to rely on government to save them, shelter them, feed them and provide security in the middle of the largest natural disaster to ever hit North America?

It appears that the Democratic interest believes it is absolutely the duty of government and, more particularily, the federal government, to swarm the scene pretty much instantly. The Republicans are maintaining states and municipalities have the primary responsibility while the feds lumber into action.

I believe both parties and their partisans are wrong: the primary responsibility lies where it always does - with the citizens directly effected.

Which will open me to accusations of “blaming the victims” and the like. Well, truth is that a good number of the “victims” refused to evacuate. They made no serious preparations to ride out the storm. They assumed that someone would take care of them. And yes, they were poor and black and all; so what? Simply filling half a dozen large pop bottles full of water the day before the hurricane hit would have avoided dehydration and cost nothing. Standing beside the highway with your thumb out the day before the hurricane hit would have cost nothing and might have ensured survival. (And, yes, I am aware that in the southern United States a lot of cars would have passed a poor black man before someone picked him up; but I suspect someone would have eventually.)

In the end the political issue brought to the forefront by Katrina is whether individuals should depend on the state as a first resort or whether they should be prepared to look after themselves. The problem, of course, is that several generations of a nanny state saps the self-reliance of its clients. That infantile dependency gives us the pitiful spectacle of Aaron Broussard telling the story of a co-worker who kept reassuring his elderly mother that help was on its way right up until she drowned. There the poor woman is in a building with a phone asking him why he didn’t come and get her…So why didn’t he? Or why didn’t Mr. Broussard?

The political lesson to be learned from Katrina is that waiting for the government can be fatal. The personal lesson is a renewed commitment to self sufficency. Water, food, shelter - assume no help for two weeks and get on with it.