From The Nation: New Orleans: Raze or Rebuild? by Christian Parenti:

Though the area is routinely designated a ghetto, the homes of the Ninth Ward are mostly beautiful, century-old capes and bungalows, some with ornate wooden detailing reminiscent of old homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. "They'll have to bulldoze it all," says a visiting New York City cop, surveying the damage from inside an NYPD van.

Is that option--the right's much-touted tabula rasa--inevitable? "They don't have to tear all these down," says Joe Peters, a Ninth Ward tier repairman. "Under that siding, that's all cypress frames and barge board." Peters seems to think that the more solid homes of the Ninth Ward can be saved. Increasingly the holdouts here see the mandatory evacuation order as part of a huge land grab.

I track down Mike Howell, a Nation reader I'd met several days before. "Yeah, this could be their dream come true," he says. "Get rid of all the poor African-Americans and turn the place into Disneyland." After camping on Howell's roof, my colleague and I leave him and his wife our extra water and gas and push on.  . . .

"The evacuation order is just trying to get out the criminal element," says the cop in the classic flat, nasal Yat accent common to the Irish- and Italian-Americans who make up much of the city's white population. He explains how the military is mapping the city for holdouts using helicopters with infrared, and how troops on the ground mark the suspect building with a system of Xs and checks, a code that indicates to the police how many people are inside. The cop finishes his drink, shakes a few hands and rolls off.

Facilitating the tabula rasa agenda is an increasingly militaristic attitude that borders on boyish fantasy and seems to pervade the numerous federal SWAT teams, out-of-town cops, private security forces, civilian volunteers and even journalists. There are exceptions: The young soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and First Cavalry seem much less caught up in it and are quite generous with their ice and MREs.

. . . two vehicle convoys from Blackwater USA--one of the biggest mercenary firms operating in Iraq--cruise the deserted city, their guns trained on rooftops ready for snipers, who have recently shot at a cell-tower repair crew. . . .

Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, Bush-connected firms like the Shaw Group, Bechtel and Halliburton are lining up to get big portions of the $62 billion in federal money that will soon flood the storm region. The fact that some of these companies had been convicted of defrauding the federal government in the past, are under investigation again for corruption in Iraq and were once banned from federal contracting due to unethical practices has not stopped the process.

(Photo of Paretti from the Mother Jones web site. 9 Ward photo from the Washington Post.)

MEANWHILE, from the New York Times:

More than 1,000 displaced residents from St. Bernard Parish crowded the State Capitol to learn about the state of their devastated houses. No one has been permitted to re-enter the area to retrieve belongings or examine their houses. News of the meeting traveled by word of mouth and Web sites, and people lined up for blocks outside the Art Deco Capitol, where Gov. Huey P. Long was assassinated in 1935. Some drove from Houston.

Local officials did not try to hide the bad news.

"You will not recognize St. Bernard Parish," the parish president, Henry J. Rodriguez Jr., told hundreds of residents in the marble foyer of the Capitol. "All you will have left of St. Bernard Parish is your memories."

Now, I've looked at photos of St. Bernard (see for example this one; compare to this image for reference), and I'm not sure exactly what he means. His statement implies that the building are gone. But they're not. Most of them are still standing. Shouldn't it be up to the owners and residents whether to give up on properties in St. Bernard?

I should add that I have looked up lots and lots of specific NOLA area addresses on the Digital Globe (and occasionally NOAA) images, and I have not yet had  to write the "you house is smashed to bits" letter, though I did ask one person if he had a really big side yard (see image below), since the pre-Katrina satellite image was too blurry for comparison. Except in obvious cases, in which a house has been replaced by a debris field, it should be up to homeowners, in consultation with structural engineers and other such professionals, whether NOLA homes that are still standing need to be demolished, not handwaving politicans making sweeping generalizations. The vast majority of New Orleans are still standing and should not be razed without their owner's consent.

For further contemplation of Future New Orleans, see Joel Garreau writing in the Washington Post, whose piece entitled A Sad Truth: Cities Aren't Forever, is an odd combination of hard-headed realism, and politically-naive passing along of the current spin. His last paragraph reads:

I hope I'm wrong about the future of the city. But if the determination and resources to rebuild New Orleans to greater glory does not come from within, from where else will it come?

Let the people go back to their houses to make their own decisions, house by house. They want to do it, but grand plans are afoot that seem likely to preclude that process. In the end, Hurricane FEMA could do more damage to the city than Katrina if let to run its course.

UPDATE: I just this one below. The building that was inquired about looks at best very badly damaged. It is down the street from the Michoud NASA facility, also shown (aerial photos from Globalsecurity.org).

[Note: A guy from Blackwater, writing in the comment section of my other Blackwater post, rightly points out that US citizens operating on US soil are, by definition, not mercenaries. In this, he is technically correct. What we call them, espcially those whose previous Blackwater deployment was outside the US, I leave up to you. -KC]

Transcript from a Democracy Now segment: Overkill: Feared Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans [mp3]:

. . . one of them was wearing a golden badge, that identified itself as being Louisiana law enforcement, and in fact, one of the Blackwater mercenaries told us that he had been deputized by the governor of Louisiana, and what's interesting is that the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security have denied that they have hired any private security firms, saying that they have enough with government forces. Well, these Blackwater men that we spoke to said that they are actually on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and indeed with the governor of Louisiana. And they said that they're sleeping in camps organized by the Department of Homeland Security.

One of the Blackwater guys said that when he heard New Orleans, he asked, “What country is that in?” And he was bragging to me about how he drives around Iraq in what he called a State Department issued level five explosion-proof BMW. This, as U.S. soldiers don't even have proper armor on their Humvees and other vehicles. And so, we also overheard one of the Blackwater guys talking to, we presume, a colleague, complaining that he was only being paid $350 a day plus his per diem, and that other firms were paying much more. And we're seeing many of these Blackwater mercenaries and other private security agents roaming the streets of New Orleans.

Now this opens interesting semantic possibilities. Because once these guys are deputized, the Governor's office can claim that they aren't "mercenaries," but rather "deputies."

(Thanks to Terry K!)

We have a new buzz-word: UN-WATERING BREACHES.

Over at TMP cafe, Reed Hunt (who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, 1993-97) proposes talking points for Democrats on the reconstruction of New Orleans. My only misgiving is that it shouldn't just be the Democrats asking these questions. Anyone who cares about property rights, up to and including the otherwise evil archconservative Pacific Legal Foundation should be asking question number 4.

Good stuff:

Simply have to investigate, expose to plain sight, reform the Administration's method of reconstruction in the Gulf.

1. Who is in charge? Surely DHS [Department of Homeland Security] is inappropriate. Who is the person who will be held accountable for spending the money?
   
2. Why is any sole source contract let? Is there no way to conduct competitive bids in a hurry?
   
3. Why can't retired business persons, with real management experience, take charge of reconstruction?
   
4. When can we expect the Administration to state its goals, including describing whether and when they intend to have previous residents of New Orleans return?
   
5. Can't we have on-line an accounting of all money spent, to be sure that political lobbying isn't playing a role?
   
6. What will HHS, Veteran's Affairs, SBA, and each other agency do? Shouldn't each be subject to oversight on a continual basis, not after the money is spent?

Go! Go!

(See also my post FEMA Needs to Tell People What It Intends for Their Homes.)

Denis McMahon writes in to say "Hi, I have some maps and photos of the levee breach locations, they might be interesting." And indeed his site is interesting and has the advantage of being created after the fact, so that there is a more orderly progressing of information than in the group stream-of-consciousness document on my site that was created as information was emerging.

The most notable thing on his site is the Army Corps of Engineers repair map which I had not previously seem. He remarks:

The Army Corps of Engineers Map shows multiple levee breaches, and suggests that some were made deliberately to allow water to drain back into the canal system or to the surrounding marshes from inside flooded areas.

I should say that by this point in Katrina-blogging, the words "deliberate" and "levee breach" used in association, are a hot button of mine. I have been emailed a number of variations on the idea that it was in someone's best interests to flood New Orleans and that they did it on purpose. So when I saw the word deliberately I thought oh, no.

But in fact there is something a bit odd about the text on the map. The flow of water at 17th Street has been staunched. So it doesn't get its own note. But the labels say, Orleans East Bank . . .3 Breaches; Orleans East (Citrus) . . . 1 Breach;  St. Bernard Sump . . . 6 Breaches; St. Bernard 4 Breaches. So either the levee system failed in a more complex way than anyone has yet documented, or Denis's interpretation is correct, that some breaches have been created to let water out of the flooded city.

I am astonished at the depths of the political naivete of the Army Corps of Engineers showed by posting that map without an accompanying explanation regarding the nature of the breaches. When my husband was in a store in Chappaqua, New York, yesterday, there was an angry man yelling about someone intentionally running a boat into a levee being the cause of "the" breach. Amid rumors that someone did some of this on purpose, they need to be much more detailed and careful in their explanations.

In fact, they need to publish a timeline showing when the narural breaches occurred and under what circumstances, along with information on these deliberate breaches.

Timeline

I've been getting a number of queries about a breach timeline. I don't have one myself. I was writing to Josh Marshall about making sure he added that info to his timeline when someone emailed me for mine. Here are the levee break entries from Marshall's timeline:

Monday, August 29:

Shortly before 8:00 AM CDT: Storm surge sends water over the Industrial Canal. Soon afterwards, Army Corps of Engineers officials believe "a barge broke loose and crashed through the floodwall, opening a breach that accelerated flooding into the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish."

8:14 AM CDT: The National Weather Service New Orleans office issues a flash flood warning stating there had been a breach in the Industrial Canal levee with 3 to 8 feet of water expected in the 9th Ward and Arabi.

Late morning: 17th Street Canal levee is breached.  Other reports place the breach much earlier.  According to Knight-Ridder, a National Guard timeline places the breach at 3 AM, three hours before the storm made landfall.

2:00 PM CDT: City officials publicly confirm breach of 17 Street Canal levee.

Tuesday, August 30:

Late morning: 17th Street Canal levee is breached.  Other reports place the breach much earlier.  According to Knight-Ridder, a National Guard timeline places the breach at 3 AM, three hours before the storm made landfall.

2:00 PM CDT: City officials publicly confirm breach of 17 Street Canal levee.

And from another timeline, Think Progress, there are a couple of items on the 28th:

AFTERNOON — BUSH, BROWN, CHERTOFF WARNED OF LEVEE FAILURE BY NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER DIRECTOR: Dr. Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center: “‘We were briefing them way before landfall. … It’s not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped.’” [Times-Picayune; St. Petersburg Times]

LATE PM – REPORTS OF WATER TOPPLING OVER LEVEE: “Waves crashed atop the exercise path on the Lake Pontchartrain levee in Kenner early Monday as Katrina churned closer.” [Times-Picayune]

And of course everyone already knows about this item from the 30th:

MIDDAY – CHERTOFF FINALLY BECOMES AWARE THAT LEVEE HAS FAILED: “It was on Tuesday that the levee–may have been overnight Monday to Tuesday–that the levee started to break. And it was midday Tuesday that I became aware of the fact that there was no possibility of plugging the gap and that essentially the lake was going to start to drain into the city.” [Meet the Press, 9/4/05]

You knew that already, but I can't quite wrap my head around the fact that the timestamp on my first blog entry about the levee breaches is Tuesday, August 30, 2005 at 11:30 AM. It's like a story out of the Onion: A Westchester housewife is on task before the director of Homeland Security even knows that there's a problem. Surreal.

UPDATE: Rafe, via email, sends links to the technical discussion:

• Surge, breach and a 26-foot-deep gouge (Times-Picayune)
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers moves forward in disaster recovery efforts (new release)
• Corps prepares to breach levees to help drain N.O. areas (pdf)

From Robert Reed's story, "Dallas: an Essay":

I was in my mid-twenties, and I was a desperately old man, always tired, suffering from peculiar aches and persistent black moods and days when I accomplished nothing but sleep.

From the Times-Picayune: Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee commandeers Sam's & Wal-Mart stores

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said he has "commandered" the Sam's and Wal-Mart stores in the parish and ordered them to open as soon as possible.

Lee said he took the action after he learned that a Wal-Mart store wanted to open recently but was told by FEMA officials that it could not. . . .

Lee said he gave handwritten notes to Wal-Mart stores in Harvey and Kenner saying they were ordered to open as soon as possible. Lee said Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed with the decision.

Lee said anyone from FEMA who tries to close either store will be arrested by deputies.

From the AP:

BATON ROUGE, La. - Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, the singer and guitarist who built a 50-year career playing blues, country, jazz and Cajun music, died Saturday in his hometown of Orange, Texas, where he had gone to escape Hurricane Katrina. He was 81.

Brown, who had been battling lung cancer and heart disease, was in ill health for the past year, said Rick Cady, his booking agent.

Cady said the musician was with his family at his brother's house when he died. Brown's home in Slidell, La., a bedroom community of New Orleans, was destroyed by Katrina, Cady said.

"He was completely devastated," Cady said. "I'm sure he was heartbroken, both literally and figuratively. He evacuated successfully before the hurricane hit, but I'm sure it weighed heavily on his soul.

(Photo from the Texas Music Project.)

It is worth noting that a strong emotional attachment to one's home and community is not something unique to musicians. Many people are feeling the way he felt all at once.

His website, not yet updated to reflect his death, has the following message:

Dear family, friends, and fans,

Gatemouth Brown and his family evacuated the New Orleans / Slidell area shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and made it safely to his hometown of Orange, Texas. However, due to hurricane damage, Gatemouth lost his home and all of his belongings. In an effort to raise money to help pay for his relocation to Austin, Texas, and to help pay for his medical expenses, living expenses, and the replacement of his instruments, Gatemouth Brown's Disaster Relief Fund has been established. To donate to the cause, you may send assistance in one of two ways:

Donations by credit card or debit card may be made via PayPal.

Donations by check or money order may be mailed to:

Gatemouth Brown's Disaster Relief Fund
(c/o Celeste Biles)
3529 Cannon Road, Suite #2B, #611
Oceanside, CA 92056

(Make checks or money orders payable to "Gatemouth Brown's Disaster Relief Fund". All proceeds will be forwarded to MusiCares in Austin, Texas and will be distributed to Gatemouth for his medical and living expenses.)

Thank you for any help you can offer. Check back regularly for updates on Gatemouth's situation and to find out about benefit concerts in the Austin area.

Sincerely,

Family and Friends of Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

I really need to use NOAA's aerial photos of greater New Orleans, and as I have said before, I hate the NOAA interface. Since my dream of a clickable interface for the NOAA photos has not yet come true, nor my dream of a Mac version of Google Earth, I'm setting up this page as my own personal index to  the NOAA photos, to which I will make additions as I go along.

Here's how it will work:

1. I'll make a thumbnail image (with a larger thumbnail if you click on the small one),
2. write a little description, and
3. give approximate GPS coordinates if I can get them. 
4. Time stamp information is highly desirable.

The highest priority are those areas of New Orleans that are not covered by the Digital Globe 8/31 10 AM satellite photos. This overview of the Digiatl Globe images shold give you a sense of the problem:

They don't cover enough of New Orleans and also it is hard to get information on nearly communities.

Contributions (by which I mean submissions for inclusion) are welcome and encouraged via email at kathryn.cramer at gmail.com.

I'm posting one now, and will post more later.

1. St. Charles Avenue, including the Loyola university stadium. This area is not covered by the Digital Globe 8/31 10 AM images available via Google Maps.

Just thought I'd share a couple of photos taken at the Marshfield Fair in Marshfield, Massachusetts in mid-August. First of all: The Execution of Elmo (found art; I videotaped it and then made David go take a picture).


. . . and First Prize in the Vegetable Sculpture Contest (true fact).

In the comments, a reader named Tim (the same fellow who provided the clear anaylsis of how levees break) provides this lucid presentation of the Galveston disaster and its relationship to our current disaster. (Photos from NOAA.)

We are witness to a terrible disaster beyond any in US history, with the single exception of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane in which 6,000 to 8,000 or more people died when a hurricane storm surge swept over the island.

Sadly, many of those people died because of one man -- Isaac Cline.

Isaac Cline was the chief meteorologist of the US Weather Service Bureau in Galveston in 1900.

He advised the citizens of Galveston that the island was not in danger of being overwashed by the storm surge, and also believed that his home, which he constructed, was "hurricane proof." He also opposed the buiding of a seawall to protect Galveston.

Sadly, he was wrong on all counts. Although he survived the storm surge, his house along with his wife and many who had sought refuge in it did not.

Some see Cline as a proud, arrogant man who refused to believe a hurricane of such intensity could sweep across the island as it did. Further, he stridently discouraged plans to build a seawall to protect Galveston from storm surges. Based largely on his advice, the city decided not to build the seawall.

Cline, whatever his true place in history, bore the distinction of being the one man most blamed for the disaster.

To his later credit, he devoted much time and energy to encouraging others to implement protective measures, many of which were responsible for saving New Orleans and other Mississippi cities from later disastrous storm surges.

Galveston built its seawall soon after the 1900 storm, and it served to protect them against a similar hurricane years later.

If there are lessons to be learned here that ar relevant to the Katrina disaster, I suppose that the failure of imagination on the parts of Cline, the city officials and the NWS which are parallel to the lack of preparations in New Orleans in light of all the well known risks posed to N.O. by hurricanes may be the most important lesson of all.

As regards the sad state of affairs in New Orleans and Mississippi, there appears to be an ongoing failure of imagination, or more to the fact, a failure to realize and respond.

Yes, it is very sad and very bad what has happened and what is still happening. Will we ever get over it? I hope the victims, the survivors will, in the sense of recovering and going forth with their lives.

I hope we, the rest of the country as well as the city, state and federal agencies and governments, do not "get over" it, meaning I hope we learn and remember and work to prevent a recurrence of such disasters on the gulf coast as well as all other locales.

The sadness does pass in time, or diminish some. Anger, too. But the memory remains, most strongly for those who suffered. As for the rest of us, we owe it to them to remember as well.

I don't know if this helps you any, but we have come through many trials before and emerged to carry on, and with knowledge sore learned, we often carry on better than before.

So it has been, and so it will be again. History bears witness to this, yet each time we are presented with a new chance to do better. So, pray for the suffering and hope for the future, and always remember.

Via email, he also suggests some links:

• MSN Terra server -- USGS topo/urban areas/aerial photo (archive only)
• DigitalGlobe | An Imagery and Information Company ( a few daily free images)
• USGS Geography: The National Map
• National Atlas home page (a USGS mapping resource with selectable thematic layers)
• EO Newsroom: New Images - Flooding in New Orleans (Earth Observatory satellite)  -- good for a few images
• Visible Earth: Home
• NOAA Home Page - Satellites Theme Page (access to numerous satellites)

I suppose I should add that my ancestors tended go through immigration in Galveston, not Ellis Island. I do not know whether I am directly related to any of those who perished in the 1900 hurricane, but it is not unlikely given the place and time.

The fate of Perdido St., gleaned from the best set of New Orleans photos I have yet seen on the Internet, Five Days with Katrina:

(Are there any bad street names in New Orleans? I've looked up many many addresses by this point, and there hasn't been a bad street name in the bunch.)

A reader who is a physical geographer has sent me an essay and photos explaining how and why levees fail:

Understanding the levee breach: a brief discussion of how the 17th Street levee canal containment wall failed.

The levee is earthen.  The canal containment wall rests on, and is partially embedded in the earthen levee.  This wall is formed by a series of preform concrete panels joined end-to-end.

The strength of the wall depends on the underlying support of the levee, and the strength of the attachments between individual panels.

Those are the Achilles heels of the wall, if you will.

When high water pressure due to high water levels, i.e., flood or surge, occurs, the following can occur.

One, water infiltrates the earthen levee.  When the earthwork is loaded with water, hydrologic pressures weaken the frictional forces within holding that earthwork together.  Enough water will cause the earthen levee to slump as loosened soils move apart.  Equally, the weakened earthen levee is more likely to be pushed or "blown out" by water pressure both from hydraulic pressure within the soil and from the flood water pushing  laterally against it.

Once weakened to the point of slump or failure, the earthen levee no longer supports the panel or panels above.  At this point, the panels are under the stress not only of water pressure pushing against them but also the force of gravity pulling down.

The preform concrete panels can withstand considerable pressure over their surface, and can withstand far more force than the attachments between the panels.

Bereft of support from below when the levee slumps or fails, the panels are bound to fail if sufficient water pressure pushes against them, and when they fail, they will almost certainly fail at the attachments -- individual  panels will not break, but will tear away from their sister panels because the joints are the weakest point.

This seemingly overlong description is actually grossly simplified and doesn't go into actual pressures, etc., but I offer it to you so you can understand what you are looking at when you view pictures of the breach and wonder why the break looks so "clean." 

Likewise, when others post to your site, I hope they can look at my composition and come to a basic understanding.

I hasten to add one final thing.  Where the panels fail is a matter of site and situation, and the result of one of the many amazing properties of water, namely its ability to find the weakest point in any formation, be it mountain or molehill.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: In the midst of all this mess, I got an email from one of the folks at Wolfram telling me about their lovely new Internet widget WolframTones, which is essentially the aesthetics of A New Kind of Science rendered as sound. One of the potentially revolutionary strengths of Mathematica is it's ability to render mathematics as sound, allowing us to gain greater understanding of math using our faculties for appreciating and understanding music. I've been looking into this myself, reading up on the neurology of math. One interesting book on this subject I have in hand is Functional Melodies: Finding Mathematical Relationships in Music by Scott Beall.

But what is special about the Wolfram version, and sets it apart from other attempts to integrate mathematics and music, is that it takes on the gnarly natural mathematics derived from Wolfram's attempt to parse the complexity of the geometry of nature. The piano selections remind me of Philip Glass's "Closing," which I think of as the best Thinking Music I have in my iTunes.

I had a fairly thorough look through the FEMA website, and no where could I find any mention of any plans to tell people FEMA's intentions for their homes. There are instructions for registering a claim with FEMA, but it is not clear to me what FEMA does for you once your claim is registered. Is this simply a mechanism for receiving aid money? Or does their attention to your claim involve keeping you updated on whether they plan to tear down your neighborhood? Anyone know?

Over the weekend, a reader made what seemed to me a really good suggestion, though I didn't yet understand at the time how good a suggestion it was:

Please consider contacting the USGS to have updated satellite photos made available for New Orleans citizens, their families and friends - so that the conditions of their neighborhood can be evaluated from their distant locations while awaiting permission to return home. This may take weeks. It would put many minds at ease (or make the worst known, not better, but less harsh than the wait to see it firsthand).

Make it so, Kathryn. Use what contacts and influence you have to make this idea understood as an important technical tool and its use as a social service.

This will also help FEMA recovery efforts.

There aren't enough satellite and aerial images publicly available to accomplish what he suggests. But the general idea, that the US government needs to provide people information about their homes, is a good one.

Clearly, some of the houses are a total loss and need to be torn down. On some portions of satellite images houses formerly aligned in neat rows now look like they were casually dropped and haven't been lined up yet. Those homes are gone. There is no question that they need to be replaced. But many others, some in quite deep water, may well be reparable. The question is this: How much of New Orleans does FEMA plan to restore, and how much does it plan to simply replace. And if the houses are replaced with something else, are they to be replaced for their original owners? Or will the land be taken by eminent domain and redistributed?

One thing I did find on the FEMA site was a news release detailing the FEMA time-line for federal funding of "debris removal":

State and local governments will be reimbursed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency for 100 percent of Hurricane Katrina eligible debris removal costs incurred during the sixty days following President Bush’s federal disaster declaration, from August 29 through October 30th, 2005.

Examples of eligible clean-up include removal of debris from public rights-of-way to ensure safe passage and debris removal from public property to eliminate health and safety hazards.

Removing the massive debris left by Hurricane Katrina is a cooperative effort between local communities, state governments, federal governments, and state and federal agencies.

It's not clear to me whether this time-line applies (or even could be applied) to the cleanup of New Orleans. But now that Michael Brown is out of the way, presumably some plan for the future of New Orleans is coming together.

Whole neighborhoods will need to be torn down entirely. We know this. It's obvious from up there in orbit where Digital Globes satellites live. But how many neighborhoods? And who will decide? Will FEMA tell you in advance if your house is to be razed, or only after the fact? FEMA needs to make its plans public as soon as possible.

The data tying specific New Orleans addresses to GPS coordinates and aerial and satellite images exists. I've been using it all week. FEMA needs to provide us with their overlay for the map of New Orleans before they start the bulldozers. My personal recommendation to whomever is now in charge of the restoration of New Orleans is that as soon as they have a map showing what areas of the city the plan to tear down, that they release it to the public and to the media so that it can be integrated into the same tools the public has been using to check on the storm damage to their homes. Specifically, I would like to see a publicly published map that could then be integrated into the Google Maps and Google Earth interfaces. Also, FEMA should license this same technology, for use on its own website, to create an Internet site where people can type in their addresses and receive a detailed report on what FEMA plans for the area.

If FEMA goes in with the bulldozers and starts razing areas without either informing the property owners and residents, nor allowing them back in to get their possessions, there will be mass panic. I hope that whoever takes over for Michael Brown has the sense to do better than that.

[UPDATE: See new post, Jeremy Scahill: "one of the Blackwater mercenaries told us that he had been deputized by the governor of Louisiana."]

I've spent days scrutinizing satellite photos of New Orleans, helping people check out their houses. Inevitably, if they or their neighbors had a swimming pool, the turquoise blue of the pool visible on the pre-Katrina image is black on Digital Globe's shots from August 31st 10 AM. Also, as I said in a previous post, I was pretty certain that certain corporate names, familiar from the mercenary industry in Iraq, were going to turn up in New Orleans. So this evening I got an email from Patrick Nielsen Hayden informing me that Blackwater's in New Orleans.  Bodyguards to the coalition, they have a certain cowboy reputation among the private "security" firms. The style of their website tends to be a little over-the-top macho in comparison to other private military firms, whose websites tend to mimic accounting firms, as though it was sercurities (in the plural) they were selling, rather than "security."

And, yes, those were Blackwater guys who died in Falluja, touching off the public revelation that at Paul Bremer's instigation, Iraq was awash in mercenaries who were pulling down salaries ten times what the American troops stationed there were making. Blackwater. From a novelistic standpoint, it is inevitable that they would turn up in the city in which there is so much water and on the satellite photos it looks like a black stain. And really, when you hire mercenaries, a certain amount of murkiness about accountability is part of what you are paying for. I lost track: were any of the private contractors implicated in the torture documented in the Taguba report ever actually charged with anything? What ever happened to John Israel and Steve Stephanowitz?

Sending Blackwater into New Orleans is the twenty-first century's sad answer to that quaint twentieth-century phrase "send in the marines." It is the public confession that too much of our infrastructure has been "privatized," by which we mean that services formerly provided by government employees accountable to the American people can now be purchased, often at much higher prices, from the private sector, opening up much larger opportunities for war (and now disaster) profiteering. This is not to say that there aren't talented, strong, idealistic young men working for companies like Blackwater. But rather the privatization of these areas of endeavor, in light of the Iraq experience, is part cynical exercise in looting of the public treasuries, and part liberating the government from the burdensome accountability that keeps public employees from behaving like action heroes do in the movies.

Put yourself in the shoes of those frightened, traumatized people holed up in their houses, determined to hang on because what's left of their houses is all they have left in the world. What would you do if one of these big burly Blackwater guys, with sunglasses and a sub-machine gun, showed up on your doorstep and instructed you to evacuate? As nearly as I can tell, New Orleans is awash in rumor. Suppose you had heard that they weren't really rescuing black people, but rather were rounding them up and putting them in concentration camps, something I wish were further from the truth [link via Xeni at boingboing]. What happens if the man from Blackwater reacts badly to your response?

And how much is Blackwater being paid to prance around with guns while firefighters who came for free are used as props for political photo ops?

(Via Attytood, thanks to Patrick Nielsen Hayden.)

A FURTHER THOUGHT: In August of 1955, Hurricane Connie passed through the Delaware Valley, followed shortly by the remnants of Hurricane Diane. This resulted in the Great Flood of 1955. As the late science fiction literary agent Virginia Kidd (at the time of the flood, Mrs. James Blish) told the story, the flood waters rose up to the window sills of the main floor of the house (to a depth of about 4 ft on one side of the house, and much deeper on the other side, as Arrowhead has a daylight basement). The waters stayed for two weeks. Meanwhile, Virginia and her family stayed at Judy Merrill's house, on much higher ground, 3 doors down from the Milford stoplight (for those who've been there). As I recall, Virginia said they spent the whole time playing cards, waiting for the waters to recede. Much of the contents of the house had to be discarded because the flooded houses all had septic systems and the septic systems had been destroyed. But the Blish family still had their house.

But not for long. The US government took most of the houses in the flood zone by eminent domain and tore many of them down. There was a plan for a vast flood management program involving making the whole area a lake. The plan was never enacted. When I worked for Virginia in the late 1980s, we were still sweeping the Delaware River mud out of the floor boards.

Virginia was allowed to rent the family house back from the government for the rest of her life, though if the Feds had ever decided to act on their plan, she would have been evicted. And the house it is where she founded and ran the Virginia Kidd Literary Agency. And when she died a few years ago, the agency was allowed to continue operating in the house, and there they are still.

Why is Blackwater in New Orleans to do work that many others have volunteered to do for free? Two words: Eminent Domain. Think about it.

What is Eminent Domain?
Eminent Domain is how the government takes your property for a public purpose, whether you chose to sell it to them or not, at a price they specify. In Kelo vs. New London, the supreme court vastly expanded the powers of government to take property in situations where it was arguably for a private, not a public, purpose. The American Bar Association outlines it thusly:

The exercise of eminent domain has a central role in urban redevelopment, smart growth, water quality improvements, wild land preservation and restoration, and a host of environmental and energy infrastructure projects.
The Fifth Amendment enjoins: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." This Quick Teleconference will examine the Supreme Court's recently decided 5th Amendment cases Kelo v. New London, No. 04-108 (June 23, 2005) and Lingle v. Chevron, 125 S. Ct. 2074 (May 23, 2005). In Kelo, the Court by a 5-4 majority upheld the City of New London, Connecticut's condemnation of 15 homes in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood for the sole purpose of furthering economic redevelopment around a planned pharmaceutical research facility. The QT will discuss the extent to which the decision allows governmental officials to condemn private property for the purpose of increasing tax revenues and promoting development.

In Lingle, the Court held in another 5-4 opinion that the 5th Amendment does not engender inquiry into whether the regulation "substantially advances" legitimate state interests, as it would with an issue under the Due Process Clause. Instead, how the amendment applies is a function of the extent and duration of the governmental action.

Translation: in situations like Katrina, Kelo vastly expands the opportunities for corporate looting.

ONE FINAL QUESTION: Under exactly whose authority is Blackwater exerting police powers?

See, for example, this passage from a NOLA account on BoingBoing:

We got yelled at some by police and official-types who wanted us out of areas where they were operating. Herding media isn't really their job, but they weren't rude about it (just brusque). The Blackwater employees, on the other hand, were phenomenally unpleasant. Jake has a lot more to add soon, I'm sure, but there's a serious question as to the authority of these mercenaries.

I imagine that FEMA might enjoy an arrangement with them rather like Paul Bremmer had Bagdad. Except that's impossible because of the extremely peculiar legal circumstances under which the Provisional Authority functioned. New Orleans is under Federal, State, and Local law.  There is a state of emergency, yes, but a subcontracted State of Martial Law is difficult to exaplin.

UPDATE 12/11: I just went looking to see why this post on Blackwater from three months ago  was getting so much traffic. It seems there has been an uptick on news coverage of Blackwater lately. One item that caught my eye was a November 29th piece from the Village Voice, Relief at the Point of a Gun:

Among other things, Blackwater's men with big guns can be found guarding the Jewish Community Center on lovely St. Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans, a FEMA recovery center in one of the most recovered neighborhoods in the city, where the gym is open for business and the Salvation Army is giving out hot meals. It is not an area where anyone normally shoots to kill.

"You're not taking a picture of me, are you?" asks a middle-aged man with a military tattoo, a Blackwater hat, and two pistols, who is immediately joined by an even beefier and younger colleague. When asked who they're working for, the older man says, "The federal government. We're providing security."

So, now that it's common knowledge that Blackwater has contracts with FEMA, what I want to know is why wouldn't people who took exception to what I'd written back in September admit the existence of the contract.  Come on, guys. That wasn't fair, now was it?

If you're going to show up to tell the liberal chick in Pleasantville that she Just Doesn't Know, you've got to be straight with me. Those are the rules of engagement here.

Written By Guest Blogger Karen Cramer Shea.

In 2000 the Republican Congress conceived the Iran Nonproliferation Act, which forbids buying anything from the Russians for the Space station unless the President certifies that the Russians aren’t exporting nuclear, chemical or biological weapons technology to Iran. In April our agreement with the Russians ends and we will have to start buying access to the space station. which is now illegal under the ITA.

From the Washington Post

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), chairman of the subcommittee on space and aeronautics is a space station advocate and the author of the law's space station restrictions. Lawmakers added the space station clause as a stiffener. "We wanted to put [everyone] on notice that we should not have high-level cooperation, even in space, if the Russians were using their technological skills to help Iran build a nuclear weapon," Rohrabacher said. "It was a very good idea.

"The Iranians have made it clear they are moving forward on the bomb," Rohrabacher said. "Even though I have more focus than most people on making the space station a success, I am not going to do anything that would signal a weakening of our resolve."

The INA is very much like Cleavon Little as Bart in Blazing Saddles saying “Nobody moves or the nigger gets it” while holding the gun to his own head. Since the Russians seem to be selling nuclear technology to the Iranians, WE will no longer have access to the space station in April. The Russians on the other hand will have seats they can sell to tourists.

This is the dumbest thing I have ever heard any politician do. The congress has a choice surrender the space station to the Russians or repeal the Act and yell from the highest peaks that everyone can feel free to sell nuclear technology to the Iranians. With the Iranians part of the axis of evil and the President sounding like he might go to war with Iran, that is the last thing we need. Repealing the act would look treasonous if we actually did go to war with Iran. Imagine the political rhetoric about appeasement of Iran costing US lives.

Now we either lose our $30 Billion space station or we spend more than that in defense costs to make up for looking weak on Nuclear Proliferation. Tails they win, heads we lose. All because the republicans couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Every parent knows you don’t make threats you are unwilling to carry out. In this case the threat is more of a reward. And if when they passed the act the republicans were willing to sacrifice the station to make a minor political point they are guilty of throwing billions of dollars and the lives of the crew of Columbia away.

By passing INA the Republicans seem to have been acting like children who don’t understand the stakes they are playing for. Now, what ever happens we lose.

Written By Guest Blogger Karen Cramer Shea.

Ophelia is headed to Kennedy Space Center. Maybe God is suggesting that it is time to stop flying the Shuttle.

Written By Guest Blogger Karen Cramer Shea

Katrina was a very powerful but nobody expected its destruction could reach all the way to Low Earth Orbit. The External Tank Factory for the shuttle is in New Orleans. While initial reports were optimistic the continuing deterioration of the situation in New Orleans looks bad for the external tank plant. The reports of looters and fires sound even worse.The satellite photo looks like the area is flooded. (compare to the Google Map, looking at the area to the east of I-510).

The work force is scattered, their homes destroyed, along with the entire infrastructure of New Orleans.  NASA is talking about a delay of the next shuttle launch until May.  I think that is very optimistic.  They may be able to move workers to Florida to modify the tanks they have.

Another year delay in the International Space Station would make completion by deadline impossible. If the Michoud plant is badly damaged how much are we willing to pay to fix it?  This cost should be considered when looking at the cost of the Shuttle Derived Heavy Lift Vehicle since, if the major repair of the facility will not help ISS construction, it should be considered part of the the new launcher. Which may eliminate any cost advantage over, starting from scratch with a Boeing built Saturn 5 derived launch vehicle.

Are any of you out there running Google Earth on a Mac using a PC emulator? The Google Earth site claims you can do it though it will be "slower." I really need a better way to get at the NOAA photos than through the NOAA site. But I'm afraid I would end up with just an expensive toy.

Is anyone out there doing it? How well does it work?

BAG News Notes has been doing a nice job of analyzing media photos emerging from New Orleans.

Certainly, most of the Katrina images last week were unvarnished and pulled no punches.  At the same time, however, I'm wondering how much of what we saw was still edited according to the taste of a mainstream viewing audience (MSVA?) that tends to alternate in disaster preference between sensationalism and denial.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall describes the Bush administration's emerging priorities in New Orleans:

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it's pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration's takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.  . . .

Take a moment to note what's happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what's happening in the city.

This is a domestic, natural disaster. Absent specific cases where members of the press would interfere or get in the way of some particular clean up operation, or perhaps demolition work, there is simply no reason why credentialed members of the press should not be able to cover everything that is happening in that city.

Too bad Karl Rove hasn't taken his frog-march off to jail yet. Otherwise they might not be trying so hard to staunch the flow of inforation.

This morning, CNN reports that 25,000 body bags have been shipped to Louisiana. "This is our tsunami," Biloxi Mayor AJ Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald. But the tsunami happened for the most part to countries with little infrastructure and very little warning. It seems to me more accurate to say that this is our Chernobyl.

Xeni Jardin posted a long account by Jasmina Tesanovic, Serbian native best known for her work documenting war in the former Yugoslavia. Tesanovic writes about visiting the temporary occupants of Austin's Convention Center with great attention to psychological nuance filtered through her experience working on the book The Suitcase: Interviews with Refugees from Bosnia and Croatia:

Who is this old respectable thin woman staring out of the window in silence?

The other old woman is all dolled up; she is sitting in the terrace, chain-smoking, chain-talking. The chair next to her is empty. People come and go and listen to her, but she never stops talking. She has thin legs and a big belly, a pretty old face and fancy sexy clothes: everybody seems to know her. They are offering her stuff and want to help, to carry her, amuse her, bring her music. But she talks and talks only. She reminds me of a raped woman who compulsively talked after she escaped the war zone; she talked sweetly and mildly of everything, even of her rapist... This woman is telling us all how happy she is with life as such, happy to be alive, happy to be here.... I wonder when she will break down, from that chair, from that cigarette to which she is clinging to as if it were a pillar.

(Can anyone who still asks where all the women bloggers are please slink away in embarrassment right now?)

Jasmina Tesanovic, left, with science fiction folk Linda Steele and Deborah Newton at Utopiales, the Jules Verne Conference in Nantes, France last fall.

The LA Times writes about the issue of whether the people of New Orleans should be called refugees or evacuees:

In Houston, where tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims have sought temporary shelter, officials distributed a terse memo Wednesday dealing not with food, lodging or human connections, but with something that in its own way has become just as emotionally loaded: the word "refugee."

"The term is perceived negatively by many of those housed at the Astrodome, who prefer to be called evacuees," said the memo to reporters, which addressed a heated conversation that has echoed in recent days from emergency shelters through the media to the White House.

"I'm not a refugee; I'm an American," said Daphne Carr, 37, who fled New Orleans with her niece, Loasha, 9, and is staying at the Astrodome.

The people displaced by Katrina deserve vastly more respect than they have been getting, but Americans should not deny the commonality that their experiences have with refugees throughout the world. We need to stop telling ourselves that this shouldn't be happening to these people because they are Americans. It shouldn't happen to anyone, anywhere, ever. The fact that they live(d) in the US simply made it less likely. (And if we adopt the term "evacuees," what then do we call the people who were not evacuated, but rather managed to escape New Orleans after the fact on their own. Escapees?) The blanket adoption of that term implies that something was done for them that may not have been.

In a longer post on our ecosuicide, Bruce Sterling remarks:

Over and over last week, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses, and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves.

Nathan Newman has a thoughful post on the role of privatization in this strange new America:

This is the challenge to the Left. Not just demanding accountability for Katrina, but looking systematically at every vulnerable facility or area in the country, and highlighting the hacks and scoundrels Bush has put in charge of our security.

Because SEIU has labor disputes with Wackenhut, they've put the energy into exposing these other problems with the company, so it's a great place to start the investigation. Check out their Eye on Wackenhut site for more.

In the context of Katrina, Dana Milibank also has this story about how private security guards from Wackenhut blocking press access to an HHS building, despite a decision by HHS officials to give them access. As Milbank said, "Thus was the true hierarchy within the federal government revealed: DHS outranks the White House, and Wackenhut trumps them all."

Which of course is no joke. Of course, the private corporate donors to the GOP, who loot the public treasury through their privatization deals, outrank the White House. As with any feudal system, it's the folks with the money who run the system. Government officials, and that applies to Bush, are only their useful vassals.

And the losers are the public who have to live -- and die -- based on the competence of folks like Wackenhut who have been entrusted with the security of our most vulnerable facilities.

As I have composed this post, a little girl in fairy wings kept trying to climb into my lap -- quite a contrast between my setting ans this post's subject matter -- but of course protecting our children is an important reason why the task Newman puts us must be done.

Provide for the common defense. Promote the general welfare. That's what America is supposed to be about.

Can Google Maps please, pretty please, integrate the NOAA photos into its interface? They are in the public domain, so copyrights should not be an issue. I seem to be getting only hard cases (i. e. people who followed my instructions and didn't get what they needed,) this evening. And, as I keep pointing out, Google Earth for Macs still isn't out.

I am hoping to find out about  3501 Apollo Drive in Metairie.  It appears to be pretty dry.  The couple living there are both disabled, one with a walker and the other in a wheelchair.

This is out of the flooded zone, and I'm also not seeing destroyed houses on NOAA maps for that general area I've been able to study. But the area's not covered by Digital Globe. And the NOAA interface for photos bites: the images are not oriented, and you have to remember what image you've just looked at on their difficult-to-parse interface in order to know what next one to move on to. Arg.

I did want to take a moment and comment upon how the science fiction field's social infrastructure contributed to the genesis of the work of collaborative cartography presented here at this blog.

First of all, my general attitude toward disaster response was nurtured by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden's blog Making Light, with its intelligent and fertile comment sections,  where I had much of my early Katrina commentary. A DOS attack on their server aimed at another site shut down their site at just the time the levee breaks were being reported. So I did my own post, New Orleans Levee Break(s) Before and After (originally phrased in the singular). Patrick and Teresa are longtime science fiction fanzine fans and also have been my friends for decades. They both work at the science fiction publishing house, Tor Books, where my husband David Hartwell also works. (I shouldn't forget to acknowledge my ovely wife David, without whom none of this is possible, who has put up with me spending all this time on the Katrina Maps project.)

Once the levee break piece was posted, it seemed to me after a look around that I had the only levee Before & After shots available on the web. So I wrote a note to my friend Cory Doctorow using the BoingBoing submit-a-site page telling him about it.  (Further connections: Tor publishes Cory; Patrick is his editor. When I was pregnant with my first child, Cory jokingly suggested we name him Darth; we chose Peter instead.) Xeni, who was doing most of the Katrina coverage there, picked it up and sent me a band of useful techies. (Also, Ned Sublette, providing some of BoingBoing's other early Katrina coverage, is the significant other of fantasy writer Constance Ash.)

From there, the whole thing took on a  life of it's own.

Internet service over Labor Day weekend provided by L. W. Currey Rare Books and by Joe and Kit Reed.

I suppose I should add that New Orleans hosted both a World Science Fiction Convention and a World Fantasy Convention. Nolacon, the Worldcon in New Orleans, had a number of programming disasters, but New Orleans is (or was) such a great city, that the very charisma of the city saved the convention. Who cared if the infrastructure of the convention had fallen apart. The WorldCon was in New Orleans! We had a great time!

And then there's Jim MacDonald's check-in page and Gary Farber (who was once a Worldcon Chair; and who lived on P & T's sofa for a while; and then in an apartment with a roomate who borrowed some of my furniture). This is a tightly knit little tribe you see. Many fewer degrees of separation. We liked New Orleans.

We pay back.

(I'm sure I've left some science fiction people out. By all means, rush forward and claim credit where credit is due!)

When submitting a request for help finding out abut a specific address please put KATRINA HELP in the subject line. My email address is kathryn.cramer at gmail.com. Thanks.

MEANWHILE: Snopes.com now has a Katrina rumor page. I found it a little disappointing, since it didn't take on a couple of the Biggies that I've had inquries about, but I'm sure in a day or so they'll get around to them.

Dan Mills sent Anne Rice's NYT Op-Ed piece on the nations' response to Katrina, which I exerpt here:

. . . to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.