I should say before I begin, that I have a hard time understanding how this could happen. The story I'm about to relate seems to me more appropriate to old Pompeii than 21st century New Orleans. And before we let certain politicians get too cozy in their new-found ability to actually respond to emergencies, we should realize that not all of the New Orleans bodies have yet been recovered.

Earlier this afternoon, I was informed by a man with whom I had corresponded about the depth and time of the flooding that his relatives' bodies had been discovered Friday by the husband of one of the parish officials who took it upon himself to go see whether these people were still in their houses. I feel a personal responsibility to those to whom I've tried to offer direct help, so I find this news hard to take.

From MSNBC:

Caption reads Water flows through a breach in the repaired Inner Harbor Canal toward the Ninth Ward District Friday in New Orleans.

Anyone got a longitude and latitude on this? (KC approximation: Lat 29.978333240947077, Lon -90.02085221140939.) Anyone want to send me the image on a Google Earth satellite image? Or do some complicated thing like place it on the Katrina image and that on a pre-hurricane season satellite picture?

I think the breach is in the general area of the Florida Avenue Bridge and Surkote Road, as shown below. Can anyone confirm? Here's a closer shot from a screengrab from CNN streaming video:

Leveen clearly broken. The CNN reporter also mentioned another broken levee in the Chantilly (he pronounced it something like Chintilly?) Gentilly area. There are other reports of multiple breaches, but none I can find that name locations.  Here's another view of the same breach.

Above is the Google Maps satellite image of the area before the hurricanes. Below is the Digital Globe August 31st, 10AM image showing one the Industrial Canal breaches. (The bigger one is further south.) I can't tell if the new breach is in the same spot as in the 8/31 image, butit looks to me like it's not.

The New York Times provides the best explanation I've seen so far of multiple breaches, but so far all the images I've seen are of the same one. (We don't have TV reception, so I'm not watching TV.)

One break in the levee was in the lower Ninth Ward, on the east side of the canal. The storm sent e water rising so quickly that it had reached windows of houses up to three blocks east of the levee by late morning. Dozens of blocks in New Orleans's Ninth Ward were under water.

Later today, another break was found in the Upper Ninth Ward, on the west side of the levee.

Here's another shot of that breach found on the LA Times site:

I'm not sure if this next photo (found on the CNN site at 6AM 9/24) is a breach or just overtopping, but it is clearly not the same spot.

UPDATE 9/24, 7:46PM: I see the Washington Post has another view of the same breach, described in the caption as a 30-yard breach on the east side of the Lower Ninth Ward:

When reading Xeni Jardin's new post, Xeni on NPR, CNN: Sonic Weapons in Iraq -- and now, US cities, I had this terrible feeling of de ja vu. Hadn't I just read something very like that, say yesterday, but it was fiction?

In the July/August issue of Analog, Gregory Benford had a story called "The Pain Gun" about a future Middleeast conflict after a nucler war or two in which nonlethal weapons were used in preference to other types so as not to inflame the political situation back in the direction of nuclear war. The story concerns the use of a weapon that causes extreme pain but does no physical damage. I read the story yesterday.

Back in August, Defense Tech had a write-up on "sonic blasters" (aka "Long Range Acoustic Devices"), which apparently the NYPD had ready during the Republican convention and a new "improved" model was being tested by the LAPD.

This device far exceeds anything I'm aware of. Others are childrens' toys compared with this thing. The developer tells us that there are other configurations they believe will allow it to take even more energy. They estimated we were using 15,000 watts, but with a different type of magnet they believe we they can easily exceed 100,000 watts without overheating.

Further, by rearranging the orientation of the magnetic speakers, they can increase or decrease the width of the lobe, as well as decrease the size, weight and power. The device we tested is "full range;" that is, it provided clear sound from about 50 Hz to about 20,000 Hz. But if we were going to use it just for human voice or a siren, or some other specific frequency range, they can also "tune it" to provide maximum effectiveness for a specific frequency range and reduce the size and power, while increasing the range.

Back in March of last year, the Associated Press reported the use of the devices as weapons in Iraq. Earlier in September, Xeni Jardin documented the deployment of sonic blasters to New Orleans. OK, so there's no electricity and you want to get the word out to those hard-of-hearing old folks stuck in the flooded zone.  Is that what the sonic blasters were brought in for? This is from Xeni's article:

American Technology is donating four devices -- three MRADs (medium-range acoustic devices) and one LRAD (long-range acoustic device). The four devices will be shipped out Friday to a Marine military police unit that is deploying to the Gulf States area for disaster-relief efforts.

"We are donating the use of one of our most powerful prototypes, LTPMS-2, for use in Mississippi as soon as possible, because the governor of that state said that the biggest problem they have right now is the fact that they have no communications infrastructure to get information or instructions out to people," he said. "They can very easily put this on a truck and send sound out for a minimum of at least a mile in either direction."

And Blackwater's just there to help get the word out, too, right? Here's more from Xeni:

Vehicle-mounted devices were used by Israeli authorities to scatter groups earlier this year, when Palestinians and Jewish supporters gathered to protest Israel's West Bank separation barrier. Dubbed "The Scream" by the Israeli Army, the device sends out streams of noise in intervals of about 10 seconds. The specific sonic frequencies chosen affect the inner ear, creating dizziness and nausea in human targets.

Is it my imagination, or isn't the use of sonic blasters as weapons to deliberately inflict pain on crowds "torture" as defined in article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture?

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

When sonic blasters are used as weapons, their use is in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. I think the US is a signatory.

Here's a question I just got by email from someone in Louisiana, and I don't really know the answer. So I put it to you:

We have taken in a young Mother and 3 children that are from Westwego, LA. We put them up in our mobile home on the same propety as our home. My question is, who do we need to contact about help with the expenses such as the electric bill etc., as we do not have the funds to last much longer and I won't kick them out?

This sounds like the sort of thing the Red Cross helps with, but is it? Where should someone with limited means turn for help when providing shelter for hurricane victims?

Here are a couple of places I found useful images:

• Digital Globe's photo of Chalmette (6486 X 3883 pixels), and
• the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network has a lot of the NOAA images in the areas of the refineries in more usable form than NOAA, and if you can stand it go to Post-Katrina environmental catastrophe: A Diary of Toxic Injustice and read their analysis.

Josh Marshall had me choking on my coffee this morning with this post:

House-Senate Katrina probe dies as Dems refuse to participate in GOP-controlled probe.

Mammalian biologists cite development as new evidence for late-stage testiculogenesis.

-- Josh Marshall

(I don't usually like political rhetoric involving balls, but I think this is one of the best versions I've seen.)

From the Washington Post:

The Department of Homeland Security recently announced that information provided by illegal immigrants seeking federal aid could be used against them later in deportation proceedings.

"The administration's priority is to provide needed assistance: water, food, medical care, shelter," said Joanna Gonzalez, a DHS spokeswoman. "However, as we move forward with the response, we can't turn a blind eye to the law."

For those of you who read Chinese, here is an article on the Google Earth and the Katrina aftermath in Chinese from the Xinmin Weekly by Zhao Yanyan, and I'm in it. For those who don't read Chinese, here is a very strange translation created by Google's Language tools.

Gently clicks on the mouse, the luxuriant blue color Earth starts to revolve, ever such giant Earth, now actually is all controls in the palm.
Writes a draft / the Zhao colorful swallow king is attractive (reporter)

(Wouldn't it be nice if Google's Chinese translation tools worked as well as Google Earth?)

Lucy Kemnitzer writes in the comment section:

Our own experiences after the Loma Prieta quake is that outsiders are very much into destroying damaged buildings. FEMA had a program where they'd bulldoze your house for free for a limited time. Getting buildings properly assessed would take much longer, and a lot of buildings were bulldozed that shouldn't have been, including our beuatiful sandstone and brick nineteenth-century courthouse, which was supposed to be about to fall down of its own accord but resisted the wrecking ball for several tries. In this case, the feds are going to be even pushier about it, and it will take outright rebellion to keep serviceable old houses.

As for mold -- mold is killable and cleanable. It's a health hazard while it's growing and sporulating, but it's not a structural threat to the houses. The houses will need super cleaning anyway: that water that they've been under is dirty.

From CNN this evening:

There is no good solution. But the federal response has been such that people can't feel secure in leaving all their earthy possessions until such time as the feds say it is safe to return.

From the front page of this morning's New York Times:

Give it a couple of years and we'll see this same headline with just the names changed: New Orleans instead of Iraq. Can't we do better this time? I would like to think so, but the early indications are not good at all.

One of the early media photos of a NOLA dead body was of a woman weeping over the body of her husband who had been suffering from lung cancer. When his prescription oxygen supply ran out, he suffocated and died.

Yesterday the Harvard School of Public Health released a survey of evacuees in shelters in the Houston area conducted in cooperation with The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey had the following health-related findings:

• 52% report having no health insurance coverage at the time of the hurricane. Of those with coverage, 34% say it is through Medicaid and 16% through Medicare. Before the hurricane 66% of people evacuated to Houston shelters used hospital or clinics as their main source of care and of those, a majority (54%) used Charity Hospital of New Orleans, substantially more than the second most common care site (University Hospital of New Orleans, at 8%).
• 33% report experiencing health problems or injuries as a result of the hurricane and 78% of them are currently receiving care for their ailments.
• 41% report chronic health conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and asthma.
• 43% say they are supposed to be taking prescription medications, and of those, 29% percent report having problems getting the prescription drugs they need.
• Of the 61% who did not evacuate before the storm, 38% said they were either physically unable to leave or had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave.
• 39% report that they did not get help from any government agency or voluntary agency during the flood and evacuation.

Earlier this week, I had my adventure trying to solve a prescription problem for someone long distance, which I chronicled in my post, Walmart Wonderland: A Strange Tale. While the situation  I was trying to help with was potentially life-threatening, I remember thinking how glad I was that it didn't involve either psychiatric meds or withdrawal. This morning, Navy Blue emailed me a link to the story of a discussion board's attempt to help someone out of a situation involving both.

About the post, she writes:

I am frustrated. AND I am concerned.  This is an entry on the teeny little tale of me, a couple a people, and our friend Dan. He needed medication and had to have it sent from halfway across the country.

I still have the Red Cross link on my pages, and I still feel people should donate and that it is better to have the Red Cross trying to help than not, but as disturbing anecdotes involving Red Cross folk pile up in my inbox, it seems to me that for someone out there there is a book in this: a case study on how the Red Cross is just no substitute for competent government. (And neither is FEMA, for that matter.)  Here are notable passages from Navy's account:

Now it was Saturday, the 9th. Two of his medications will run out tomorrow.  One is a moodstabilizer and an anticonvulsant.  When one quits an anticonvulsant 'cold turkey', you are at risk for seizures.  The other one is a strong anti-depressant- known for heavy withdrawal symptoms. Combine this with such a traumatic experience and the physical and psychological stressors that come with it and Dan was in a very bad situation.

He emailed FEMA and The Red Cross, asking for information on what he can do.
A Red Cross truck came and delivered water and meals.

The Walgreens, a couple towns over, opened.  He drove through the dirty roads to  the store, stopping to wait three hour for gas. Then he brought his medication bottles, which were current and clearly had refills on them, to the pharmacy. They wouldn't be refilled unless the pharmacist could get in touch with his pharmacy or doctor.
. . .
On the 15th, 6 days after he had contacted them, Dan finally heard from FEMA, by email and the Red Cross, via a representative.

“Fema said that in a few days I will be assigned to a case handler who will check into the situation and drive out to interview me for an assessment of my needs. ”
“Red Cross said they only get involved in drugs when it is a matter of life or death.  I tried explaining; the guy, who had a double digit IQ, stood there with a sort of glazed look in his eyes.  Nothing I said penetrated the fog. ”

He received the last package [FedExed by a member of the online discussion group] and has taken four doses, and the discontinuation symptoms are generally improving.

While in Walgreens, Dan ran into an acquaintance of his, who's psychiatrist is still in the area.  He will tell the psychiatrist of Dan's situation and likely enable Dan to get new scripts for his medications.  In the meantime, he will be ok with what he was able to receive.

By the time FEMA sends him a case worker for an interview, he will have probably already gotten his refills.   If he hadn't had another resource, which happened, in this case, to be online friends, he could be severely ill.  In a worst case- Dan could be dead: seizures; acute dehydration- he was getting weak and likely wouldn't have gotten food and water very easily in the next few days; physical illness [ he was extremely sick and lost 11 pounds in about three days, no doubt lowering his immune system when he is already weak and prey to several infections]...

(The other Red Cross anecdote I received was from someone whom I had tried to help assess possibilities of rescuing a trapped relative in the early days of the flooding crisis. After exhausting all governmental avenues to place a request to have some people in a specific spot in NOLA rescued, the family tried calling the Red Cross. The person they reached didn't want to help with the rescue but did want a donation. The desperate family tried to exchange a donation for the person taking the rescue request and passing it along to someone who might help. The representative eventually allowed as how no rescue request would be passed along even if a donation was made.  At that moment, as nearly as my correspondent was able to assess, there was NO organization anywhere in the country willing to receive rescue requests. The request was ultimately conveyed via helpful journalists to the Coast Guard.)

People are suffering and dying because the emergency prescription infrastructure just doesn't work well enough. The Red Cross can help, but the nature of that help is far from ideal. We should not rest assured that all we have to do is donate money and that the hurricane survivors' needs will be taken care of, because it just ain't so.

MEANWHILE,

• Reed Hundt has a bunch more excellent questions that need to be asked of the government we have, competent or not.
• Boy, our President sure knows how to roll up his sleeves, doesn't he? I'm very impressed with his sleeve-rolling competency. He's been practicing a lot lately, hasn't he?

 

Scary stuff from a military briefing yesterday: Defense Department Briefing on Hurricane Katrina Repairs, Presenter: Commander, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Gen. Carl Strock. (A PDF of the slides from the briefing is available here)

One of the questions that we are dealing with now is the status of the levees.  It's a very important question for two reasons. Number one, we want to make sure that if there are weakened portions of the levee or there are breaches that we haven't identified yet, we know about those.  Because as the decisions are made to move back in to these parishes, we need to understand the level of vulnerability that our citizens have moving back in.  So we've got a very intense effort going out to assess the condition of the levee systems and put in repairs where it makes sense.

The other thing, of course, is we're looking down range a little bit and we realized when we get through our response and the initial stages of recovery, we've really got to understand exactly what occurred here.  So part of our project condition survey is to capture the conditions as the water recedes so we can do the analysis later on to ensure we have the right engineering and we're doing the right steps to protect the people in the future.

So that's it.  It's a sort of a forensic aspect of the effort now, principally for operational and safety purposes, but also so we can go back and understand what happened.  And that's an ongoing effort.

As we do that, we are identifying some breaches in levees we did not see initially.  Our attention was really drawn to 17th Street and London Avenue canal in the inner harbor.  But now we're finding some levee breaches in places like the National Wildlife Refuge up here.  So there are other sections of the levee which breached.  We also have levee breaches down in Plaquemines County.  If I could go to that one real quick.

This is Plaquemines County, which is -- which is south and east of New Orleans.  They have breaches down there which we're working as well.  Plaquemines has been kind of out of the news, but clearly, it's an important area, it needs to be brought back up.  One of the reasons for that is a lot of the support for the oil fields moves up and down this corridor here, so we need to bring -- bring that area back up as quickly as we can.

Physicist Ellery Schempp, a friend of sf writer Jim Morrow's and a fascinating character in his own right, sent in the following interesting analysis of the levee failures:

First of all, we recognize that the flooding in New Orleans was predicted in an article in Scientific American in October, 2001.   There have been many disputes between environmental groups and the Army Corps of Engineers as to how to manage the lower Mississippi.  It surely is not a black and white matter.

There is dispute as to when the first levee broke--some say it was ca. 10 AM on Monday on the 17th St canal.   Others say it was later that evening.  In either case, all the catastrophe and suffering occurred after the levees broke, which resulted in flooding the city.  Before that moment, the remaining residents were not in severe danger.  All the horrors occurred because of the flooding.  All the future expenses are due to the flooding.

It is truly amazing that no one seems to know when the first levee wall broke.  How could it be that people were not monitoring the walls?  Relatively simple and inexpensive measures could have been implemented in the months before.  The levees did not fail because the water was so high that it overran them; it wasn't the direct effects of a category 5 hurricane that destroyed New Orleans.  In fact, 99% of the miles of levees held perfectly well--there were two breaches, one about 50 ft wide on the 17th Street Canal and the other about 200 ft long on the Lake Pontchartrain levee.  Maybe there was a third one--no account seems to know.  How could people not know?

I emphasize that this was not a case of an overflowing bathtub.  Cement walls failed, not due to a category 5 hurricane, but because there was no system in place to monitor and support the levees.

This  is well explained in the graphics of the recent History Channel description.  No earthen levee or cement wall failed { via snap}; in every case the failure took place over hours.

What should have been done:
1. All the major levees should have been outfitted with electronic sensors to monitor them.  There are a host of simple means from simple water sensors on the dry side (shielded from rain), to breakable wires to monitor continuity, to tiltmeters--dozens of technologies geologists use to monitor volcanoes and earthquake zones.  These could all have been connected to redundant monitoring centers provided with multiple battery and diesel generator backup.  In the event of an incipient failure, alarms would be sent pinpointing the area.

2. The important levees could have been constantly patrolled on the parallel roads so any signs of trouble would be seen quickly.   Trucks filled with sandbags and crews ready to work would be stationed at intervals.  Mobile cranes, too.   

3. How did the levees fail?  The most probable scenario is this.  Levees are at risk of water infiltrating under the barrier, percolating through and undermining the footing.  This is well known, so engineers prevent this by carefully sealing the water side with mixtures of clay and grout to prevent any water infiltration.  However, the dry side is usually not so protected. 

Probably, water started to slosh over from waves.  As it did, it ran down the dry-side walls and began to undermine the easily-penetrated dry-side foundations, possibly somewhat weakened by the heavy rains.  Eventually, one section began to tilt slightly, allowing more water over, more erosion, and from then the result was foregone.  The first breach probably was over only one or two 8-foot sections.  But as everyone knows, as soon as water starts flowing fast through a breach, sections on either side go quickly.  So a small breach became 200 feet wide.

4. Had the sensor monitoring system been in place and had the patrols been in place, this could have been prevented.  Sensors and patrols would have noticed the water coming over and immediately two-feet of sandbags placed on top of the levee, preventing further undermining.  The levees would have been saved, and there would have been no massive flooding.

5. Assume that even with monitoring for an incipient situation and timely response, a cement wall breaks {snap?  there were no warning signs?}.  How to stop the rush of water?  Well, you have barges prepared for this--they move into place and block the flow enough.  Takes some engineering to make it work, but certainly doable.  Street-based crews provide back up.

6. In a worst case scenario, the levees would have failed despite these early warning and corrective activities.  In that case, the monitoring and patrols would have been able to raise the alarm.  In a well-organized emergency management system, immediately loudspeaker trucks and buses would fan out throughout the city.  "The levees have broken,  The levees have broken.  You must leave now.  A flood is coming.  You must leave now." 

At the time the levees broke, there was a 12-18 hour window to get into the city and evacuate people.  In New Orleans, when the levees broke, everybody was clueless,  there was no early warning, and there was no effort whatever to repair a small break before it became unstoppable.  There was no effort to evacuate the residents with warnings of the NEW danger, after the hurricane had passed. 

It is clear that a mere $50 million in monitoring technology and levee patrolling and response teams would have saved $400,000 million in future costs.

There is no excuse for the lack of a constant monitoring system; there is no excuse for not patrolling the levee walls; there is no excuse for not having a response plan to prevent a minor break from expanding to flood the entire city.  Incompetence and stupidity are high on the list.  I mean, why wasn't a simple monitoring system for failure in place?

(One minor point: The people swarming around this web site were able to verifiy three breaches in three different locations by matching media images to satellite images; and as far as I know we were the first "media" source to do so. Pretty sad, yes? I entirely agree with Schempp's general point about the shocking lack of information about the breaches.)

Schempp's CV concludes:

In a 1999 interview, Ellery said:  “I have had the good fortune to have worked 400 miles from the North Pole and then 800 miles from the South Pole thanks to Prof. Robert Nichols at Tufts; I enjoyed these unique places immensely and they were transforming in my life; I had the good fortune to have the Supreme Court agree with my understanding of the First Amendment, with lots of help from the ACLU and my parents.  I had the good fortune to do a PhD in physics at Brown, with support from Prof. Philip Bray and many professors.  I am happy to be acknowledged, and I guess I made some contributions, but I think many others are to be recognized.”

He is also the author of the widely circulated satirical essay, Warning: Gravity is “Only a Theory.” Of his gravity essay, he remarks, " Amazingly, I found a lot of responses that took me seriously.  I therefore had to write an annotated version that explains the science and jokes. "

Mapwise, a lot seems to be happening.

First of all, the New Improved! Clickable Depth Map (aka the C&C Technologies New Orleans Flood Map) now has an address field! Hooray! (Now you don't have to go into Goggle Maps first in order to pin-point and address before using the depth map.)

Secondly Microsoft's VirtualEarth has joined the effort. Today I got t his message from a Program Manager:

After the Hurricane, a number of us began a project to show before and after imagery in an effort to help victims discover if their homes are under water. Instead of relying on low res satellite imagery, we worked with a company who specializes in low altitude oblique imagery which gives a MUCH more useful view of the area. Anyway, we just got the results of this effort online yesterday at msnbc. I hope you find it helpful.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/apps/ve/katrina.htm

I tried the site in both Safari and Firefox (G5 Mac; OSX Tiger). On neither broswer did their aerial photos display properly, although the bugs were different. But the project only launched yesterday, and I could see what they were trying to do, which looks very promising.It might work for you today. Or it might work for you next week when they get a few kinks out of it.  Very promising.

UPDATE: My correspondent suggests the following to get around browser incompatibility issues:

Here is an idea since images aren’t displaying for you in the browser properly. At the end of the day, Eagle Eye images are standard JPG images. You can view them in any picture viewer, not just the online viewer we built at MSNBC. If you right click (or whatever the Mac equiv is) on an image that didn’t display, you can see the full URL for the image. You can just enter that URL in your browser to display it. Like this:

http://media.msnbc.msn.com/i/katrina/0914/after/LAORLE011003NeighObliq99N-000.jpg

The image he links to I find quite affecting. The boats look like toys forgotten by careless children, an odd collision in the semantics of scale.

 

FURTHER UPATE: The folks at Microsoft have volunteer to take care of my current address query  load, so current inquries have been passed along to them. I've been working on a bit of a case of eye strain, so it comes at a good time.

From Gizmodo: Joel Johnson writes about an improvised radio station set up by volunteers now on the air in New Orleans:

Some volunteers came down with a low-power FM station, a hundred feet of coax, and a makeshift antenna. What they didn’t have was a tower. I was going to strap a pole onto the chimney of the house we’re staying in, but another volunteer named Jackie said she was pretty handy with a Skill saw and would be happy to rig something together.

About 8 hours later, we lofted this home-built antenna tower onto the top of the roof and begin broadcasting 94.5 FM, a station the radio operators are calling ‘The Battle for Algiers’ (which has a political connotation that I have not had the time to grok).

After the sun set, I walked a little ways down the street (but not too far, because of the curfew), listening to scratchy, mono sounds of John Coltrane beaming our from an community radio tower built from the salvaged lumber of destroyed homes. With the helicopters overhead, it felt like a lull in an 1960’s American war in our own streets that never happened.

Picture by Bradley Stuart, Creative Commons, non-commerical.

(Thanks to Xeni, who told me it was coming, and to Matt Harris who told me it had happened!)

I've been debating for a day or so whether to post this, because I don't want to advertise myself as someone who can solve this kind of problem. But I think this tale needs to be told. So here is it, as I wrote it up in email yesterday:

In addition to queries from people wanting help with NOLA disaster maps, I get a few from people asking for help of other kinds. The missing persons queries I really can't do anything with. But I got one that, after a little bit of discussion to clarify the issues, had something I might be able to help with.

The woman I'm trying to help is displaced from Jefferson Parish. She has type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. She was given a one week supply of each of her three medications. It was paid for by the Red Cross, and filled at the Walmart in Baton Rouge. She was running out of medication. She said the diabetes medication was crucial to the maintenance of her blood sugar levels, and without it she was at risk for going into a diabetic coma. Also at the time of our first email exchange, the only aid she had received was the one week prescription.

She had applied unsuccessfully for food stamps (since resolved). She also said, "I went online and applied to FEMA and received an application for an SBA loan."

In the meantime, she had relocated to a rural community, Baywood, LA. The nearest Walmart is in Zachary, LA. She went there to refill her prescription, but was told that the Red Cross picking up the tab was a one-time thing.

So, I thought about this a bit, and called up Melanie Miller, the Assistant Minister at the First Congregational Church in Chappaqua, NY. We kicked around some ideas of how to help, and our first thought was for Melanie to get in contact with a Congregational Church in Louisiana. She tried calling the one closest to Baywood. But for understandable reasons, their phone line was perpetually busy.

So we had another thought. Why couldn't Melanie just call the pharmacy department of the Zachary Walmart and give them the church's credit card number and have the church pick up the tab? Sounds easy, right? An elegant solution.

So Melanie called. And she was told, not very nicely, that we didn't have enough information to get the prescriptions refilled and that their usual policy was that they didn't take credit cards over the phone. So we get more information, and Melanie calls again and is told that the only one who can authorize phone credit card charges is Pat, the Manager, and that he won't be in until after 11 AM. She Melanie calls and calls. Pat is 45 minutes late to work. When he finally arrives, Melanie gets him on the phone and he declines to allow the First Congregational Church of Chappaqua to buy this woman her medication because he won't take a credit card number over the phone.

It seems to me that anyone managing a pharmacy would be fully aware of the risks of taking someone of the medications the woman was prescribed without a doctor's supervision. So I don't really understand what Pat the Manager is thinking. Now, I don't want to rag on Walmart, because their distribution system may be the backbone of the recovery. And I don't even want particularly to rag on the Zachary, LA Walmart. But PLEASE, people, WAKE UP. This is a national emergency.

My next thought was to give a call to the Westchester office of one of our elected officials to see if she can help, which I did, leaving a request from a constituent for assistance. Hillary lives just around the corner from the First Congregational Church, at 15 Old House Lane.

When Melanie got upset with Pat the Walmart Manager, he told her that there was a  possibility that our woman might be eligible for some form of free aid, but that she would need to call or come in to determine whether she was eligible. I suspect that if she contacts him to inquire, she will be told that the one week prescription from the Red Cross that she has already gone through is all that's available.

We're still working out it. Meanwhile, the woman is looking for a more cooperative pharmacy to which to transfer her prescriptions. I think she ran out of her diabetes medication a day or so ago.

UPDATE: Senator Clinton's office in on the case.

A FURTHER UPDATE AND EPILOGUE: First of all, our woman got her meds, so she isn't going to die. We had Senator Clinton's Westchester office all set to call Pat the Manager, but before the call took place, our woman transfered her prescriptions to a much-more-cooperative CVS, where she received her essential medication for free. Also, in the comments, Madeleine of the Red Cross explains that the Red Cross prescription help is not supposed to work the way the Zachary Walmart employees said. So if you have this kind of prescription problem, get in touch with the Red Cross for help solving it.

From NPR: A Doctor's Message from Katrina's Front Lines. Quoted is Hemant Vankawala, 34, is a doctor with one of the nine Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) medical groups set up at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport:

In hindsight, it seems silly that a bunch of civilian yahoos came in and took over the airport and had it up and running -- exceeding its normal operating load of passengers -- with an untrained skeleton crew and generator partial power. But we did what we had to do, and I think we did it well.

(A lot of the article, especially as concerns triage, is tough reading.)

CNN's front page this morning:

It seems to me that there should be a lot more people charged with negligent homicide, including government officials at all levels (up to and including that fellow who, after two weeks of dithering, has just publicly acknowledged that he's responsible.)

MEANWHILE, Josh Marshall writes about something I've been wondering. Just what was Dick Cheney doing while the rest of the administration waited for someone to tell them that the unfolding Katrina disaster wasn't all done with CGI? The answer is really interesting.

Did NASA ever locate the 1,000 people missing from the Michoud Assembly Facility east of New Orleans? Anyone know what the story is?

(Um. And why didn't they evacuate in the first place? Anyone know?) Karen explains in the comments that there were only 56 people actually at Michoud; that they missing employees are or were people not yet accounted for who may or may not have evacuated. That makes more sense.

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).

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 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.

This is an open thread for people to explain and discuss problems they encounter trying to file FEMA claims. I got the idea from reading padiwack's Journal, a LiveJournal in which the author writes:

incredible frustration...
trying off & on all day to file claim with FEMA, both online and by phone. zip...zilch...nada

*sigh*

What are the problems you are encountering filing claims? Is there anything the rest of us can do to help? Tell us.

UPDATE: Before anyone actually arrives to discuss anything, I can see that FEMA's dispensation of aid is a disaster unto itself.

First, there is the problem with the computer system requriements, an ongoing issue with US goverment web sites which should come as no surprise to FEMA.

I see one problem right away, just from typing "FEMA claims" into Technorati. From Linux Insider: FEMA Forces Explorer Use for Online Claims:

The U.S. government is again excluding non-Microsoft Internet browsers, as Hurricane Katrina victims seeking to file claim  with the Federal Emergency Management Agency  (FEMA) may only do so with Internet Explorer 6.0 or above. . . .

Although evacuees, rescuers and others seeking to provide assistance in the aftermath of the devastating storm and flooding have relied heavily on computers and the Internet  to search for loved ones and information, the exclusion of other Web browsers for FEMA claims -- including Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL)  Safari, Mozilla Firefox and others -- has again prompted criticism of the government and FEMA, which has already been blasted for its delayed response to the disaster.

Industry observers stressed that such sites should be built to World Wide Web Consortium  (W3C) standards, which would provide functionality for those using other browsers. In addition, the use of Windows PCs and Explorer have also caused some consternation among relief workers who have reportedly complained of the time it takes to set up and secure a Windows machine versus other operating systems, which rely on other browsers.

Cut Off Again
Richard Stiennon, a Web browser expert and vice president of threat research for anti-spyware company Webroot, told TechNewsWorld that although Windows and Explorer are largely ubiquitous, the FEMA online claim requirement for Explorer excludes at least 5 to 10 percent of users.

See also Russell Shaw at the Huffington Post, where a reader points out that this cuts out all users running on Macs, for which IE only goes up to 5 (PAGING STEVE JOBS! REPORT FOR BATTLE!). So FEMA has set up the situation so that my very expensive, well-equipped Battle Station here in my dining room on which I've been doing all this elaborate Katrina blogging would be technologically insufficient for filing a FEMA claim. How interesting. (See Slashdot.)
And the FEMA site doesn't support wireless technology such as Blackberries and Palms.)

But it works OK for Windows users, right?

This is from larcher on flickr, photo of Dick Cheney trying to do tech support for FEMA applicants, with a devastating caption:

The caption reads:

One of the volunteers was telling Mr. Cheney how awful and hard to use the FEMA website is.

Once we helped an evacuee navigate through the badly written instructions and multi-page forms required to file a claim *and* get a user ID, the server would often crash, causing us to start over or just give up and come back later.
Apparently, FEMA's servers were not prepared for this amount of traffic.

So what you really need to do is go to where they are on foot, right?

And then there's this account, published on the Times-Picayune site, of someone stalking FEMA on foot:

As I awoke this morning my 13th day on the road and 6th "location of the day", which has even included my car. I heard on the news that FEMA, the four-letter word that I have instructed my children to not say around me, was giving out $2000 debit cards to victims of hurricane Katrina. I thought, finally some help!

Then as I logged on to the computer to find out how to receive it. I went to FEMA.GOV and found out that the "invisible" workers of FEMA are going to shelters in the affected areas to streamline the application process and get the money out. But, what shelters, the big ones? The ones on TV? What about shelters set up by people in small towns like I am using. Where are these people from FEMA that I heard about but haven't seen? I came close yesterday. I drove 30 miles to Greenville, MS because I was told that FEMA was there. When I got there I was told by the Red Cross, "No, they were supposed to be here, they were here yesterday, but they hadn't shown up today."

OK. Two strikes. There is, of course, always the telephone.

And this person, posting on one of the NOLA forums, seems to have reached FEMA on the phone:

I just found out that FEMA has denied my claim because they could not inspect my property!!! This is after I had to explain to them that I could not fax them details of damages because I had NO POWER. The idiot from FEMA had a hard time understanding this.

And so did this one:

I called last night on the help line, they said they couldnt pull up my application, to call back today. So I called today, got a hold of someone that could not answer anything I asked her. Its giving me a message on my application overview that says I was not eligible for the household or something program, which I think is not the same as the emergency living expense thing, and she asked for my claim # and said she "thinks" they will be mailing me something in 10-14 days and to call back in about a week. I am so aggravated!!!!!! WTF??? Does anyone know anything???? I said, "how is it that people that did the same exact thing as me already have their $ and mine seems to be goig in a completely different direction?" She said, I know maim, FEMA makes me mad too, ahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She said everyone will not get the $2,000, everyone thinks they will, but they wont, you have to be approved for it. I said maybe everyone thinks they will, because THATS WHAT THE PRESIDENT SAID ON THE NEWS!!!!!! I am so aggravated with this right now.

. . . and another one:

I actually got a hold of a FEMA rep on the phone at 1am after holding for 30 minutes. And get this, if you are 'displaced' with a place to stay (such as parents, friends, etc) you will not be entitled to the $2000 card. If you need assistance with food, you need to see Red Cross or file for food stamps.
I don't know about you guys, but I am such an indepdendent person and feel sick to my stomach to depend on others to help me. But yet, when you really do need the help, no one can help you. I am in Northern MS, and I went to file for food stamps here, and because I had 'a little money in my pocket' (even though who knows how long that will last), I wasn't even approved for food stamps!! Do the people who already live off the government is the only people who get any kind of help??

. . . and another one . . .

I was hung up on be FEMA Thursday evening because I told the gentleman by the name of Will, that his boss should be fired. I got through on Friday evening at 11:25 pm to a wonderful man by the name of Marcus who said I should have money in the bank next week. I won't hold my breath since I'm with Chase and their whole system went down in Louisiana. Hang in there. We will get through this and be better!

I know I'll be one to get out of the Orleans/Jefferson area. This is ridiculous. Always having threats and having to evacuate, then when the 'big one' hits, and are stuck out of your own place, you get no kind of assistance.

In all fairness, I have found some accounts of successful encounters with FEMA. But even if FEMA were playing Sugar Daddy and handing everyone in sight two grand whether they needed it or not, given FEMA's new mandate to be responsible for the reconstruction of the areas devastated by Katrina, they would still be falling short of the mark. They are unable to complete the most basic tasks of the agency. Why were they given more to do?

Bureaucrazy

Here's an idea: Maybe Louisiana and Mississippi should secede for the union and then apply for foreign aid! Then their displaced citizens might get a fresh start with a more competent bureaucracy.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

I know a fair amount about mercenaries and private military contractors (see my somewhat incomplete  Mercenaries & PMFs archive), and have been anticipating with a certain sick feeling of de ja vu that I was going to have to blog how all the usual suspects from Iraq and Africa turn up in New Orleans, the world's newest Third World country, so the sentence New Orleans may well have more mercenaries and National Guards operating in it than there are citizens left at the moment gives me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I have been focusing  primarily on the cartography of Katrina and would appreciate reader recommendations for articles on the involvement of Private Military Contractors. No one knows where all of the bodies are buried in that field, but I at least know where some of them are.

And yes, I know about Halliburton. I want the rest of the names, especially those guys carrying guns. UPDATE: Ah. Here are some names:

• "British security firm AKE Group has three employees on the ground in New Orleans with CNN, a unit of Time Warner Inc. <TWX.N>, and is preparing to send three more." This makes sense to me: CNN should have security people. And it seems to me that security guys accompanying reporters are highly unlikely to turn Rambo. Nonetheless, the Terminator/Robocop graphic to the left comes from their site.  AKE is apparently run by a former CIA guy.
• "Security firms Kroll Inc. and Beau Dietl & Associates also said on Friday they have seen a surge in requests for security services and advice in the New Orleans area this week.
  Kroll, a unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos. <MMC.N>, has been working to help clients in industries like hotels and casinos to evacuate facilities and implement emergency contingency plans, according to spokeswoman Jodie Rosenblum." This sounds sensible on the face of it, except that it could easily get out of hand. Exactly who is going to prosecute one of their guys if he shoots someone just because the piss him off?

[ADVISORY: Those who came here for the maps and aren't interested in my personal political opinions, stop reading here.]

Jerry Walker writes:

Hi Kathryn,
Not sure if you've seen this map or not. You can point and click and see what the water depth is in New Orleans, street by street. It's a google map, but I can't find the map on google itself.

http://www.cybergod.net/gmap/  http://mapper.cctechnol.com

Thanks so much for all you're doing!

Jerry

I tried it and it seems to work! Now all it needs is the addition of an address input field. But if you have the address already up in Google Maps in a separate browser window, then you can pretty much find what you are looking for.

It's creator, Teh Treag (aka cjames) says

We started off with LIDAR terrian model of the city.  Then, with some  reported water depths in  the city we projected the data into our model. I'm still waiting on the data processors to get some more data to me; right now we have over 2.5 million data points loaded into MySQL using the spatial features.  I expect this number to tripple as they continue refining the modeling.

The page uses AJAX to query the database for a 200x200m area and averages the result.

So far, the data appears to correlate well with the post storm images.

Gods of Google Maps, you've answered my prayers once by adding the Katrina button. Please come through for me by adding the depth info.

To Google Earth users: are their overlays already integrating this info?

(Someone else may have sent this URL to me previously, but I've been pretty busy and have lost some of the things I planned to check out in the rising tide in my inbox.)

SEE ALSO: Flood Level Maps, which gives you an idea of which parts were flooded at various stages on the flooding and this Customized Dynamic Map of New Orleans. You guys are heroes. This kind of information is tremendouly important  to the people whose houses or relatives were there.  Also, it may even  have cash value to the victims, in that I suspect it will make dealing  with FEMA claims officials and their insurance comapnies a lot easier if there is  physical evidence of the damage to homes.

ANOTHER READER QUESTION:

kathyrn,
have you found a site that would have the results of the toxic water in New Orleans.  My husband has been down there since last Tuesday trying to get the MCI telephone sites up and running.  Passed the worrying stage about the gun shots around him but now am worried about the toxic water problem and long term effects.

An extant toxics map sounds to me a bit ahead of the data we have right now by a good bit. But it is something that should exist, even if it doesn't. I have been talking about the need for information on the water depths and water movement with the tides and other factors,  and still haven't come up with a solution for that yet, but her question is an important one. Anyone know if there have been surveys of toxics. I recall that preliminary looks seemed to suggest that the toxics problem was not as bad as it might be, but that could have changed and might have been wrong in the first place. What can be done to get this information together?

(Image of chemical sheen on the water courtesy of Shawn McBride. I think it's a NOAA image acquired through Google Earth with overlays; I gather it's a search he did for someone who enquiring about their house.)

Also, if you can load a really large image, have a look at this NOAA image, just to get the scale. I'm trying to find someone's house on an area of the city not covered by the Digital Globe images, and I'm a little lost, because NOAA doesn't preserve orientation in its interface. But the sheen, oh my God . . .

UPDATE:

• CNN has an article on what's in that water. Pretty vile stuff, it seems:Polluted water covering New Orleans could be major health hazard
• And then there's the NYT article: Water Returned to Lake Pontchartrain Contains Toxic Material

One question that came in today in an email from China this morning is what people in countries far away can do to help. The easy answer is "send money," but given that the US is perhaps the richest country on the planet, that answer does not seem very satisfactory. And the in the grand scheme of things, the problem was never one of money, but of quality of  thought. (This is not necessarily true on a local scale, only on the national scale.) We had money, but it was spent on the wrong things. It may indeed take mountains of money to  get us out of this, but we need a lot of help that money can't buy.

German reader Holger Schick made some astute observations in the comment section of the New Orleans Levee post which I wanted to pass along. While in Mt. Kisco, NY, returning from Elizabeth's dentist this morning, I saw the perfect illustration to go with Schick's comment -- this assemblage of suburban assult vehicles -- so I took the photo to the right.

Maybe your President Bush is now willing to deal with the problem of global warming and the effects emission of CO2 is having.

It's 35% of the global energy that is consumed by the US. They are driving cars that are consuming 15 or up to 25 litres per 100 kilometres (in Europe the cars are consuming 8 litres on average).

"Mr. Bush, sign the Kyoto protocol! Make laws to regulated CO2 emissions in your country."

I'm sorry for the people, that have lost their home in the New Orleans area, but in my point of view political maturity and even environmental awareness is actual not existent in the US. Human are responsible for their future for themselves. If we not stop the global destruction of the environment, we and especially our children's children will have to pay the price for it.

I wouldn't say that political maturity and even environmental awareness don't exist in the US, but rather that they are rather hard to find in US policy. And ecocide neither provides for the common defense, nor promotes the general welfare, austensible reasons for the founding of this country as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Schick's general point holds whether you personally think that global warming makes category 5 hurricanes more likely or not and whether you believe in global warming or not. There are plenty of other accidents waiting to happen, and the more we damage the ecosystem, the more there are.

Have Bush & Co. learned this lesson? I doubt it. But perhaps the American public has.

MEANWHILE, Savanna, the woman who was trying to plot an escape route for her family, writes that they were just rescued by FBI agents in a Hummer. Now there is the proper use of a Hummer, not driving to the Pleasantville post office.

PS to German readers: Ich lese und schreibe Deutsch. Wenn Sie nicht auf English schreiben koennen, Sie durfen mich auf Deutsch schreiben.

This is the first day of school for my son Peter, who is going into the third grade. My daughter Elizabeth starts preschool next week. This morning I've got all kinds of school-year related things to do. (The picture to the right was taken yesterday morning in Middletown, CT, on the last day of summer vacation.)

There are many queries in my inbox about the state of flooding at specific NOLA addresses. I will try to get to as many as I can over the course of the day.

My do-it-yourself instructions are in my post How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water. If you can't get the results you need, email me and I'll give it a try when I get a moment.

I have mostly not talked about my feelings about what I'm seeing when I look at addresses I look up for people. But on his livejournal, encapsulate sums it up pretty well:

ioerror gives us The long and short of it. He's dead on.

I've spent last night, and this morning looking up Lou's friends. They all seem to be in the water 7 to 10 feet. I've been taking screen caps, and sending it to them.

It's horrible.

Look at the chemical sheen the water has. If you look south of the big building in the center, there is a smaller building. Those yellow dots you see are vans. They're just under the surface.

Here is the same area before.

I really want to be able to give some people good news. I want to tell some one, "YES! I can see your house! It's fine. Everything's alright." I haven't been able to do that.

The closest I've come is Lou's house... which is a matter of "Too close to tell." The streets look wet, but 10 feet down the road they're fine. How deep did it get? When are these pictures from? Who knows...

I am not trained in clinical detachment, nor bedside manner. At first, I was keeping politics out of it because I wanted what I was posting to be accessible to those who needed it, whether they cared for my personal politics or not. By now, I need to bite back comments about politicians because what I feel ought to be done about them has no basis in US law. What you need to understand about the big picture of New Orleans after the flood is that we are looking at a mass grave. It is larger and more spread out than the usual mass grave, but it is a mass grave nonetheless.

Jim MacDonald John M. Ford [thanks, Lennie] has an excellent post over at Making Light about what to do if you become emotionally flooded by the hurricane coverage:

Go do something else, now.

—Find a distraction and allow it to distract you. Pick up some unfinished work. Go for a walk and pay attention to every detail, even the ones that remind you of Topic A; this is about coping, not pretending it’s not there.

—Read, watch a movie, put on some music. It doesn’t have to be “happy.” This is what catharsis is all about, and why there’s been a word for it for so long.

—Talk to someone about something else that matters to both of you. Or, perhaps better, talk to someone you care about who’s also stressed — I doubt you’ll have much trouble finding someone — about how you both feel. Talk each other down. If you need to hug or cry, let it roll. In this hour, the trolls of damned-lie stoicism have no claim on your soul.

I am not asking anyone to stop assisting with relief efforts of any kind. Was that understood? Good.

I didn't cancel our Labor Day weekend plans, so I have been off doing something else, and spending time on the computer here and there to check on people's houses and answer questions. And tomorrow is the first day of school for my son, entering 3rd grade, and so there are many something elses I have to do.

We look at these images because people need understanding and they need closure. And I have remained pretty calm about it, and have focused on the fact that this is a unique opportunity to help people, the kind that may never occur again in my life.

But I am also made deeply angry by what I see.

I'm back from my Labor Day weekend travels through Upstate New York, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and am  going through my inbox. I wasn't completely offline, but my internet access was fairly limited while I was out.

Here's New Orleans resident, whose house looks OK to me on the satellite photo:

If the neighborhood appears OK, why can't we just get some things? Is it the roads? I wouldn't stay. But all I have are the clothes on my back.

On the face of it, this doesn't seem like a very good idea. I'm not sure it's even legal, though last night in the 10 minutes of CNN TV coverage I have actually watched, I saw this gal go in with Christian Amanpour, but it may take her press credentials to get you in. (Question to those in the know: Is it legal or even possible to get in? CNN reports that people from Jefferson Parish were allowed back in today. How to interpret that in general is less clear.)

My reader escaped with her life. Why risk it for stuff? (My husband is a book collector. I understand in some detail why someone might want to go back for stuff, even in a dangerous situation.) And the return under these circumstances might be more traumatic than losing all her stuff. I hate to direct her to an agency whose head, several days back, should have been stripped naked except for a large name tag, and lowered slowly through the roof of the Superdome at its worst, but it is probably a better idea to apply to FEMA  for aid. They now have a web page for aid applications at their Individual Assistance Center:

If you have been affected by a disaster you may be eligible for federal assistance. Please select one of two options below: Register for Assistance or Review your Application. For disaster assistance information you may want to read the Applicant Guide, view information about Federally Declared Disasters by Calendar Year, or review support from other available Agencies.             

They also have a phone number for those without computers hooked up to the Internet:

Call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362)                   
The speech or hearing impaired may call (TTY) 1-800-462-7585

What they have to offer those without either Internet access or phone service is not so clear.

And what will come of an application isn't clear. See this August 30th Miami Herald article for details: Skittish FEMA may not assist individuals:

FEMA is giving aid to local governments, but has yet to decide on helping individual storm victims. One reason: criticism that it was overly generous last year.

Presumably they have backed off from the position described in the Miami Herald, but I would love to hear about the results of such applications.

MEANWHILE, CNN reports that "the" levee break has been patched. I presume they mean the biggest levee break.

In disasters since the invention of the news media, in each era coverage of disasters is highly mediated by the coverage of the most recent war. (I wrote an essay about this once, which I don't have to hand at the moment.) This is the era of "embedded" journalists and media complicity. I can't find words for what to say about this: [UPDATE: note transcript of segment below; two sequences were conflated.]

There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV.

ZDF News reported that the president's visit was a completely staged event. Their crew witnessed how the open air food distribution point Bush visited in front of the cameras was torn down immediately after the president and the herd of 'news people' had left and that others which were allegedly being set up were abandoned at the same time.

The people in the area were once again left to fend for themselves, said ZDF.

A city is destroyed, people are dying in vast quantities, and job one for the White House image makers remains to get public opinion off Bush's back. This makes me feel physically ill. I'm not being hyperbolic or metaphorical. It gives me a slight feeling of vertigo, a tension across my forehead, and a feeling in the pit of my stomach like I'm going to throw up.

(Appeared on Laura Rozen's War & Pieces, via Kevin Drum.)

UPDATE: Rivka has tracked it down and found the TV transcript. The story is not quite as reported by Laura Rozen's reader, though it remains repugnant:

Anchor: President Bush also paid the almost completely devastated small town of Biloxi a quick little visit as a part of his tour. Claudia Rueggeberg in Biloxi, how did the citizens react to the visit from the President?

Claudia Rueggeberg: There was a lot of variation. We talked to people here after the visit: one woman said a symbolic visit like that was better than none at all, and it was good that the President was showing his face there and looking at the situation up-close. Others tended to react with desperation. One woman burst into tears and said, full of rage, that the President shouldn't come here, he should finally see to it that help comes. All of the people, his whole entourage, these cars, they should be loaded up with supplies and not with bodyguards, and he shouldn't play the good samaritan here, and a staged visit like this doesn't help. And it actually was the case that all of a sudden this morning helper personnel showed up here, people who cleared away the rubble, who went through the houses in search of bodies, but exclusively along the route where the President traveled. Two hours ago the President left Biloxi again, and all of the helper personnel along with him.

Anchor: We know that President Bush promised quick help. Can that be felt where you are? For example, is there clean water and food?

CR: There's nothing here at all. Aside from what was cleared aside by the helper personnel this morning, the rubble is lying all over the street exactly as it was several days ago after the storm. There are no reasonable provisions; there's an emergency medical station and otherwise nothing. There is a stench of decomposition across the entire city. There are bodies that haven't been covered up in the buildings. Everything has been reduced to rubble, and help--from what we can see here and what others from other cities have also said--isn't coming.

Anchor: Thank you in Biloxi, Claudia Rueggeberg.

(Translation by Idealistic Pragmatist, based on her transcript of the ZDF video.)

Looking at the transcripts, it seems easy enough to figure out what happened. Laura's commenter, who appears to have been reconstructing from memory a news story he'd seen on TV, elided the New Orleans segment (which had Bush speaking at "one of the few" supply distribution points) and the Biloxi segment (which had cleaning crews working only along Bush's route, and disappearing afterward). Combined, these two segments became a story about supply distribution points disappearing after Bush's visit.

That story fit in well with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu's report that construction equipment had been brought in to the levee for Bush's visit, and then removed again. And it also fit in well with the lefty blogosphere's traditional distrust of the American media ("There was a striking discrepancy between the CNN International report on the Bush visit to the New Orleans disaster zone, yesterday, and reports of the same event by German TV"), and their perceptions that foreign reporters are more likely to get it right.

Thanks, Rivka. This is, I think one of the general problems of television disaster coverage. Viewers are emotionally flooded and take in perhaps not all of the actual information content. The images are constructed in memory at a gut level without giving the viewer easy access to reviewing the information. I have watched all of 10 minutes of actual television coverage of the disaster, since we don't have cable TV and live on the north side of a hill with almost no TV reception. I think this is a real advantage.

This morning's New York Times has a write-up on a few of us who tried to help people get the information they needed about the state of the homes in the area where Katrina hit hardest:

For Victims, News About Home Can Come From Strangers Online

UPDATE: Welcome also to readers arriving from:

• the heroic Times-Picayune (can someone just give that paper a Pulitzer prize already?)
• ZDNet.de (article in German)
• Telekom-Presse.at (article in German), and
• Corriere della Sera (article in Italian)
• focus.msn.de (in German).

For those new to blogs, here are shortcuts to information about our collaborative maps project:

First of all, my Katrina archive contains all blog posts related to Katrina. The archive page is updated each time I make a new Katrina post, so it would be the best place to bookmark.  On the other hand, it contains many images, so on a dial-up connection it would be slow to load. Also, separately, I have an online album of Katrina map images, Katrina Floods New Orleans, 2005.

As of now, my individual Katrina posts related to maps are:

1. New Orleans Levee Break(s) Before and After
2. not too far from filling in the bowl
3. NASA's First Katrina Before and After Comparison
4. Google Earth Helps Place the Flow from a New Orleans Neighborhood into the Canal in Context
5. DigitalGlobe's New Orleans Before and After Images Are Up
6. How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water
7. How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water, Part 2: We Really Need to Integrate Topo Maps and Known Water Depths into the System
8. Escape Routes for Hurricane Victims
9. Welcome, Forbes and BBC Readers
10. Associated Press & Digital Globe Make Zoomable New Orleans Satellite Map Available
    Meanwhile, New Orleans Burns
11. New Orleans: Notes from My Parents

Also, my sister, Karen Cramer Shea, has been guest-blogging for me while I was away over the weekend. Her posts are:

1. Lost in Katrina
2. Rebuilding New Orleans

I think this is only the second time I've made the New York Times. The first time was in October of 1987: My anthology The Architecture of Fear, comprised of architectural horror stories, was featured on the front page of the Home section for Halloween.

PS: And may I also recommend the high quality Katrina discussion and analysis at Making Light, BoingBoing, & Amygdala.

Looking to the future we should consider how to rebuild New Orleans. Some question the wisdom of rebuilding, but permanently relocating 1.4 million people and abandoning a nearly 300 year old city is unlikely. Especially since it is so historically important. Not to mention it IS party town USA. So we might as well start considering how to build a better safer New Orleans since we are going to be starting from close to scratch.

1. What historic things don't we want to keep. Like the Canals, are the canals still useful and are they a good idea in a city with flooding problems?  Also widen narrow roads.

2. Replace flood prone buildings with green space. The lowest lying areas should be reserved for parks, ball fields and green space. New Orleans should have areas for flood waters to go which will not put people or property at risk. Also consider not rebuilding directly next to old levies, a block of green space could reduce property damage considerably.

3. Raise the level of the city. Use rubble as fill and build on top. Large building in low areas should be build with a several floors of parking before the enclosed space starts.

4. All new levies should be rated for a category 5 hurricane.

5. Keep irreplaceable items or non duplicate services out of New Orleans. This is not the place for priceless historic treasures or corporate  headquarters.  Rebuild New Orleans to save as much history as survived and as a tourist destination but this not the place for critical national infrastructure.

6. Rebuild Roads and Bridges for evacuation not normal traffic levels.

7. Also it may be wise to avoid housing the long term disabled in New Orleans. These people are the hardest to evacuate. There is one report of 80 people dead at a nursing home. These people probably make up the majority of the dead. Only people with long term ties with New Orleans or family willing to evacuate them should be housed in long term care facilities in the city.

Kathryn is away and asked me to keep blogging on Katrina. I am her sister Karen who usually writes the Lunar Development Weblog. I figured a good place to start is to put the power of the web to use in getting help for those in need who have acess to it. Below are sites which can provide help or help locate family and friends.

Louisiana Government

Red Cross Family Locator

FEMA

NASA Stennis/ Michoud Employee Contact Board

NOLA.COM

NOLA.COM Missing Persons

NOLA.COM I'm OK

NASA- Katrina

Homeland Security

Craiges List- Katrina

MSNBC -Looking for

MSNBC- Add to Safe List

MSNBC -Safe and Looking for Lists

From my father:

Dear Kathryn,

   Hello from Houston.

   Mom saw your blog and wants to know if the St Alphonsus Church [2045 Constance St.] is
OK.  This if the place where my  father was baptized  and which we would
have visited if we had made a trip to New Orleans.

Love,

Dad****

From my mother:

Kathryn,

See
http://www.stalphonsus.org/photoalbum.html

On Constance Street,there are two churches.  One is the oldest Catholic church in Louisiana.  One built by the Irish and one by the Germans. The German church had old wooden sculpture and the original organ was still used.  The other church has beautiful stained glass.

This area is between the French quarter and the water.  The street where grandpa Louis [Lois A. Cramer, my great-grandfather -KC] lived when he was a baby was Tchoupitoulas St., which is parallel and right by the Mississippi and perpendicular to Constance street.

It would have been an interesting area to visit.

Mom.

I'll check later today.

UPDATE: So I'm on a slow, borrowed computer with a tiny little monitor and so checking things by satellite is much more difficult than on my Mac G5 with two big monitors at home where I have a veritable mansion of screen realestate to work with.  On the other hand, to my complete astonishment, I see that Google Maps has made the job easier by adding a "Katrina" button to New Orleans Google Maps searches. So I typed in 2045 Constance St. and bounced back and forth between the before and after satellite views at various magnifications. If I was at home on my own equipment, I would also check the much more detailed NOAA photos, which would give a much better idea. but I'm not.  So here is my tentative opinion on St. Alphonsus Church. First, I can't really tell which building in the image is the church, so I don't really know what I'm looking at. Secondly, the church appears to be located near the flooding stain so may be in standing water some of the time, but not deep water, most likely. Most importantly, I have a hard time matching up the builings in that block because some of them are missing. I don't know which they are, but there are disturbing absences.

Can anyone do any better?  I would be interested to receive comparative jpegs using different methods to assess this location, since it is an historically significant church and since it would be very useful to be able to compare tactics.

UPDATE 9/16: Using the Microsoft VirtualEarth Katrina site, I got this nice shot. Looks like the church came through pretty well:

Lis Riba writes in the comments to the previous post:

Just seen over the wires:

The Associated Press is offering Internet access to a satellite image that covers most of New Orleans, detailed enough that viewers can zoom in to check on particular neighborhoods and streets.
The image's resolution is high, at 2.4 meters per pixel. It is posted in a format that allows quick viewing of any area a user zooms in on. Users can quickly see what areas are under water and what structures are still standing.

The initial image was taken Wednesday and supplied by the company DigitalGlobe. AP will offer updated satellite images as as they become available.

The image is available at: http://hosted.ap.org/specials/neworleanssatellite/index.html

I tried it. It works and will simplify for many  the kind of tasks I was up to yesterday. The NOAA images are better. AP could improve upon this by integrating the much more detailed NOAA images into the interface.

MEANWHILE, New Orleans burns.

For those needing the information, vua Matthew Harris, here are links to scanner feeds with live audio. I have not listened to them myself.

http://nola-intel.org:8001/scan (1000 user max) Orig Feed, LAPD/NG *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://nola-intel.org:8003/fema (1000 user max) Fema/etc Feed *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://nola-intel.org:8003/astro (http://nola-intel.org:8005/astro) (1000 user max) Astrodome Huston PD Feed *BW Provided by 15minuteservers.com/nac.net NJ
http://stfunoob.com/nola/scanner.pls - All 3 scanner streams (Both NOLA+Astrodome), 4000 slots combined.
http://204.9.66.211:9900/listen.pls Astrodome scanner mirror
http://nola-intel.org:8005/astro Astrodome mirror2 (1000 listeners max)
http://64.202.112.69:8080/scanner (1000 listeners max)
http://tinyurl.com/dc4tx
http://216.22.26.45:8002 (200 Slot)
http://stream.etherkiller.de:8000/no.mp3 (1000 Slot) (located in Europe)
http://us3.comclub.org:8000/no_scanner.m3u (1000 user max aggregate with below) (located in Texas, USA)
http://us3.comclub.org:8000/fema_scanner (1000 user max aggregate with above) (located in Taxas, USA)
http://radio2.wrpn.net:5000/nola_scanner.m3u (32 clients max, located in Columbus, OH, USA)
http://radio.artplz.com:8000/NewOrleans.mp3.m3u (600 max clients) (located in Dallas, Texas, USA)

 

The Forbes web site has published a rather good article on the various web efforts to use Google Earth and Google Maps to provide more information about the media's disaster images. I am quoted extensively. And just a moment ago, I noticed that the BBC has published a similar, also quite good, article along the same lines.

For those new to blogs, here are shortcuts to information about our collaborative maps project:

First of all, my Katrina archive contains all blog posts related to Katrina. The archive page is updated each time I make a new Katrina post, so it would be the best place to bookmark.  On the other hand, it contains many images, so on a dial-up connection it would be slow to load. Also, separately, I have an online album of Katrina map images, Katrina Floods New Orleans, 2005.

As of now, my individual Katrina posts related to maps are:

1. New Orleans Levee Break(s) Before and After
2. not too far from filling in the bowl
3. NASA's First Katrina Before and After Comparison
4. Google Earth Helps Place the Flow from a New Orleans Neighborhood into the Canal in Context
5. DigitalGlobe's New Orleans Before and After Images Are Up
6. How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water
7. How to Find Out if Your New Orleans House Is Under Water, Part 2: We Really Need to Integrate Topo Maps and Known Water Depths into the System
8. Escape Routes for Hurricane Victims

They're All Going to Visit Relatives?

CNN reports that the Astrodome is full and is not accepting any more refugees.

A reader asked a question a few minutes ago that seems to me a very important one: How can she help plot escape routes out of New Orleans given the information available on the Internet?

Could you direct me to a blog or outline a process whereby I might assist my sister and brother-in-law plan/plot a car route out of NOLA in the next few days?

They are on the "Esplanade Ridge", right below the Fairgrounds, and have not been flooded, thankfully.  I'm trying to keep an eye on the flood levels to be able to inform them from this end (New Jersey).

Which is the best satellite source for monitoring daily levels?

The first post-Katrina satellite maps came out only in the last day or so, so real-time satellite monitoring of flooding is probably out of the question. A really detailed topo map would help, but would work better in combination with access to recent satellite photos that would tip you off to missing infrastructure. I've heard that the water in the city moves with the tides, so tide charts would be helpful: cover lower-lying areas at low tide. Other ideas?

Living Next to the Levee
Also in my email this evening, I got this note and picture:

I just want to say thank-you for posting the Levee Break pictures.

In 1998 I was Director of Telecommunications for Entergy.  I rode out Hurricane Georges in the house located at 6812 Belaire Dr. NOLA.  In the attached picture you can see our backyard being the spot where the Levee broke at the 17th Street Canal.  The picture is oriented with East being the top.  There is either one or two houses complete gone just north of our house.  Directly across the levee is Bucktown to the west which looks now relatively dry, but was flooded during the storm based on other satellite photos.

Today on CNN, they were dropping sandbags directly in our backyard trying to fix the break.  The Levee has been completely built up since we left in 99. You see see the Levee wall is relatively new cement.

It is a terrible tragedy and our thoughts are with all of our friends in Nawlins.

Fritz

And here is the picture that came with it:

Wow.

Not the Rapture
To anyone from the Washington Post reading this, can you PLEASE can the moralizing in the photo captions of your otherwise excellent photo galleries?

How can you even consider publishing passages like People who had resisted early evacuation orders, including many elderly and infirm . . . ? Age, infirmity, and poverty are lifestyle choices? This is a natural disaster, not the Rapture.

9/5 UPDATE: Boingboing reports:

The Coast Guard has set up links on its Homeport website so that people can request a rescue for a specific missing or stranded person in the area affected by Katrina.

Wow. That's great. I hope the rescues actually take place if you request one. But that's a huge improvement on the previous situation.

I've been thinking about this all day, and I have a few ideas, some of which I'm a bit too tired to try. But here is the problem. The question is not whether grandma's wedding pictures are getting ruined. The question for many people writing to me is whether their stranded relatives are dead, or at least the nature of their chances of survival. I am reminded of a 9/11 account we published in the 9/11 special supplement to the New York Review of Science Fiction. The husband of a friend, who worked on the WTC's 22nd floor, walked around looking for someone who could answer questions. An official asked, "What kind of questions?" My friend's husband replied, "Like whether my wife is dead." The information about depths and currents is absolutely crucial to those who might still have a relative trapped.

So here is a case in point. I have someone writing from Kosovo who works for the UN saying:

Kathryn,
Can you help me? I have a brother-in-law who is trying to stay in a warehouse two blocks from the River in New Orleans. I've lost contact with him by telephone and am trying to get an idea of the water level around his building, and thus how dangerous his situation is.

It's a white two-story warehouse occupying the full block between Royal and Chartres Streets (on the north and south), and Press and Mantegut Strrets (on the west and east; address 2916 Royal St, zipcode 70117-7362).

Its an almost square building with the northeast corner cut out for a small parking lot. The way to locate it on a photograph is that it's on the northside of the Mississippi at the last big bend in the River before it leaves New Orleans, between Mandeville and Louisa Street Wharfs. You'll see a railroad track that runs along the river by Mandeville Street Wharf and then turns inland; the warehouse is a block inland next to the track.

Well that's probably too much information. But if you can get any idea from scanning photographs as to how much water is around the building, it will be very helpful to us in make decisions about what action to take. (I'm in Eastern Europe at the moment and doing what I can from the internet and telephone contacts, but I've gone about as far as I can for now.)

Lets help her. This seems like a case in which someone might potentially be alive, is known to have been at that location, and so conceivably might be rescued. First of all, here is the Google Maps neighborhood view.

On the face of it, things are not looking too good, since it's within the FEMA designated flood area. But how deep is the water? This is a two-story warehouse. Depth matters. It really matters.

Now a look to see what DigitalGlobe thinks. The results are not too bad. DigitalGlobe's image suggests that the building was not flooded at the point where their picture was taken:

Here is the DigitalGlobe shot from further away:

Note that the stain of flooding starts a block away. Water levels apparently vary with the tides and other factors, so it may be flooded at this moment, but it is crucially important that it is in an area where the water is not very deep, if there is any.

How can we make this better? Ideas, please.

A further example: Mike Moore asks in the comments of the previous post,

Flooding status at 6300 Paris Avenue
In Lake Terrace
Corner of Paris and Frankfort Thanks Mike

Here's his visual answer, a screenshot composited from Google Maps & a DigitalGlobe shot:

Definitely flooded, but what does that mean? Four feet? Or 20? If it was 4 yesterday when the picture was taken, is it 20 today at high tide?

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/7: There is now a clickable depth map for New Orleans at http://mapper.cctechnol.com.

Here is my discussion of how to use it in combination with Google Maps to check out your house. Also, my Katrina album has some some more sample images. Furtehr UPDATE: the depth map is now searchable by address.

IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/17: VirtualEarth's Katrina Flyover  has excellent aerial photos searchable by street address. The interface does not work on all browsers. If you have trouble, see my post describing a workaround.

Another IMPORTANT UPDATE, 9/17: Much more detailed instructions for using Google Earth to check on your house are posted HERE.

The best way to check if a New Orleans address is under water is by using Google Earth and the techniques and overlays created by the Google Earth Current Events Community.  Since GE doesn't have their Mac version out yet, I myself can't do it that way.

UPDATE: Here are the promised Google Earth instructions from our hero Shawn:

1) Install Google Earth
a) http://kh.google.com/download/earth/index.html
2) Click the NOAA Overlay Link from Google Earth Community BBS
a) Mississippi Coast - http://earth.google.com/katrina.html
b) http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/92563/page/3/vc/1
i) Click "Open This Placemark"
ii) Either open file or save to disk and double click.
c) Check the Current Events Board for many more overlays of specific areas.
i) http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/postlist.php/Cat/0/Board/currentEvents/page/0
3) Once overlay is open in Google Earth, Enter your full address in the search field in the upper left corner.   That will center the view on your address.

If you can't or don't want to do it that way, here is a shot-cut.

Step 1: Go to Google Maps and enter the address. Click on the button that says "Hybrid" on the upper right. You will get an image with a speech ballon pointing to a thumbtack showing the location of the address on the satellite photo.
[IMPORTANT UPDATE: Bless their hearts, Google Maps has added a "KATRINA" button to New Orleans areas searchs, so they have automated some of the process I descibe here! Yee haw!]

Step 2: Click up and down the vertical ladder-like bar to see the image at various scales until you feel you can find the place on a satellite image.

Step 3: Compare your image to this superimposition of the FEMA flood map on a New Orleans satellite photo, created by the Google Earth Current Events Community. Here is a small version. Click on it for a much bigger picture.

If the address you are checking is fairly centrally located, you can also check your address image against the DigitalGlobe satellite picture of the flooding.

I hope to post some good Google Earth instructions later. I'll be out for several hours, so if you have some, post 'em in the comments until I get back.

OR PERHAPS I'VE BEEN TO OPTIMISTIC: While I was out driving around Pleasantville a little while ago, a reporter on NPR described all of New Orleans as being flooded. Perhaps she was being hyperbolic. But the more important question for those who need to know about specific addresses in New Orleans may be how deep the water and how swift the current; this all combined with information about the rise and fall of the tides.

BY THE WAY: If you get ahold of Before and After pictures of your house, BE SURE TO KEEP COPIES so you can submit them with your homeowners insurance claims, applications for FEMA aid, and other such. It seems to me that providing physical evidence specific to your address would be likely to expedite claims processing.

DigitalGlobe has a fine gallery of extremely detailed Katrina satellite photos up, and Shawn points out via email that the busy folks in the Google Earth Current Events Community have already figured out how to used them in Overlays, so you can, for example, superimpose a street grid, to have a good look at what happened to your house or that favorite spot (at least, as of yesterday).

Shawn showed me some extremely useful New Orleans big picture Before and After shots. Unfortunately, the DigitalGlobe usage agreement specifically prohibits publication of altered images without their consent. So I can't show you, but if you can run Google Earth, the overlays these people have come up with should allow you to look up specific places fairly easily. Shawn writes:

DigitalGlobe put out new Sat images a couple hours ago, now a lot people people biting their fingers can look up where they want in GE and see the flooding over a lot of NOLA.

And here's the Overlay as made by GE User Equitus from this forum post: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/92563/page/0/vc/1

Overlay http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=92563

For a sense of the resolution, note that the big 17th Street levee break is clearly visible toward the bottom right of the sample DigitalGlobe image to the left.

NOTE TO THE FOLKS AT GOOGLE EARTH: Finish your Macintosh version! People need it.

MEANWHILE, the September 1st New York Times editorial begins

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

I confess I have been paying almost no attention to Bush's behavior at all. In his "management style," his minions will tell him when he's needed and he doesn't rise to occasions until they do. So I expected very little.

But what has happened to New Orleans seems to me to be rather like a stroke. There is a saying about strokes, TIME IS BRAIN: The longer treatment takes, the more brain damage occurs. Never mind that a "mandatory" evacuation should have provided a plan for the poor to get out, the New Orleans second-round evacuation currently in progress needed to start a lot earlier. The longer it takes, the less infrastrcture there is to do it with. The longer it takes, the more people roast, unrescued, trapped in their attics, or float away when the water gets above the roof, or try to make a break for it and drown.

BUSH UPDATE: Have received scathing reviews for his speech yesterday, Bush tries to do better on Good Morning America this morning, claiming, I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees. See Echidne for further details. I don't have the stomach for it this morning. (Via atrios.)

This is the Google Earth superimposition of this photo I posted yesterday, showing water flowing out of a neighborhood, over the levee at Surekote Rd. and into the canal. (In case you're wondering, those little rectangles are the rooves of houses. The big red rectangles are city blocks.) The Google Earth group working on this has created a number of such superimpositions. I asked Shawn if he could please do the Surekote picture for me. Thanks Shawn.

UPDATE: I've now got an album up of this kind of image: Katrina Floods New Orleans, 2005.

A FURTHER TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCE for the Google Earth users: Shawn writes, via email

Check this one out...

http://www.scipionus.com/

It's a google maps hack, allowing users to add markers with information on the area.

In a fastmoving disaster situation, this looks to be especially useful.

FINALLY (at 11:03 PM), I'm tired and want to go to bed. But Xeni's readers have provided her with more links  over at Boingboing. Goodnight.

The images are shown in false color to make water visible against the land. Water is black or dark blue where it is colored with mud, vegetation is bright green, and clouds are light blue and white. The large images provided above provide a broader view of the region. They show flooding along the Mississippi and Alabama coast, particularly around Mobile Bay and parts of coastal Mississippi. The large images are at MODIS’ maximum resolution, but both the August 30 and August 27 images are available in additional resolutions from the MODIS Rapid Response Team.

NASA images courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

[My husband David points out that their description is confusing. I believe the turquoise blue color is shallow water in the city of New Orleans.] See also their Mississippi and Alabama coastal comparison photo.

And the water has had another 24 hours to rise since that photo was taken.

NASA update 8:48 PM, 8/31: The Washington Post has a NASA simulation using satellite maps of how much of New Orleans disappears under water as water levels rise.

(Via BoingBoing, hat tip to Lis Riba.)

MEANWHILE, there begins to be talk of a death toll in the thousands. (My personal estimate is that this is an event on the scale of the French heat wave in terms of its body count; I'm guessing low five figures.)

"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," and other people dead in attics, Mayor Ray Nagin said. Asked how many, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

The frightening estimate came as Army engineers struggled to plug New Orleans' breached levees with giant sandbags and concrete barriers, while authorities drew up plans to clear out the tens of thousands of people left in the Big Easy and all but abandon the flooded-out city.

There will be a "total evacuation of the city. We have to. The city will not be functional for two or three months," Nagin said.

Most of those storm refugees — 15,000 to 20,000 people — were in the Superdome, which had become hot and stuffy, with broken toilets and nowhere for anyone to bathe. "It can no longer operate as a shelter of last resort," the mayor said.

Nagin estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained in New Orleans, a city of nearly half a million people. He said 14,000 to 15,000 a day could be evacuated.

In light of the situation, I can't imagine why the current Washington Post headline reads More than 25,000 People to be Evacualted. More? Yeah, I'd say 50,000 - 100,000 is more than 25,000. A whole hell of a lot more. From what planet are they reporting on this story? Perhaps NASA could be persuaded to give them a lift back.

UPDATE 9/7: NASA has more Katrina photos up.

Where to begin? How are they going to evacuate the people still in New Orleans? (Transporter beams? Scottie, where are you when we need you? In military helicopters? The caption to the Times-Picayune photo to the left reads, Acadian Ambulance workers rush two small children from a Louisiana National Guard helicopter as they were evacuated from the Superdome. Story problem: there are 20,000 people in the stadium. Oh, never mind.) The current plan for evacuating the stadium, according to an MSNBC story from a few minutes ago, seems to be this:

With the city still flooding after levees failed, officials on Wednesday made plans to bus the 25,000 evacuees at the Superdome and other shelters to Houston's Astrodome. . . .

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said everyone still in the city, now huddled in the Superdome and other rescue centers, needs to leave. She said she wanted the Superdome evacuated within two days. . . .

Houston officials later said those evacuees would be sent via 475 buses to the city's Astrodome. The stadium's schedule was cleared through December to make it available.

How many are there left? Let's see: a city of 1.3 million people; 1 million flee. How many remain? Or let's say the city was 90% evacuated. How many remain? And how will they know when they've got them all?

And about those broken levees: How are they going to fix them with so much water rushng through? I spent last week at the beach, so every time I think about plans I heard about involving sand, I keep thinking of a small child trying to fix a damaged castle in the face of the rising tide. I gather there is some new plan involving lots of cement blocks that are on trucks somewhere enroute.

And what if the levees can't be fixed? Was that perhaps the thought behind Governor Blanco's remark that some of those taking refuge in and now trapped in the stadium "do not have any regard for others”? That perhaps it would be okay if only the Good were saved?

Yesterday, some of us noticed that in some photos water seemed, incomprehensibly, to be flowing out of a neighborhood and into the canal. The explanation, which I came across this morning is chilling. If you can stand it, read the whole thing:

Flooding will only get worse by Mark Schleifstein, Times-Picayune staff writer

The lake is normally 1 foot above sea level, while the city of New Orleans is an average of 6 feet below sea level. But a combination of storm surge and rainfall from Katrina have raised the lake's surface to 6 feet above sea level, or more.

All of that water moving from the lake has found several holes in the lake's banks - all pouring into New Orleans. Water that crossed St. Charles Parish in an area where the lakefront levee has not yet been completed, and that backed up from the lake in Jefferson Parish canals, is funneling into Kenner and Metairie.

A 500-yard and growing breach in the eastern wall of the 17th Street Canal separating New Orleans from Metairie is pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of lake water per second into the New Orleans area. Water also is flowing through two more levee breaches along the Industrial Canal, which created a Hurricane Betsy-on-steroids flood in the Lower 9th Ward on Monday that is now spreading south into the French Quarter and other parts of the city.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned Tuesday evening that an attempt to plug the holes in the 17th Street Canal had failed, and the floodwaters were expected to continue to rise rapidly throughout the night. Eventually, Nagin said, the water could reach as high as 3 feet above sea level, meaning it could rise to 12 to 15 feet high in some parts of the city.

Louisiana State University Hurricane Center researcher Ivor van Heerden warned that Nagin's estimates could be too low because the lake water won't fall quickly during the next few days.

And then there's this bit from another Time-Picayune story:

With solid water from the lake to the French Quarter, the inundation and depopulation of an entire American city was at hand.

"Truth to tell, we're not to far from filling in the bowl," said Terry Ebbert, the city's director of homeland security. The waters were still rising at 3 inches per hour, and eventually could move close to the French Quarter levee.

In the media hype leading up to landfall, there was the illusion that other than those performing essential functions, anyone else left in New Orleans was either tucked away in the stadium or was a French Quarter drunkard. The quantity of media reports of people needing to be rescued from their houses tells a different story. Do they even know how many people stayed behind?

MEANWHILE, I see from earthhopper's photogallery on Flicker that Shawn's Google Earth initiative is yeilding fruit (and this presumably overnight):

The second one seemed to be attributed to "Mickey" on the Google Hacks site. I don't have any attribution for the other one. I would also appreciate descriptive details from those who have them.

UPDATE: Shawn tells me a group attribution for a group of about nine Google Earth users is in order. (I presume the poster, dOLLYLLAMA also deserves credit.)

New Orleans-Mississippi-Flood/Damage Compilation

New Orleans Flood Damage
~A collection of overlays, placemarks and photos, by various contributors.

Mississippi
~Check video link

thanks:Modest baggydog Shawn_McBride drew10dall vyruss equitus jay_babin,johnmora,mwarren,reuters,AP
If i forgot to mention please forgive, I wanted to get this out fast.

-dOLLYLLAMA

[Preface, September 12th, 2005: It is now nearly two weeks since this blog post was begun. In its initial draft it was quite short. As more information came in, it was revisied, corrected and expanded on the fly. Some of the information may be out of date. -KC  9/23: For info in the new breaches, see New Orleans Area in Trouble from Rita Storm Surge. -KC]

I'm probably violating all kinds of copyrights here, but since I haven't seen it elsewhere, here is that levee in New Orleans before and after the break (or at least a levee before & after). Note that the expanse of water in the after picture was formerly (or perhaps currently) occupied by houses.

The first picture comes via Matthew Harris's Flickr account, extracted from Google Earth. [SEE CORRECTED IMAGE w/ BREAK IN A DIFFERENT PLACE FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE.]

The second comes via a comment in Making Light and originates at the URL http://www.hunt101.com/img/319526.JPG, beyond which I don't know its provenance.

I don't guarantee that these are actually the same spot, because of the vagaries of all this. There are some differences in the buildings, but I don't know when the Google Earth picture was taken.

UPDATE: At Making Light, David Bell comments

Looking at Kathryn's pictures, the red-roofed building is very prominent on the Google Earth imagery, by the north end of the canal. It's on the lake shore. In the background haze you can see the high-rise buildings of the city centre. And the trees and the buildings on the opposite side of the canal are good landmarks on Google Earth.

30d01m07s N 90d07m17s W

And that looks like a 200-foot breach, similar width to the canal.

So the marked breach on the one photo may not be the same as the other. Is there more than one? I'm on a Mac so I can't get at Google Earth.

(Additional aerial photo references appreciated.)

FURTHER UPDATE: in the comments a fellow named kevin has accomplished what I haven't. He has gotten me a corrected "before" shot. I have them from Google Maps and GlobeXplorer, but couldn't seem to either link to them, or get copies. (They're too clever for the likes of me.) I had my digital camera in my lap all ready to take pictures of my screen, when his link arrived.  Thanks, kevin!

The question that remains is what the Harris picture represents. Is it the breach that was reported earlier?

(Web collaboration is a beautiful thing.)

Matthew Harris clarifies his breach picture, saying, Note these images are not current they are from older aerial photos that have been superimposed with graphics, they are for illustration purposes only. There are two breaches:

He has a second, closer, "Before" picture:

Via email, Mark Bernstein points out that it is being reported that the I-10 Bridge has been destroyed. Here's a Before shot, taken with my digital camera pointing it at my LCD monitor. Anyone got an After pic?

And here's the Houston Chronicle write-up:

Portions of the Interstate 10 high-rise bridge over the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain, east of New Orleans and south of Slidell, have collapsed. Some sections of the I-10 twin span — a lifeline between the south and north shores of Lake Pontchartrain — are missing; others have shifted position but are still standing.

"We know that the I-10 twin span has blown over, is no longer with us," said Mark Smith, spokesman for the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

Here's an AP photo of the state of the bridge. The car is the same one as in the CNN video. Watching the CNN video a couple of times, it looks like something is flopped over the steering wheel, though you can't see into the car from this angle. (Follow the link for a crisper image.
This is from the Times Picayune, where I finally did get their slide-shows to work.

 

An Afterthought: we blog-folk are doing this by the seat of our pants and actually getting somewhere. But as Xeni Jardin asks, "media evacuates, there is no grid, damage map?" Why do you see this attempt here and not on the CNN of MSNBC site?

This isn't a disaster movie. It's real. People care about specific people in specific places. They want to understand precisely where the water is 20 ft. deep, where the water is coming in. Many, many people have very specific, individual relationships to this city. The specifics we are being given just don't cut it. If I can look this stuff up, why don't they?

St Bernard's Parish, via dipdewdog on Flickr, provenance unknown, though it looks like a news photo:

Here is what I gather is roughly the same area from Google maps (again, via my digital camera. Anyone know how to do screen shoots in Tiger? [8/31 UPDATE: I've been given much helpful advice. Thanks.]).

[9/2: A Google Earth image for comparison is available in the album, thanks to Scott Sherris.]

Returning to the subject of breached levees, here is another photo from Flickr, this one posted by darrelf, again of unknown provenance, though it looks like a news photo. His caption reads, New Orleans, LA -- notice the water coming over the levee at the bottom.

Peter Trei notes that this break in an MSNBC graphic is not one of the ones we've been talking about, but is instead at 30 01' 12.39" N 90 04' 14.72" W ( decimal: 30.020108° -90.070756°).

I'm trying to get a good Before Satellite photo to position it. UPDATE: Trei has helped me out and sent me a couple:

He remarks:

The MSNBC.com front page shows a breach about 150 feet long. I've managed to identify the location in Google Earth, based on the shapes of the houses. . . . Google earth shows that this is on a different canal than the others - its on the west side of the London Avenue Outfall Canal, opposite Pratt Street, a few houses south of the bridge carrying Robert E Lee Blvd.

In a subsequent email, Trei point out this MSNBC picture, which I think is of the same break as the image I got from darrelf, about which he says:

This one appears to be a highly foreshortened view of the bridge the carries State Hwy 39 over the short canal connecting the river and the Main Outfall canal.

The breach appears to be at opposite Jourdan Ave, near N Roman Street, at about 29 58 12.48 N    90 01 24.64 W

The thing I don't understand is that the water in this photo seems to be flowing  INTO the canal.

 

Here is a hybrid sat photo street map, also courtesy of Peter Trei, showing the location:

The governor has announced a complete evacuation of New Orleans, for obvious reasons.

MEANWHILE, a post-apocalypse SF novel plays itself out. This is from the Times Picayune (via email from Mark Bernstein).

Law enforcement efforts to contain the emergency left by Katrina slipped into chaos in parts of New Orleans Tuesday with some police officers and firefighters joining looters in picking stores clean.

At the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street, an initial effort to hand out provisions to stranded citizens quickly disintegrated into mass looting. Authorities at the scene said bedlam erupted after the giveaway was  announced over the radio.

While many people carried out food and essential supplies, others cleared out jewelry racks and carted out computers, TVs and appliances on  handtrucks.

Some officers joined in taking whatever they could, including one New Orleans cop who loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat-screen television.

Officers claimed there was nothing they could do to contain the anarchy, saying their radio communications have broken down and they had no direction from commanders. . . .

Inside the store, one woman was stocking up on make-up. She said she took comfort in watching police load up their own carts.

“It must be legal,” she said. “The police are here taking stuff, too.”

 

The caption on whitehouse.gov begins, President George W. Bush is handed a map by Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin.

Shawn in the comments is really onto something, figuring out a way to superimpose media images on Google maps:

Finally -- because I plan to go to bed shortly -- here is a photo from the Washington Post showing the flood waters rising around the stadium which, as far as I know, still has 10,000 people in it.

4:38 AM, 8/31: Shawn writes via email,

The google earth community is really flowing with people matching up arial photos to the levee breaks. There's one group of people setting up an auto updating google earth file. I placed all of the good ones I found at tehsquee.com

You need Google Earth to be able to use the files he's posted there.

For more images, see my subsequent post. The superimposed images are toward the bottom.

NOTE 8/31 at 3:36 PM: the fist NASA comparison satellite photos are in.

9/1: CNN has an interesting animation/video of how the levees broke.

PS: If you are trying to make a comment and it gets rejected, email it to me at kathryn.cramer at gmail.com.

 

I found this interesting infrared satellite photo on Weatherunderground.com. I'm not sure how to interpret it, except that it suggests strongly that Katrina will begin having a significant effect on our weather in Pleasantville, NY as soon as this afternoon or early evening. The scale is really impressive.

Here is a photo I took yesterday morning  returning to our motel from the beach in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Before heading home, I got the kids up at 7AM, so we could go to the beach one last time.  It was high tide, but almost immediately we found a kite. The string was stretched a long way down the beach, and at the end of the string was a wet, but flyable, Dragon Ball Z kite.  I shot this picture as we were carrying our windfall kite back to the motel just before changing clothes and checking out. This is the beach where David's grandfather built a beach house in about 1910 which remained in David's family until the 1970s, so it is the beach where David spent summers as a child. We stayed over on our way back from Maine.

So now we're home in this final week of summer before school starts. Taking stock when we got home yesterday after a long grueling drive back from Massachusetts, it began to appear that New Orleans was in significant danger of being wiped out by the incoming hurricane.

Looking at the photos of long lines of cars streaming out of New Orleans, I was reminded of our midday experience on the Mass Pike: Here are a few Mass Pike pictures. There was some kind of huge accident west of the Millbury exit, so the Pike was closed in both directions. This set the stage for some really appalling behavior on the part of frustrated drivers. I honest to God saw someone pull out onto the shoulder of the road and cut off an ambulance with lights flashing and sirens blaring. Here are the cars driving in the breakdown lane next to a guard rail, cutting off access for emergency vehicles, and the cop car and the car it was trying to escort. Most drivers behaved themselves, but there was a significant contingent that seemed mostly unconcerned with getting out of the way of emergency vehicles that were trying to reach the accident. There were scores of minor accidents as cars jostled each other in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. From the radio coverage, I gather that the traffic jam was ultimately resolved by the arrival of a Medvac helicopter. We didn't see the actual accident site.

I wish I'd thought to get out my video camera to tape the scene of a frustrated cop trying to escort a couple in a visibly damaged car off the  highway. He got out of his car and rapped on the window of the car in from of him twice. And he also went to one of the cars trying to tag along, put his hands on his hips and asked "Why are you following me?" I didn't hear the driver's reply.

I hope the Louisiana drivers were more considerate of each other than the people I witnessed yesterday. 

And so now, a hurricane, a huge hurricane. Lucky me, we don't have cable TV. So I don't have the opportunity to subject myself to endless looping anxiety as CNN covers the story with way too little data because it would be potentially lethal to do the usual coverage. My first words to David this morning were "Well, New Orleans isn't gone yet."

My great-grandmother, Agnes Gleason Cramer, died and was buried somewhere in New Orleans in about 1908; we don't know where. She died when my grandfather was 10 months old, as I understand it from complications from childbirth. So my grandfather never knew his mother. A few years ago, we established that the family seemed to have no copies of her picture. Last night, I had a dream that her bones were floating out to sea.