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Sun. Sep 18, 2005

Storm Remnants

While I currently have no interest in talking about the Big Rage any more than I already have, there are some random remnants of Katrina’s aftermath that have been bouncing around my brain. Lucky you, you get to see me let them out!

One of the reasons I see no point in talking about the Big Rage is that I simply can’t compete. If you’ve been following QuoteLog this month, you may have noticed a new attribution for some of the quotes; “Someone Who Sacrificed His Soul On The Altar of Politics.” It’s pretty self explanatory, and is applied only to the most egregious cases. But I started with just three of them. And now there’s six. All signs indicate it will be a growing trend.

We’re also beginning to see it’s not just various levels of government failing to meet their commitments. Let’s talk about the insurance companies. They’re telling many of these people in Mississippi and Louisiana that they’ll cover damage caused by the wind of the hurricane, but that’s not flood insurance. They won’t be paying out on that kind of water damage.

This is going to leave hundreds of thousands of home owners in a horrible bind. Imagine you’re a working man with a nice but modest $100,000 home, over a half mile from the water in Southern Mississippi. It’s all you and your family have, and hard work has half paid it off. Along comes Katrina, and you’re left with little more than a concrete slab and a pile of lumber that used to be your half paid off home. And a valid home insurance policy.

Now, if the wind had ripped off your roof, and the wind had driven gallons of rain water through your roof into your home, that would be covered. But when the wind of the storm pushes a 25 foot surge of water inland and wipes the earth clean … that’s not covered. Note, if there was no wind (covered), there would be no inland storm surge (not covered).

So you’re left with that concrete slab, and you still owe $50,000 on it. No payoffs will be coming, other than maybe a few thousand in emergency relief. Through no fault of your own, you are now homeless, jobless, and have a massive debt you can never pay on something that no longer exists. So, as much as you hate to do it, you wonder if bankruptcy is your best option. And then you remember the fine work of our Congress earlier this year.

Like I told you, you’re on your own.

Another thing that’s bugging me may seem like a purely semantic issue, but it’s actually a structural one. The common perception is that the levees holding back Lake Ponchartrain failed. I see that repeated in the media and blogs over and over. First, the water came from breaks in the canals, not the lake.

Secondly, they weren’t levees. A levee is a berm, with a large base and a sloped wall on both sides rising to a peak. Those are what line the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain. They take up a lot of space. And if you want to increase the height of one, you have to increase the width of the base. Obviously, in an urban environment, that’s a problem.

The canals that actually run through the city are held in by concrete flood walls, not a traditional levee. Look at this picture. That’s what failed. When a levee is overtopped, the water has a gradual slope to run down on the other side. When a flood wall is overtopped, a curtain of water falls straight down, and can quickly erode the backside support of that wall. And each section of concrete has multiple angles at which it can fail, vertically or horizontally. One loose barge flopping about in the Industrial Canal, and you’ve got a nearly guaranteed failure.

If your home was flooded, it certainly doesn’t matter whether it was by levee or flood wall, via breach or overtopping. The result is the same. But like I said, it’s been bugging me.

What else has been bugging me? I guess I should be used to it, but it’s still disconcerting to see FEMA bleeding money like a stuck pig to the benefit of no one but their vendors. NBC took on the simplest of issues, ice. One ice vendor reports “only one-third of his trucks have actually unloaded the ice that FEMA ordered.” The rest are rerouted and/or put in storage for thousands per day, per truck. “From a trucking aspect, I’m happy. Keep it coming … From a taxpayer aspect, it’s sick.”

FEMA will likely be providing the ice water in Hell.

Locally, it ain’t much better. The Atlanta paper has an article in the Sunday edition that is titled “Could Atlanta cope?” in the web edition, but the printed paper is boldly headlined “City Not Ready for Disaster.” In it, they say “In light of government failures that left many New Orleans residents stranded in their homes, President Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security to reassess the preparedness of every major American city for disasters that might require large evacuations.”

And part of me just has to wonder what Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff have been doing with their department. Each major city has its own unique threats, geography, and difficulties. One would think that would be Job One, assess how local authorities are prepared to react, and then judge how the feds can quickly fill in the gaps.

No matter. The city isn’t ready to talk to them anyway. Not in any serious way:

The worst catastrophe that disaster planners envision for Atlanta isn’t a hurricane or a chemical spill or a terrorist attack.

It’s an ice storm.

Jim Cook, director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency [...] runs the emergency agency from a bunker built in the basement of the Fulton County government building before the 1996 Summer Olympics. With beds, showers, a kitchen and fuel for generators, a couple of dozen disaster managers could live underground there for as long as two weeks.

During emergencies, the bunker becomes the command center for city and county officials, who coordinate the response to disasters with guidance from a 180-page loose-leaf book: the Emergency Operations Plan.

AJC: Could Atlanta cope?

Sounds good so far, eh? Other than some odd priorities. Except that big “Emergency Operations Plan” sounds like a chunk of lightweight boilerplate, not an actual plan.

Despite its heft, the book provides few details. Much of it is based on a template developed by the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, which requires each county in the state to produce an updated plan every four years. The state agency must approve the plans, which increasingly contain material on terrorism preparedness requested by federal Homeland Security officials.

The book notes that “streets and highways become extremely hazardous” during ice storms and that power outages may occur. It says emergencies involving large groups of people in places such as arenas or malls can cause “mass confusion and hysteria.”

In listing terrorism as the sixth-greatest threat facing Atlanta, the book reports: “Often, a terrorist attack is based on a political agenda or national cause. Terrorism is the use of violence to elicit fear and effect change … The process of recovery may take an extended period of time for the healing of people affected and the recovery of the community.”

The book contains no guidelines for preventing a terrorist act or responding to natural disaster, however.

That’s so very reassuring. Because in the event of a terrorist attack on say, the Center for Disease Control, the first thing I’m going to want is a bureaucratic parsing of what terrorism is. Basically, it sounds like those couple dozen people in the bunker at Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency will be very well set. The rest of us? Not so good.

Have I mentioned? You’re on your own.

Finally, though I didn’t listen to the President’s speech the other night, I did find this copy of the full text, and he said: “Four years after the frightening experience of September the 11th, Americans have every right to expect a more effective response in a time of emergency. When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as President, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution.”

Therefore, I find it quite comical that a few on the right are still saying there’s no evidence of federal (Republican) failure, it was all the local (Democratic) folks. I can’t help but be reminded of Islamist fundamentalists who, to this day, insist Al Qaeda wasn’t responsible for 9/11, it was the Jews. Even after Osama bin Laden admitted, “no, really, it was us.” But their blindered mindset could not accept that the fault didn’t belong to those they’d always blamed, for every problem.

There’s blame for some Democrats, some Republicans, some local and state officials, and some federal officials. This was a cascade of failures. And as long as a significant percentage of both partisan flanks devote their energy to “winning this battle,” it will simply remain a cascade of failures. Maybe even grow some.

Enough. I think I’ve filled my curmudgeon quota for this week. I promise more trivial and light things are to come in the next few days. I just had to clear out some dark clutter.