RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Hurricane Katrina

Quote:

---

Matter-eater Man said:
President Bush finally accepts some responsability.

Bush: 'I take responsibility'

* "To the extent the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility," Bush says

---

Quote:

---

magicjay38 said:
Doc, you've lived in the Gulf region awhile so I'm guessing you've seen disasterous hurricanes before. Has anyone ever been happy with FEMA's performance? They never are in California.

I hope all is well for you and your family. Best of luck!

---

Quote:

---

the G-man said:
...

Who else should he take responsibility for? The local authorities? The La authorities? The looters?

---

Quote:

---

WASHINGTON — Michael Brown, who Friday was sent back to Washington, is the poster boy for what has gone wrong with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The nation’s federal disaster agency has been politicized and dismantled over the past four years, and Brown, who remains as its director, is a symptom of that transformation, disaster and government efficiency experts say.

The Bush administration has filled FEMA’s top jobs with political patronage appointees with no emergency management experience, cut disaster preparedness budgets and marginalized the agency by merging it with the new anti-terrorism bureaucracy, say those experts, who include four former senior FEMA officials.

The number of career disaster management professionals in senior FEMA jobs has been cut by more than 50 percent since 2000, federal personnel records show.

Brown “has become a symbol of what’s wrong with FEMA, and ultimately he has to go,” said Paul C. Light, a New York University public service professor. “The real problem here is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with the appointments process. It’s the people who decided to put him in place and put all those politicals in place.”

George Haddow, a former FEMA deputy chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and a co-author of an emergency management textbook, called what happened in the past four years the “deconstruction of the most robust emergency management and effective response system in the world.”

In 2000, 40 percent of the top FEMA jobs were held by career workers who rose through the ranks of the agency, including chief of staff. By 2004, that figure was less than 19 percent, and the deputy director/chief of staff job is held by a former TV anchor turned political operative.

Gen. Julius Becton Jr., a FEMA director in the Reagan administration, said the agency had become too political and should be run by a nonpolitical appointee.

Of the top 15 FEMA spots in Washington, the only persons who have experience or have a single permanent job are the agency’s top lawyer, its equal rights director, its technology chief and its inner-agency planning chief.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigating arm of Congress, summarized the agency’s history this way:

“The agency’s performance during hurricanes and an earthquake in the late 1980s and early 1990s generated intense criticism and raised doubts about its ability to respond to disasters. …

“In the wake of congressional investigations, President Bill Clinton in 1993 appointed James Lee Witt, who ran emergency management in Arkansas, to head the embattled federal agency. Witt is widely credited with turning FEMA into a model for disaster response.”

Just before FEMA was merged into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, insiders said that problems were sure to develop.

---

Bars, restaurants and shops had just begun showing signs of life when the mayor halted the repopulation of the city and once again ordered everyone to leave town as a new tropical storm headed toward the Gulf of Mexico.

The call for another evacuation came after repeated warnings from top federal officials — including President Bush himself — that New Orleans was not safe enough to reopen.

Federal officials warned that Tropical Storm Rita could breach the city's weakened levees and swamp the city all over again.

Nagin saw a quick reopening as a way to get the storm-battered city back in the business of luring tourists. But federal officials warned that such a move could be a few weeks premature, pointing out that much of the area does not yet have full electricity and still has no drinkable water, 911 service or working hospitals.

With the approach of Rita, Bush added his voice, saying he had "deep concern" about the possibility that New Orleans' levees could be breached again.

"The mayor — you know, he's got this dream about having a city up and running, and we share that dream," the president said. "But we also want to be realistic about some of the hurdles and obstacles that we all confront in repopulating New Orleans."

About 20 percent of the city is still flooded, down from a high of about 80 percent after Katrina, and the water was expected to be pumped out by Sept. 30.

Quote:

---

Things I have learned from watching the news on TV during the last eight days:

The hurricane only hit black family's property

New Orleans was devastated and no other city was affected by the hurricane

Mississippi is reported to have a tree blown down

New Orleans has no white people

The hurricane blew a limb off a tree in the yard of an Alabama resident

When you are hungry after a hurricane steal a big screen TV

The hurricane did 23 billion dollars in improvements to New Orleans: now the city is looter and gang free; and they are in your city.

Don't give thanks to the thousands that came to help rescue you, instead bitch because the government hasn't given you a debit card yet

---

Quote:

---

thedoctor said:

Quote:

---

Things I have learned from watching the news on TV during the last eight days:

The hurricane only hit black family's property

New Orleans was devastated and no other city was affected by the hurricane

Mississippi is reported to have a tree blown down

New Orleans has no white people

The hurricane blew a limb off a tree in the yard of an Alabama resident

When you are hungry after a hurricane steal a big screen TV

The hurricane did 23 billion dollars in improvements to New Orleans: now the city is looter and gang free; and they are in your city.

Don't give thanks to the thousands that came to help rescue you, instead bitch because the government hasn't given you a debit card yet

---

---

Quote:

---

magicjay38 said:
Just a thought; that big screen tv running down the street was soaked in dirty water. It will never work again.

---

Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.

Gore criticized the Bush administration's slow response to Katrina in a speech Friday in San Francisco, but refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew on Sept. 3 and 4.

However, Dr. Anderson Spickard, who is Gore's personal physician and accompanied him on the flights, said: "Gore told me he wanted to do this because like all of us he wanted to seize the opportunity to do what one guy can do, given the assets that he has."

Quote:

---

the G-man said:
It's good to see a failed presidential candidate actually doing something worthwhile instead of just carping.

---

Just couldn't get all the way through it, could ya ?

Quote:

---

Pariah said:
Failures can't invent hurricanes!

That's crazy!

---

WE MIGHT have had a faster response to Katrina, and prevented the 9/11 attacks altogether, if only we'd followed the advice of Dick the Butcher: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin reportedly was reluctant to order a mandatory evacuation for fear of lawsuits.

God knows why Gov. Kathleen Blanco dragged her feet - dithering seems to be her modus operandi - but I suspect lawyers had a lot to do with it.

My friend Ralph Peters told me his sources in the Pentagon told him lawyers for FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security spent the weekend before Katrina struck arguing about what they could or couldn't do - the emphasis was on couldn't - absent certain permissions from Ms. Blanco.

Former members of Able Danger, a military intelligence unit, have claimed they had identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the members of his cell more than a year before 9/11, and had tried to pass this information on to the FBI, but were forbidden to do so on the advice of Pentagon lawyers.

There are lawyers who can act promptly and decisively in a crisis (see Giuliani, Rudy). But they are the exception rather than the rule. By training and temperament, lawyers are more likely to flash a yellow light than a green one.

It is this fundamental characteristic, my friend Tom Lipscomb told me, that caused a young Donald Rumsfeld to argue that lawyers should be barred from holding public office. It was probably not helpful that both Michael Brown, the head of FEMA when Katrina struck, and Michael Chertoff, his boss at the Department of Homeland Security, are lawyers.

The pernicious impact lawyers can have in a crisis is compounded by bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies typically move at a torpid pace, and insist on following the rules even when the rules make no sense. So firemen were prevented from rescuing Katrina victims until they had received a lecture on sexual harassment policy.

The more layers of bureaucrats through which a decision must pass, the slower the response. Yet Washington's response to any crisis is to create larger bureaucracies.

The only bureaucracy which moves rapidly in a crisis is the military. I think it would be a mistake to make the military a "first responder" in natural disasters, but FEMA should be reorganized along military lines.

After more than a month of living with dozens of displaced relatives in Opelousas, Jacquelyn Sherman, an evacuee from New Orleans, told her niece she was depressed.

That all changed when she won $1.6 million--before taxes--playing a slot machine at Evangeline Downs Racetrack and Casino.

"When it happened, I didn't know what was going on," Sherman said. "I had just put in my $20 in the "Wheel of Fortune" machine when it hit. . . .

Jacquelyn Sherman and her sister decided to entertain themselves with a trip to Evangeline Downs. Before she knew it, Sherman went from having practically nothing to being a millionaire.

The government's head of Hurricane Katrina (search) relief efforts made a surprise visit to a newly built trailer park Saturday and said hundreds of similar makeshift towns are planned to house residents displaced by the storm.

U.S. Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen (search) called the construction of the park that holds more than 570 trailers about 91 miles northwest of New Orleans (search) "pretty remarkable."

"This went from nothing to something in about five weeks," said Allen, who chatted with residents of the small trailers equipped with air conditioning, plumbing and TV antennas.

The park is laid out like a small town, with gravel roads, street lights and power lines.

Allen said about 120,000 trailers and mobile homes are expected to be delivered to Louisiana for evacuees in the coming weeks. FEMA and state officials said the optimum size of each park will be about 200 housing units, but they also may be placed on the property of residents with destroyed homes. Other people may wind up in hotels.

President Bush has said all Gulf Coast evacuees should be out of shelters by mid-October. The American Red Cross said Saturday that 23,970 Gulf Coast residents displaced by the hurricanes had stayed in shelters the night before.

Despite a barrage of criticism, a state money panel refused Tuesday to reconsider its decision to spend $45 million on new construction projects even as the state faces devastating budget problems and seeks federal aid for hurricane recovery needs.

The projects approved last week — everything from health labs and water wells to livestock facilities and a sports complex — have generated complaints on editorial pages and from legislators.

Some lawmakers said the construction projects will damage Louisiana's efforts to secure federal hurricane relief aid because it appears that the state hasn't reined in its own spending to help itself before asking for federal assistance.

But on Tuesday, urged by an official with Gov. Kathleen Blanco's administration, the Bond Commission voted 12-2 to end its meeting without considering a request put on the agenda by state Treasurer John Kennedy, head of the commission, to take another look at the projects.

Quote:

---

Shortcuts alleged in building levees
By Alan Levin, USA TODAY

Several of the levees that flooded New Orleans may have been built with shoddy materials or by contractors who took shortcuts to save money, an investigator told Congress Wednesday.

About a dozen people, including engineers and contractors, made the allegations of poor workmanship in recent weeks to investigators probing the levee failures, said Raymond Seed, the head of a National Science Foundation team examining the levees.

Seed would not identify the tipsters and he cautioned that the allegations may ultimately have nothing to do with the levee disaster that led to hundreds of deaths. But he said that investigators are taking the tips seriously and intend to turn them over to federal officials.

"What makes us nervous is we're hearing multiple accounts," Seed said after testifying before the Senate
Homeland Security Committee. The National Science Foundation, which gave Seed a grant to investigate the levees, is an independent federal agency charged with promoting science and the nation's welfare.

The complaints focus on two canals where levees topped with flood walls were built in stages over the past 15 years. One of the claims is that contractors used steel sheets - which were driven into the levees to prevent water seepage - that were shorter than what was called for in designs. If true, that could have made the levees weak and prone to failure.

Other tipsters complained that inferior materials, such as porous soil, were used to construct the levees.

Robert Bea, another University of California, Berkeley professor working with Seed, said in an interview that he talked on the phone with two women who said they had specific information from their late husbands on construction shortcuts taken on the levees.

Seed said other investigators received similar complaints.

He wants the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw design and construction of the levees, to dig up portions of them to make sure they were built properly.

A preliminary report issued Wednesday by Seed's group and an American Society of Civil Engineers team said key levee failures on the canals near Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans occurred because water oozed beneath the steel sheets and pushed aside the soft delta soil.

The levees were supposed to be able to withstand water heights seen in Hurricane Katrina, which hit Aug. 29. Investigators have not pinpointed whether designs were inadequate or the levees were built improperly.

Seed was joined by the heads of three other groups investigating the levee failures. The investigators raised questions about poor federal and local oversight of the levees, steadily decreasing budgets for the Army Corps of Engineers and decades of safety compromises.

---

Quote:

---

'Can I quit now?' FEMA chief wrote as Katrina raged

E-mails give insight into Brown's leadership, attitude

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Louisiana congressman says e-mails written by the government's emergency response chief as Hurricane Katrina raged show a lack of concern for the unfolding tragedy and a failure in leadership.

---

Quote:

---

Gulf Coast Homeowners' Mortgages Come Due
By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer

OCEAN SPRINGS, Miss. - Like many homeowners around here, Janet Kisling owes a pile of debt on little more than a pile of debris. She has a $1,000-a-month mortgage on a home that is uninhabitable.

For her and others along the Gulf Coast, December brings a cruel cut-off: It marks the end of an informal 90-day grace period that many lenders offered to Hurricane Katrina victims that let them put their mortgage payments on hold.

That means Kisling, a self-employed wardrobe consultant who sells fabulous clothing to wealthy women across the country who are too busy to shop, will have to start making payments again come Dec. 15.

"I lost my business. I lost all my merchandise. I'm way behind the eight ball," complained Kisling, who is sleeping in a trailer and waiting for her flood insurance money to come through so that she can rebuild.

Hers is a tale of woe that stretches across the Gulf Coast, from Pascagoula on the Alabama line through this artsy village on the edge of Biloxi Bay, to New Orleans and west across Louisiana.

Banks and lenders cannot forgive loans entirely without risking the stability of their institutions. Some homeowners will have to pay off debt for years, whether they rebuild or move away; others will be forced to declare bankruptcy.

The scope of the problem is unclear, three months after Katrina came ashore Aug. 29.

"How many fit into that category we don't really know," said Chevis Swetman, president and chief executive of The Peoples Bank of Biloxi, a $720 million bank that lost several of its branches to wind and floodwaters. He is planning to write off $5 million in losses but said that is just a guess.

In Pass Christian, where the floods left block after block of tumbled-down trees and upended homes, Philip LaGrange warned: "This month will be a major turning point for most Katrina victims."

"They've been sheltered with no mortgage payments for three months," said LaGrange, who is trying to rebuild his 160-year-old bed-and-breakfast. "Now, as a December Christmas gift, mortgage payments are due."

Willie Smith, a 58-year-old funeral home manager in Pascagoula, has to dig himself out of debt before he can begin to think about starting over. He and his wife had less than six years of mortgage payments left on their home when the storm came. The waters rose nearly 6 feet up the walls, ruining nearly everything. He had no flood insurance because his home was not in a federal flood zone.

Smith's insurance company sent him $1,000 up front on his homeowner policy. A month after the storm, an adjuster came and concluded that nearly all the damage was from the flood, not the storm, so his policy did not cover it. It covered just under $1,000, meaning Smith owed his insurer $28.97.

But his big worry is the $28,000 left on the mortgage. He and his wife hope to pay their bills and save what they can to rebuild. He can do some work himself. His brother-in-law will help him do electric work; a volunteer group in Texas has promised to help put up Sheetrock once he gets new siding, a new roof and power.

"I told my wife, every pay day we'll buy a little bit more. It'll take us a couple of years to put it back together," Smith said. "We have no choice. That's life."

Bankers across the region say they will try to show some flexibility, but they have obligations to stockholders and banking regulators.

After Katrina, regulators recommended lenders give homeowners a grace period on their mortgage payments. Most provided 90 days, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council in Virginia.

O. Bruce Coffman, president of the Louisiana Mortgage Lenders Association, said the industry is not eager to see a lot of foreclosures.

"We're not in the real estate business," he said. "They certainly don't want to own property that's been virtually destroyed. So I don't look for the mortgage services industry to pull out the knives on Dec. 1."

With the grace period coming to an end, most mortgage companies and banks do not plan to force homeowners to pay everything back at once, Coffman said. Companies will spread the amount over several months: If your mortgage payment is $1,000 a month and you took advantage of the three-month grace period beginning in September, in December you would owe $4,000. But the back payment of $3,000 could be spread out over nine months, so your new monthly payment would be about $1,333.

In cases where homeowners cannot even afford to spread out the three payments, mortgage companies will try to work something out, Coffman said.

Mac Deaver, president of the Mississippi Bankers Association, said banks must help homeowners where they can.

"If the community can't work, can't get the wherewithal to be employed, make money, make payments, then the banks can't survive. They're all in this together," Deaver said. "It's an economic engine that has to work together."

---

GULFPORT, Miss. -- Puppies are popping up everywhere amid the rubble left by Hurricane Katrina.

Animal welfare workers are seeing the tip of what they fear will be a big boom in dog births in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi hammered by the storm.

Officials say more than 6,000 pets were saved in the region after Katrina came ashore Aug. 29, and many of them were relocated to new homes elsewhere in the country. An unknown number drowned in the floodwaters or died later of injuries.

But thousands of animals remain, and humane organizations are beginning to see the result of even small numbers of animals running loose for weeks in neighborhoods where fences were flattened and owners fled.

"I've never seen so many puppies in my life," said Manny Maciel, an animal control officer from New Bedford, Mass., who has made two trips south to help trap loose dogs and cats in New Orleans and Mississippi.

Maciel recently pulled 10 puppies and their mother from beneath a porch in a particularly hard-hit section of Biloxi. On another two-hour shift he found seven puppies and seven other dogs.

Maciel took all the animals to the Humane Society of South Mississippi, where a shelter built for 75 animals now holds about 250 dogs and cats on any given day, including nearly 50 puppies. The shelter is the largest operating on the Mississippi coast.

Tara High, executive director of the nonprofit group, said workers have yet to see a spike in cat births, but dogs are proliferating.

"We're beginning to get litters now," said High, a board member thrust into the job in the post-Katrina frenzy when the former director quit unexpectedly. "It's a lot of puppies, and it's not puppy season."

Puppies are brought in daily by residents and workers such as Maciel, who is among eight professional trappers working with the Humane Society of the United States to help capture animals running loose in the hurricane zone. They use lassos and harmless wire cages baited with food to capture dogs and cats.

A big part of the job for Maciel and partner Janis Moore of Springfield, Vt., is encouraging pet owners to help stem the puppy boom by having their animals spayed or neutered. Maciel and Moore drive through mostly abandoned neighborhoods checking reports of stray animals and asking people to let them "fix" their pets for free.

Some animal owners, even those living in vans while their battered homes are being repaired, do not want to part with their pets for fear they will never see them again.

"A lot of times, it's the only thing they've got," Moore said.

Animals without owners often wind up at the shelter, where workers are overwhelmed despite the trickle of volunteers still coming through to help walk dogs and clean up.

Of the 300 or so animals that had to be euthanized in November at the shelter, all were too old, sick or aggressive to be adopted, High said. Three hundred seventy-eight other dogs and cats were adopted.

Quote:

---

Evoking King, Nagin calls N.O. 'chocolate' city
Speech addresses fear of losing black culture
By John Pope
Staff writer

Speaking to a fraction of the crowd typically drawn to a holiday parade honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Monday predicted that displaced African-American residents will return to the rebuilt city and it "will be chocolate at the end of the day."

"This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be," Nagin said. "You can't have it no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

Nagin's remarks were tucked into a wide-ranging speech, delivered on the steps of the federal courthouse, in which the mayor related a dream conversation he had with the slain civil rights leader.

In addition to discussing New Orleans' reconstruction, unity and numerous issues in the black community, in his speech Nagin attributed the recent hurricanes striking the United States to a God who is "mad at America" for waging a war in Iraq based on false pretenses. Nagin said God also is upset at the black community for not taking better care of its people.

His comments, especially those meant to address the concerns of some black residents that white New Orleanians don't want them back, touched off a firestorm of reaction.

Late in the day, Nagin's spokeswoman Tami Frazier said the mayor's comments were not meant to be divisive.

"The mayor's comments were in reference to the fact that . . . there has been talk that the diversity of New Orleans is not what it was," she said. "New Orleans has been a predominantly African-American city for quite some time now. His comments were not meant to exclude anyone. He was just saying that as we rebuild the new New Orleans, we will still retain our diverse culture and everything that has made New Orleans what it is, together, both black and white."

Flavorful speech

Speaking in rolling cadences like a preacher addressing his congregation, Nagin called on the small, interracial crowd to rebuild a majority-black city. The group of about 60 people was preparing to march down to the South Claiborne Avenue statue of King.

"We ask black people. . . . It's time for us to come together," said the mayor, who is black.

"It's time for us to rebuild a New Orleans, the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," he said. "And I don't care what people are saying in Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day."

Nagin also said that last year's devastating hurricanes were signs of God's wrath.

"Surely God is mad at America," he said.

The remarks, which prompted a storm of angry callers when Garland Robinette played them repeatedly on his talk show on WWL-AM, also drew fire from some black leaders.

"Everybody's jaws are dropping right now," said City Councilman Oliver Thomas, who is black. "Even if you believe some of that crazy stuff, that is not the type of image we need to present to the nation."

Thomas, who has been friendly to the Nagin administration but is now viewed as a potential mayoral contender, said the mayor was indulging in "equal-opportunity slamming."

Instead of the city being chocolate, Thomas said, "we ought to be Neapolitan, fudge ripple, all the flavors together. Who really cares what the racial makeup of the city is as long as it works for everybody?"

Political analyst Silas Lee said the anger Nagin's speech provoked probably was intensified by the environment in which he delivered it: a city where nerves are raw and whatever sense of security people had was blown away in Katrina's gale.

"That makes it much more fragile and might make people more sensitive, more emotional," Lee said. "Therefore, every word any elected official may say can be misinterpreted very easily. In his speech, it sounded like he was venting a lot of feelings and pent-up frustration. However, how it came out and how it was interpreted is very subjective. Once you say things, you can't retract them."

Calls for love, not violence

Unlike Martin Luther King Day parades in previous years, when families lined the route, there were few spectators Monday as marchers proceeded through a neighborhood where many buildings are still dark and empty.

Before Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans on Aug. 29, scattering three-fourths of its residents to every corner of the United States, the city's population was about 68 percent black.

King, a powerful preacher whose work as a civil rights leader won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was assassinated in 1968.

Although King made a point of reaching out to white and black people, Nagin insisted Monday that if King were alive, he would urge African-Americans to stop worrying about other races and tend to their own community.

In his speech, the mayor lashed out at a shooting on Sunday afternoon that wounded three people during a second-line parade that had been designed to show unity and support for rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged city.

"Knuckleheads" were responsible for the gunfire that wounded a 34-year-old man, an 18-year-old woman and an 20-year-old man, he said. "When we come together for a second-line, we're not going to tolerate any violence. Martin Luther King would've wanted it that way . . ."

Nagin went on to decry the violent crime that plagued many of the city's African-American neighborhoods before the storm.

"It's time for all of us good folk to stand up and say, 'We're tired of the violence. We're tired of black folks killing each other,' " Nagin said.

"What are we doing? Why is black-on-black crime such an issue?" he continued. "Why do our young men hate each other so much that they look their brother in the face and they will take a gun and kill him in cold blood?"

In response to such senseless horror, King would say, "We as a people need to fix ourselves first," said Nagin, striking a frequent theme of his speeches. "The lack of love is killing us."

Besides respecting one another, Nagin said his listeners need to pay attention to God, who, Nagin said, expressed his anger at America last year by sending hurricane after hurricane over the land.

"Surely he's not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense," Nagin said. "But surely he's upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves, we're not taking care of our women, and we're not taking care of our children . . ."

---

Quote:

---

How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about. New Orleans was a chocolate city before Katrina. It is going to be a chocolate city after. How is that divisive? It is white and black working together, coming together and making something special.

---

Quote:

---

Senator Says Gulf Coast Help Insufficient
By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The government has not done enough to help large swaths of the Gulf Coast recover and rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, a key Republican senator said in a push for Congress to retain its focus on delivering aid in the new year.

Though lawmakers have approved $67 billion for Gulf Coast emergency relief and long-term recovery programs, and President Bush has called for an additional $1.5 billion to strengthen New Orleans levees, hard-hit areas in Mississippi and Louisiana need more federal resources and attention, said Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record), R-Maine.

"I don't think the government has done enough," said Collins, who is leading a delegation of senators on Tuesday to Gulfport, Miss., and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana — two areas that she said have been overlooked compared to New Orleans. Both areas were nearly obliterated by high wind during the Aug. 29 storm.

The lawmakers also will tour parts of New Orleans, including inspecting progress on rebuilding levees that are crucial to encouraging residents and businesses back to the previously flooded city.

"This is a long-term commitment," Collins said in an interview Saturday. "The devastation is so widespread that a sustained federal commitment is going to be necessary. I think Congress realizes that, but there's also a growing concern about whether the money is well spent."

Democrats, too, are watching how Congress will pay for what they called continued necessary assistance to the Gulf Coast amid a rising deficit and other high-cost expenses, including the war in Iraq.

"This is really a catastrophe of enormous proportions, and I don't think we appropriated nearly enough to help," said Rep. Barbara Lee (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., after reviewing damage Friday in the New Orleans area. She is calling for Congress to repeal Bush's tax cuts to help pay for Katrina-related rebuilding.

Last month, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, chastised Congress for failing to approve emergency funding, thus stalling state transportation, school and housing projects.

The state last week released a report calling for bold moves to improve its transportation and housing systems to a better level than before Katrina hit.

In prepared testimony for a Senate hearing in Gulfport on Tuesday, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast rebuilding czar outlined two top priorities for Mississippi: debris removal and temporary housing for evacuees.

So far, Mississippi has cleaned up 27 million cubic yards of debris — about two-thirds of the total, said Donald Powell, the federal Gulf Coast coordinator. He estimated that Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties in Mississippi were left with more debris after Katrina than totals after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the World Trade Center from the 2001 terror attacks combined.

Powell also estimated that fewer than 2,000 evacuated families remain in Mississippi hotels, and that 280,000 state residents have received transitional housing assistance.

"Every time some type of natural disaster has hit, the people of this region have come back, and come back stronger than before," Powell said in his prepared remarks, obtained by The Associated Press. "Failure is not an option. ... It's too important a task not to do it right."

Collins, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which is holding the hearing, said she planned to examine whether Powell has enough authority in his post to order changes for progress.

Powell, the former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and a wealthy Bush campaign contributor, serves as a liaison between state and local authorities in the region who are developing rebuilding plans, and Congress and Bush administration officials who will help fund them.

"He cannot direct what needs to be done," Collins said, adding that Powell has been working with a bare-bones staff. "He's very much a straight-shooter, and is hard working, but I wonder if he has the troops that he needs."

Collins also said senators would examine rebuilding progress on New Orleans levees — and the ongoing controversy over whether Congress should approve funds to make them strong enough to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, as local residents and business leaders have demanded.

Some weather experts believe Katrina, a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the coast, had weakened to a Category 3 or 2 storm by the time it reached New Orleans. Bush and Powell have called for rebuilding the floodwalls to withstand a Category 3 storm.

"I clearly want the levees to be stronger, taller and tougher than they were before, but there's not a common definition what it means to build to a Category 5," Collins said.

---

Quote:

---

Many on Miss. Coast Feel Overshadowed
By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press Writer

GULFPORT, Miss. - Nicki Henderson has had plenty of reasons to be angry since Hurricane Katrina destroyed her Biloxi home, but it was a simple news item about dislocated dolphins that really made her blood boil.

Henderson lost her temper when she logged on to her computer and spotted this headline: "New Orleans Dolphins Find New Home." She knew the dolphins actually came from a hurricane-ravaged marine park in Gulfport, not New Orleans.

The headline writer's error reinforced her belief — shared by many on Mississippi's Gulf Coast — that New Orleans has gotten a disproportionate share of the news coverage and the nation's attention in the aftermath of the storm, now more than four months gone.

There is a growing sense the catastrophic damage along Mississippi's 70-mile stretch of coastline is being treated as a mere footnote to the story in New Orleans, which was ravaged by flooding.

Worse, some say the lack attention could hamper the recovery of an area that had experienced an economic renaissance in the past decade thanks to billions of dollars of investment by major casino and hotel companies.

"I am terrified the American people are going to forget about us," Henderson said.

On Dec. 14, The Sun Herald in Gulfport devoted its entire front page to an editorial, headlined "Mississippi's Invisible Coast," that argued the region is fading into a "black hole of media obscurity." Next to the editorial was a graphic tallying Katrina's toll on the region: $125 billion in estimated damage, 236 dead, 65,380 houses destroyed.

Louisiana's death toll stands at 1,078. More than 6,000 homes in New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard Parish may have to be demolished.

The piece ended with a plea to the national media to "tell our story."

"The depth of the suffering and the height of the courage of south Mississippians is an incredible story that the American people must know. But, in the shadows of the New Orleans story, the Mississippi Coast has become invisible and forgotten to most Americans," the editorial read.

Sun Herald publisher Ricky Mathews said more balanced coverage would give Mississippi's residents a sorely needed morale boost. "They need to know they haven't been forgotten," Mathews said.

Mississippi residents are not the only ones feeling overshadowed by New Orleans. Larry Hooper, 63, has been living on a campground since Katrina destroyed his home in Empire, La., about 60 miles from New Orleans.

"Our town was wiped off the map," he said. "We feel as left out as the people in Mississippi and Alabama because of all the New Orleans reporting."

Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of the American Journalism Review, said it is obvious New Orleans has gotten the overwhelming share of headlines.

"Part of it has to do with the mythical status that New Orleans has in this country," he said. "It did become the focal point of national attention. The unfortunate byproduct is that the story on the Mississippi Gulf Coast can be backburnered."

Mathews said he worries that a "national obsession" with New Orleans will cost Mississippi its fair share of federal aid, private investment and help from volunteers.

"The government can help us get our important infrastructure rebuilt, but it's the private investment that's going to tell the story long term," he added.

Congress has approved tens of billions of dollars for recovery and rebuilding on the Gulf Coast. Only time will tell how the money is divided, but news coverage "does have an impact on what Congress does," said Biloxi native Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

"When it's off the screen of the media, it's off the screen of the federal government," said Nelson, who landed his first newspaper job at The Sun Herald.

Not everybody is clamoring for a brighter media spotlight, because bad news can be bad for business.

"I really think there's a downside to overexposure, if it's exposure that says things aren't working well," said Stephen Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau. "Yes, there has been less coverage here, but I think in the long term we may come out ahead, because there's been more focus on the constructive things we're doing."

Three casinos already have reopened in Biloxi and others have vowed to be back before Katrina's anniversary on Aug. 29. In 2004, the dozen casinos on the Mississippi coast generated $1.2 billion in gross revenue.

---

Quote:

---

MISSISSIPPI'S INVISIBLE COAST

As Aug. 29 recedes into the conscious time of many Americans, the great storm that devastated 70 miles of Mississippi's Coast, destroying the homes and lives of hundreds of thousands, fades into a black hole of media obscurity.

Never mind that, if taken alone, the destruction in Mississippi would represent the single greatest natural disaster in 229 years of American history. The telling of Katrina by national media has created the illusion of the hurricane's impact on our Coast as something of a footnote.

The awful tragedy that befell New Orleans as a consequence of levee failures at the time of Katrina, likewise, taken by itself, also represents a monumental natural disaster. But, of course, the devastation there, and here, were not separate events, but one, wrought by the Aug. 29 storm.

There is no question that the New Orleans story, like ours, is a compelling, ongoing saga as its brave people seek to reclaim those parts of the city lost to the floods.

But it becomes more and more obvious that to national media, New Orleans is THE story - to the extent that if the Mississippi Coast is mentioned at all it is often in an add-on paragraph that mentions "and the Gulf Coast" or "and Mississippi and Alabama."

The television trucks and satellite dishes that were seen here in the early days have all but disappeared.

While there has been no study to quantify the amount of coverage accorded to the plight of so many here or in New Orleans, it is obvious to any observer that the number of news stories on New Orleans is many times that of those focused on Mississippi.

So, why does that matter?

It matters first as it relates to journalism's obligations to cover human beings whose conditions are as dire as those that exist here.

The depth of the suffering and the height of the courage of South Mississippians is an incredible story that the American people must know. But, in the shadows of the New Orleans story, the Mississippi Coast has become invisible and forgotten to most Americans.

Could it be possible that the ongoing story of an Alabama teenager missing in Aruba has received more coverage on some cable networks than all of the incredibly compelling stories of courage, loss and need of untold thousands of Mississippians? Maybe a lot more coverage?

The second reason that the coverage matters is in the realm of politics. If the American people and their elected representatives do not truly know the scope of the destruction here, and if they are not shown the ongoing conditions afflicting so many, then there are consequences which are playing out even this week in Washington, where Congress will act, or not act, to relieve the incredible pain that has reduced the condition of so many American citizens to Third World status or worse.

If the people do not know, they cannot care.

We believe if they are shown the extent of the devastation and the suffering, they and their representatives will respond.

So the coverage matters. A lot.

The problem, to some extent, is that you have to be here and see it for yourself to comprehend the utter destruction that is so much like Berlin or Tokyo after World War II.

We would like to invite our news colleagues from across the nation to come and view the Coast with us. It is impossible to comprehend this disaster from afar. A television can display only a single screen of the damage. When you have driven mile after mind-numbing mile and viewed the complete nothingness where cities and homes and businesses once stood, only then will you begin to understand what has happened here.

Then you will begin to wonder, where are all the people who used to live on this beautiful shore? What has happened to their families and all of those shattered lives? That is when you will understand that the story of Katrina in South Mississippi isn't over, it has only begun.

On the third day after Katrina crushed us, this newspaper appealed to America: "Help us now," the headline implored. America answered with an outpouring of love and help. That response saved us then.

Our plea to newspapers and television and radio and Web sites across the land is no less important today: Please, tell our story. Hear the voice of our people and tell it far and wide.

We are here. Do not forsake us.

We are no footnote.

And one more thing...

Thank you. To every out-of-state volunteer, to every friend and family member who has sent supplies or prayers, we sincerely thank you.

And we ask that you do one more thing: Call your senators and your congressional representative and ask them to support additional aid for South Mississippi's recovery.

We couldn't have gotten off our knees without you. But we can't get back on our feet without federal help.

---

Quote:

---

Sen. Joseph Lieberman says the White House is instructing agencies not to help out in the Katrina probe.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House is dodging questions about Hurricane Katrina response and has instructed other agencies to join it in fending off investigators, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said on Tuesday. The White House denies the allegations.

Lieberman went so far as to suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to kill the investigation.

"My staff believes that DHS has engaged in a conscious strategy of slow-walking our investigation in the hope that we would run out of time to follow the investigation's natural progression to where it leads," Lieberman said. "At this point, I cannot disagree."

The Connecticut senator, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, further said no real reason is being given for the administration's reticence.

"There's been no assertion of executive privilege, just a refusal to answer," Lieberman said. "I have been told by my staff that almost every question our staff has asked federal agency witnesses regarding conversations with or involvement of the White House has been met with a response that they could not answer on direction of the White House." ...

---

Katelyn Carman said she wasn't prepared for the post-Hurricane Katrina devastation she found in the Lower 9th Ward, but she and many of the other college students helping to clean the wreckage have been so moved by the experience that they vow to return.

"People don't understand why we would want to come here, and some of our friends went to Cancun," said Miss Carman, a 20-year-old on spring break in the Big Easy, "but the majority of us will come back this summer."

She and more than 50 of her classmates from Whittier College in California paid $300 for tickets to New Orleans for a week of helping to gut homes in the poorest parts of the flood-ravaged city.

Hundreds of students have joined the cleanup efforts. Many of the 20-somethings drawn to the Gulf Coast to salvage what Katrina left behind thought they would depart the city feeling self-satisfied after a few weeks away from home, but the scope of the damage compels many of them to stay.

"I realized there's nothing more important in my life that I could be doing," said Annie Hostetter, 23. She quit her job at a Wisconsin cafe in January and has been living among volunteers at a base camp in the Lower 9th Ward since then, coordinating efforts for the nonprofit group Common Ground.

"It's emotionally draining, and it's hard work," Miss Hostetter said, gesturing to two young women who had just returned to the camp filthy and teary-eyed after gutting a condemned home. "It's so heartening to see people coming here when they could be doing other things. They could be in Aruba."

The volunteers' friends on tropical spring-break vacations might be wearing sunscreen to protect from the elements, but these volunteers don respirators to block toxic asbestos, lead and mold from entering their lungs, and thick boots and gloves to guard them from injury as they heave pieces of drywall and roofing into wheelbarrows.

By nightfall, the students "decontaminate" back at the shelter before they manage to find fun a taxi ride away in the bars and clubs along Bourbon Street. The famed French Quarter is largely recovered, though the number of visitors has declined.

Relief groups are still seeking donations of food, clothes and money, but organizers said what they need most is more volunteers to help with the cleanup.

Stan Emerson and his church group were so overwhelmed by the condition of the Lower 9th Ward that they plan to spread the word back home in Avon, Ind., and then return with a bigger group. "It's a wake-up call," he said.

They realize the task before them is gargantuan -- more than 215,000 homes were destroyed.

"Even if every person in America came, it wouldn't all get done," said Lisa Ceremsak, a volunteer from Cambridge, Mass. "I had no idea."

Thousands of Gulf Coast residents have been told they must repay millions of dollars in federal Hurricane Katrina benefits that were excessive or, in some cases, fraudulent.

In Mississippi alone, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it is seeking $4.7 million from 2,044 people, telling them in a form letter that they have four months to repay or set up a payment plan.

Some storm victims got duplicate or extra benefits because of FEMA errors, FEMA spokesman Eugene Brezany said, and others might have received benefits for expenses that later were reimbursed by insurance settlements.

Some others benefited "by intentional misrepresentation" or the mistaken belief that secondary residences qualified for payments, he said.

In February, audits by the General Accounting Office and the Department of Homeland Security found that as many as 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program - which included $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees - were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.

Also in February, the Justice Department said federal prosecutors charged 212 people with fraud, theft and other counts in scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes.

A Houston hairdresser with a long rap sheet conned the feds into paying for his sex-change operation with Hurricane Katrina aid, it was revealed yesterday.

Michael James Green, 25, was charged with bilking the feds out of $36,000 meant for destitute hurricane victims. He claimed to have lived in 18 damaged addresses and used 18 different Social Security numbers, federal prosecutors said.

But Green wasn't using the money for food and shelter: He used it to pay for a sex-change operation, sources said.

Word of the taxpayer-subsidized sex-change surgery outraged lawmakers at a hearing yesterday - as a FEMA official tried to minimize the massive fraud charges totaling $1.4 billion.

"How could government pay for a sex-change operation?" asked Rep. Charles Dent (D-Pa.).

FEMA official Donna Dannels disputed the report's fraud claims, saying the exposed cases "represent a fraction of the overall assistance provided."

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) replied, "The amount of fraud outlined in this report, I don't think it's refutable."