They Really Dropped the Ball..

[amber]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

I don't know that it is possible to do that.

Why? Does the state of LA actually own all that equipment and those refineries?

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

So Hastert's bulldoze comment was really that far off?

I think he was talking about the whole city and most of the more Southern regions of LA. Interestingly, he did not make the same comment about MS, which voted for W - do the math.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by amber

Why? Does the state of LA actually own all that equipment and those refineries?

They would if they seceeded and I can assure you that LA would make it far more economically beneficial for them to stay right where they are as opposed to rebuilding somewhere else.

[amber]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

They would if they seceeded and I can assure you that LA would make it far more economically beneficial for them to stay right where they are as opposed to rebuilding somewhere else.

What do you mean? LA would make it more economically beneficial for who?
Also, if they seceeded, but the federal gov't owns the refineries and other equipement, I find it hard to believe that the fed. gov't would just go "oh, darn! They seceeded! Well, I guess they get to keep all that stuff, even if it belongs to us"
But, I'm sure this will never happen, anyway.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by amber

What do you mean? LA would make it more economically beneficial for who?
Also, if they seceeded, but the federal gov't owns the refineries and other equipement, I find it hard to believe that the fed. gov't would just go "oh, darn! They seceeded! Well, I guess they get to keep all that stuff, even if it belongs to us"
But, I'm sure this will never happen, anyway.

Bless your heart The Fed. Govt. does not own the refineries, the oil companies do. The Fed. Govt. does not own the oil in the ground, essentially the owners of that property do.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by amber

Why? Does the state of LA actually own all that equipment and those refineries?

Any entity operating in a seperate country would be subject to the laws of said country.

[amber]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Bless your heart The Fed. Govt. does not own the refineries, the oil companies do. The Fed. Govt. does not own the oil in the ground, essentially the owners of that property do.

oh. Well, I thought since oil and our gov't always seem to go hand in hand, that it really wouldn't matter, the gov't absolutely would have control over it, in some way or another.

[strandinthewind]

Go to cnn.com for video of Sean Penn and Douglas Brinkley's take on what they saw:

I agree with them in the sense that if you have a shallow bottom boat and are willing and know what the hell you are doing go and volunteer.

Having said that, many have done just that and the autorities in the area like the Coast Guard are going a great job and are to be commended. There are just not enough of them and people are dying as a result.

[strandinthewind]

START THE PUMPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

17th Street Canal breach fixed

Monday, 1:55 p.m.

By Jeff Meitrodt
Staff writer

With assistance from the Army Corps of Engineers, repairs have been completed to the 17th Street Canal breach, responsible for the post-Hurricane Katrina deluge into New Orleans, the state Department of Transportation and Development announced during its mid-day briefing.

The next step, transportation public affairs officer Cleo Allen said, is to get the floodwater out of the city. Authorities said the Mounes Pumping station has power and they expect to start it up this afternoon.

“We will get the smaller pumps, which should dry out the larger pumps,’’ he said.

Authorities are uncertain about the condition of the 17th Street Canal pumps, and Corps engineers are trying to determine whether the canal’s walls are stable, Allen said. “When that happens we will have considerable more capacity,’’ he said.

Crews will move next to the London Avenue canal, he said.

Allen also updated news the media on evacuations in St. Bernard Parish. In the past three to four days, 5,000 to 6,000 people were shuttled from Chalmette to Algiers Point using the ferry.

In addition, Lt. Lawrence McLeary of the State Police addressed rumors of state police officers resigning rather than serving in New Orleans.

“I”d like to stop that misinformation right now. The fact is there have been no such resignations by the State Police,’’ McLeary said. “In fact, 14 retired troopers who retired in the last 24 months have been rehired. There have been no troopers resigning their commission for refusing to go to New Orleans.'' [COMMENT - this is interesting and I am glad to see it!!!!!]

www.nola.com

BTW - my brother saw them doing this yesterday as he was near the Canal. He said the effort was jaw dropping.

[strandinthewind]

Tensions color Bush, Blanco meeting

Gov. Kathleen Blanco canceled a scheduled trip Monday to visit Louisiana evacuees in Houston shelters to stay in Baton Rouge to meet with President Bush.

Blanco Communications Director Bob Mann said the governor did not learn about the Bush visit until early Monday morning.

“We had no idea the president was coming,” Mann said.

Tension between the Blanco and Bush administrations has surfaced in recent days as state and federal officials try to coordinate recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Blanco administration clearly wanted to express their irritation with the communication about the president's trip.

Blanco officials said they had heard that the president might make a visit and had been trying to get details. As of late Sunday night, FEMA officials told Blanco that the president was not planning a visit, Mann said.

One key point of coordination is the military effort to restore order and begin rebuilding infrastructure.

As of Monday morning, the National Guard from Louisiana and other states had deployed 13,268 troops in the 13 parish area affected by the storm, Louisiana National Guard spokesman Pete Schneider said. In route are 7,845 more National Guardsmen, so that by Tuesday morning 21,113 guardsmen will be in Louisiana.

Parallel to that effort, the regular Army 82nd Airborne and 1st Cavalry divisions are sending in 7,000 troops to Louisiana to arrive in the next couple of days.

www.nola.com

Comment - WHY THE FU*K DOES IT TAKE A WEEK OR MORE TO GET THE NECESSARY NUMBER OF TROOPS

[GypsySorcerer]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

START THE PUMPS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

17th Street Canal breach fixed

Great news. Nagin think it will take weeks, instead of months, to pump the water out. I hope he's right.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by GypsySorcerer

Great news. Nagin think it will take weeks, instead of months, to pump the water out. I hope he's right.

One of the largest problems is the surface/earth is not smooth like a bowl. In other words, when the several feet of water are drained, it is possible little mini levees will appear because the earth is higher there and the when 20 feet of water was there that taller earth did not matter, but it could act as a dam when draining. So, I think, barring another breach in the levees, the water will dain down to a few feet or less and from there it will be harder to drain. Also, the debris makes the draining harder as does the treatment of the water (assuming they are still doing that) prior to its expulsion.

[strandinthewind]

Orleans Breaking News


Monday, September 05, 2005

New Orleans staggers to its feet for next step on long road
By Ron Thibodeaux and Gordon Russell
Staff writers

In a city in dire need of some divine intervention from the most catastrophic week in its history, the first post-Katrina Sunday in New Orleans was infused with the sounds of military helicopters and sporadic gunfire instead of lilting hymns and Gospel readings.

On the seventh day of this disaster of biblical proportions, the last evacuees from the fetid conditions of the Superdome and the Convention Center rested with New Orleans in the rearview mirror of the buses taking them to clean, safe havens far away.

In the city they finally left behind, churches were empty, bells did not peal, Sunday services were not held and the Saints, the football version, were said to be pondering their own evacuation, possibly a permanent one, to San Antonio, Texas.

Entergy workers made their first foray into New Orleans to begin the gargantuan task of assessing the damage to the city's electrical system. Their arrival was a glimmer of encouragement in the vista of despair that confronts those charged with rebuilding the city.

Meanwhile, in adjacent Jefferson Parish, authorities braced for a Labor Day invasion of evacuees expected to return for a first look at their homes.

Search and rescue operations continued and during the late afternoon, helicopters using Interstate 10 as a landing pad were pulling people from rooftops in Mid-City and other parts of town.

Law enforcement agencies fielded about 1,000 distress 911 calls Saturday from people still trapped in attics of buildings surrounded by water, State Police said Sunday.

For the city's police officers in particular, Sunday was the first day to get something like a breather after working around the clock for the past eight days.

"Today is the first day you will see a smile on some of the officers' faces," said NOPD Capt. Marlon Defillo, who was taking a break on the neutral ground of Loyola Avenue with Detective William Charbonnet. "This has been a tremendous challenge for members of the police department, but they've held their ground. They've given their hearts and souls."

New Orleans Police officers sent up a cheer at one point Sunday at a report that their colleagues had engaged in a shootout with an armed group on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans, with several of the suspected marauders - but none of the police officers - being hit. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said police shot eight people, killing five or six of them.

Defillo said police morale had hit a low point around Wednesday or Thursday in terms of the stress on officers, who had to try to keep the city safe without a working communications system amid increasing anarchy . While it was harrowing, reports that hundreds of police officers abandoned ship are false, he said.

"There was a report that 60 percent of our officers bugged out and hadn't been seen since Monday night. It is totally untrue," Defillo said.

What happened, according to Defillo, was that the NOPD's communications system crashed in the wake of the storm, making it impossible for officers to contact one another.

"We had to work on the buddy system, two guys staying together," he said. Defillo acknowledged that "there were some people who bugged out" but he didn't have an estimate of their numbers.

Defillo himself was feeling better after shaving for the first time in a week and taking an impromptu bath in the green, leafy water of a backyard swimming pool. He was wearing a clean pair of acid-washed jeans and a polo shirt that he "found."

The scene was more intense in flood-ravaged St. Bernard Parish, where rescue efforts still lag behind those of New Orleans. Sheriff Jack Stephens authorized his haggard deputies to shoot to kill looters or anyone else who poses a threat.

Small gangs of heavily armed career criminals are roaming the parish's isolated eastern half and looting buildings, Stephens said.

"These are the same a------- who have been testing us for 20 years," Stephens told his SWAT team at a security briefing. "Today is the day they are going to listen to us or we're gonna take 'em out."

As National Guard troops and utility workers launched their patrols through the abandoned neighborhoods of New Orleans on Sunday morning, federal, state and local authorities intensified their finger-pointing at one another over the breakdowns in last week's rescue efforts.

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff struggled on NBC's "Meet the Press" to explain why federal agencies were so slow to react to the crisis and sought to deflect at least part of the blame toward the evacuation plan confected by city and state officials.

Later in the same program, a ragged Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard broke down as he told the national audience how a colleague's elderly mother died in her home Friday after waiting four days for rescuers that never arrived.

With thousands of federal troops finally assisting in what had been an ineffective, disorganized operation, 19,000 people were removed from the Convention Center in less than 24 hours and the final evacuees from the Superdome boarded a bus for somewhere, anywhere.

Hundreds of people continued to mill around the outside of both facilities, arriving on foot in hopes of getting a ride out of town.
Col. Henry Whitehorn, superintendent of Louisiana State Police, estimated that 2,000 people, many of them with serious medical problems, were still housed inside the terminal at Louis Armstrong International Airport.

A busload of 160 people that the state Legislative Black Caucus arranged to deliver to Alexandria ended up at a shelter there, not in facilities at the former England Air Force Base as the lawmakers had intended.

Angry that thousands of Louisianians are being bused out of state because of an apparent lack of shelter space, the black caucus members had called on the federal government Saturday to make Louisiana's military installations available.

Jefferson Parish officials prepared Sunday for a huge influx of residents expected to return today to see what Katrina did to their homes. Hours after the storm hit, Broussard had decreed that evacuated Jefferson residents stay away only for a week to give parish authorities a fighting chance to get control of the destruction and bedlam there.

Many parish officials are skeptical about the decision to let residents return even this soon, but Broussard stood by his decision, saying residents need to see for themselves how bad things are so they can move on with their lives.

"I am the only elected official who is in favor of doing this, but people need to understand that they're not coming back to Wally Cleaver's neighborhood," he said Sunday. "I am doing this to jumpstart the economy, not the economy of Jefferson Parish. That is destroyed. I want to jumpstart the economies of the residents of Jefferson Parish, who need to find new jobs, new places to live."

Long lines are expected today at checkpoints where parish authorities will verify that returnees live in Jefferson Parish before letting them in.

The 1 million-plus number of homes and businesses that lost power in the area was down to 643,000, Public Service Commissioner Jimmy Field said. LSU researchers testing the floodwaters for contamination levels also reported that they had taken the first water samples from canals draining into Lake Pontchartrain and expect to have the results in about two days.

Entergy was able to send a 12-member assessment team, flanked by National Guardsmen, into the city to inspect storm damage.
"The main thing we were trying to find out is what needs to be done to restore power to the Central Business District," utility spokesman Chanel Lagarde said.

In St. Tammany Parish, Cleco reported it has restored power to 5,000 of its 80,000 customers, beginning with hospitals, other essential locations and sites along the parish's main traffic arteries.

In San Antonio, where New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson had been conspicuously silent about the impact of Katrina on his football team's hometown and its residents, reports surfaced that the team's management is considering pulling out of the city and relocating, perhaps permanently, to San Antonio, where Benson has a business interests and a ranch outside of the city.

www.nola.com

[strandinthewind]

Goldie - is this what you were talking about? - from www.wdsu.com

Nearly 70 Percent of Gulf Oil Production Still Shut In

POSTED: 2:01 pm CDT September 5, 2005
UPDATED: 2:15 pm CDT September 5, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Nearly 70 percent of the Gulf of Mexico's normal daily oil production is still blocked from market Monday because of offshore platform evacuations forced by Hurricane Katrina.

The United States Minerals Management Service said that 228 of the 819 staffed production platforms in the Gulf are shut down, delaying production of one million barrels of oil, or 69.6 percent of the region's normal daily production of 1.5 million barrels.

On August 30, the day after Katrina hit, 95 percent of the Gulf's normal daily production was shut down. Since Katrina first threatened Gulf platforms, 12 million barrels of oil and 64.1 billion cubic feet of natural gas have been delayed from reaching market.

Katrina marks the fourth time that Gulf production has been interrupted since the hurricane season began.

[strandinthewind]

Bless their hearts, they need to get out of there - but still, I admire their spirit in the face of this

Decadence Parade Continues Despite Hurricane Hit
POSTED: 9:45 am CDT September 5, 2005
UPDATED: 11:04 am CDT September 5, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- Not even Hurricane Katrina could prevent the Decadence Parade from being staged in the French Quarter.

The annual Labor Day gay celebration drew about two-dozen people.

As street musician Matt Menold explained, "It's New Orleans, man. We're going to celebrate."

and another

Yes, you can still get a drink in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (Reuters) -- At least two bars in New Orleans' fabled French Quarter are honoring the tradition that drinking establishments in the boisterous tourist district stay open during hurricanes, even apocalyptic monsters like Hurricane Katrina.

Molly's at the Market shut down the evening of August 28 as Katrina bore down on New Orleans. The storm struck the city with damaging winds that night, then floodwaters began to seep in through levee breaches on the north end of town the next day.

Except for wind damage, the Quarter stayed high and dry and so did Molly's and Johnny White's. And both were back in business Monday, August 29, with little apparent damage despite a lack of electricity and running water.

"That's our job. That's just what we do," Molly's owner Jim Monaghan, 47, said.

Molly's somehow managed to serve iced drinks Sunday to a mixed crowd of die-hard locals, visiting authorities and the media gaggle. Monaghan wouldn't say where he got the ice, and any inquisitors didn't much care.

"This is gold," said Sonny Fyler, 45, a builder who chatted over a well-iced vodka and cranberry cocktail. "This is definitely gold. I'm coming in here every day."

While Molly's stays open only during daylight hours and caters to a varied clientele, the customers at Johnny White's were different. A late-night visit found a group of dedicated, mostly intoxicated, locals who drank uncooled cocktails by candlelight in the bar at the corner of Orleans and Bourbon in the heart of the Quarter.

The open-air joint has no doors, so the proprietors decided to hang on for as long as possible.

New Orleans police, normally ambivalent about the public drunkenness that occurs most nights throughout the district, seemed strangely intolerant of it over the weekend even as it seemed they had bigger problems at hand, such as mass deaths and destruction throughout the region.

"We have a makeshift jail. You cross this line, and we'll take your ass there," a policeman, drawing an imaginary line at the doorway, screamed at a drunken middle-aged woman who had stumbled out the door momentarily.

A few minutes later, the woman collapsed to the floor in an alcoholic stupor.

If he can give folks, whether they're locals or visitors, a short respite from the despair gripping New Orleans, Monaghan said his bar on Decatur Street on the Quarter's edge is doing a public service.

"I believe this city is coming back," he said. "I wouldn't have stayed open if I didn't think that."

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/05/kat...eut/index.html