Alan Gutierrez

Finally finished the leftovers from my visit to Father Luke’s church on Sunday, Our Lady of Vietnam, in East New Orleans. I went with Karen Gadbois, and their had lunch with outgoing NPN board members Renia and Calvin. Father Luke cooked this wonderful fried rice. We talked about levee politics with Patti Lapeyre, who’s been campaigning for a unified levee board.

After we’d stuffed ourselves, Father Luke filled up to go containers, and we all went home with at least five pounds of food.

Father Luke’s neighborhood is coming back strong. It is like an island in East New Orleans. The drive to the neighborhood goes past the Six Flags Jazzland amusement park which rises out of the wetlands in tinker-toy glory. The rippled and cracked road cuts through the marshes.

Then you drive right into suburbia. Most of the homes are occupied. There are people riding bikes in the street. It’s a neighborhood.

This was an article I drafted, but forgot to post, so I’m posting it way late…

There was an article today in the Houston Chronicle about a neighborhood meeting where Residents urge White to send evacuees home. It is disconcerting. It is especially disconcerting to hear the Katrina Fatigue sentiment echoed by a Texan who otherwise writes about Tsunami recovery.

Is there something amiss with our message if we turn off a blogger such as this?

We are not OK. But then, neither is Houston. Much of the Gulf is in disarray.

Can you expect city handle an influx of a quarter of a million people who are homeless indefinitely? It’s good that 150,000 have returned, but we know that some folks have nothing to which they can return. Rents are high. Public housing is covered in those clever steel contraptions that make entry impossible. The Road Home has not yet been paved.

It’s fashionable to pick on Texas if you are not fond of the current administration. In the last year, I’ve heard Texas described as the “world’s most maligned sub-culture”.

I love Texas. Central Texas. I’ve lived in both San Antonio and Austin. It’s a another corner of the Union that has a mix of culture, and a strong cultural identity. Good food for cheap. Real tortillas. Real music. If there was any other place that I’d live it would be in Austin, San Antonio or the hills thereby.

FEMA didn’t last a week in New Orleans. They left us.

From Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security:

For Louisiana, the savior state was Texas, which by Wednesday had opened forty-seven evacuation shelters and was preparing the Houston Astrodome for a flood of evacuees from the Superdome. Texas had a thirty-five-man water rescue team with its own boats that by Wednesday had already saved 1,100 people in New Orleans. It had also sent eight Blackhawk helicopters to the city, along with two Chinook helicopters and five fixed-wing aircraft. It sent a satellite phone communication suite, fifty game wardens with boats and trucks, four tanker fuelers, and fifty ambulances, along with 135 paramedics, nurses, and doctors. It deployed 300 military police and 120 combat engineers from its National Guard. It sent five airboats. The list went on.

The real pull quote from Houston Chronicle article is from Mayor Bill White.

“If people want do so something unlawful, then we need to catch them, try them, convict them and lock them up,” White said.

“If they’re just trying to get on with their lives, then we ought to respect our fellow Americans, and there’s not much of a home to go to.”

That is not the voice of a populist. That is the voice of a leader.

Watch this episode of NewsHour: Shelter for Katrina Evacuees for a sense of the man.

[FEMA Director] DAVID PAULISON: We usually don’t even pay for things this far into the disaster. It’s for immediate lifesaving and health issues, is what it’s supposed to be. So normally it’s used for congregate sheltering when they move out of their homes, they evacuate out of the homes into a congregate shelter or even some very immediate step into a hotel or motel. Here we’re almost six months now, so the emergency is over.

LEE HOCHBERG: But Houston’s mayor says that’s absurd.

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Not for these families that don’t have a house, the emergency hasn’t ended.

…

MAYOR BILL WHITE: Usually, the situation has been that every day, every week, I’ll have to call somebody locally, call state, call nationally. The national person will agree to something. They’ll send a national team down here that will include some of the most senior people– the administrator of FEMA, the COO of FEMA. We’ll reach certain agreements in principle and then we’ll have to call and call and call and bug them and have members of Congress call and have senators call before they’re implemented.

Mayor White opened up Houston and accepted the poorest of New Orleans. He has housed the evacuees and seen that the City of Houston is reimbursed by FEMA. When our public housing remains sealed with steel barriers, when we have a single Road Home office in Orleans Parish, and in all the talk about neighborhood planning, little is said about re-population.

Perhaps it ugly things are said in west Houston. Even so, is not the silent indifference of New Orleans a more damning condemnation?

I’m going to be doing more organization in the open, here at Blogometer and also at the Think New Orleans weblog. I’ve created a WordPress plugin that allows me to choose what goes on the front page of Blogometer, and what can go in the sidelines.

It’s an extension of a concept I’ve had for a while, of a stream of consciousness blog, a place where you post ideas in their infancy, ask questions, or leave yourself notes. It is not even an aside, one of the short scrunchy posts that you see here, since it is information that ought to interest no one, except perhaps the oddballs that Google brings in.

If you look in the categories section, you’ll find posts that are not visible in on the front page. I’m going to experiment with categorization, so that if you’re involved in a particular project, you can follow along by viewing a particular category, or a particular tag.

For now, if you want to catch what is missing, bookmark Sideline or subscribe to the Sideline feed and I’ll be sure to tag posts that are not on the front page with “Sideline”.

Paul Christmann has updated his friends with an email message, where he tells us about the renovation of his house. He ends with some observations on waterlines.

But I must relay one last observation I’ve found over the last several months: flood lines on buildings are an absolutely mesmerizing sight while driving. More than once, I’ve nearly hit a curb when I get distracted by the water marks on a building. Its not just the heights, its the unbelievable straight-ness of the line. You can follow a road that gently moves up and down; the line is straight. You can look at older buildings that lean; the line is straight. That’s often one of the first things people do: try to clean the line. Its not easy. Trust me. In fact, I don’t think its ever actually removable. We’ll have to repaint over it. But I’d like to find a way to leave it somewhere on the house. Of course, Noel won’t have any of that. but we’ll see.

I can imagine an unpainted circle, with a frame around it, on a home that wanted to remember the water level, or if that is too unsightly, to afix some molding along a yard of the waterline, and paint over it.

On this day, I’m not much into reflecting. I don’t feel that there has been a pause since I arrived. I don’t know why I’d pause now, in the midst of the 2006 hurricane season.

I’m reading Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure or Homeland Security. I’ve read it all day yesterday, and I’ll finish it shortly. It is the first accounting of the Hurricane that I have read. I know now that much of the flooding came from the collapse of the flood walls on the canals.

Reading this book also explains whey Ashley is so adamant that the floodwalls were destoryed in a terrorist attack. In Disaster authors Christopher Cooper and Robert Block describe a brand new Department of Homeland Security that has taken control of FEMA, and taxed it’s natural disaster response resources to fund preparation for further terrorist attacks.

The DHS did not recognize that a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a historic disaster, and did not respond with the fury that was required. We are fortunate to have our neighbor Texas, which dispatched more resources to Louisiana than FEMA, which was absent three days after the storm. We are fortunate for the intervention of Wal-Mart, which brought necessities to the National Guard at the Convention Center, when FEMA could not.

Upon reading Disaster, I feel that Michael Brown is a perfect scapegoat.

Today, Karen Gadbois and Craig Morse and I went to the Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association’s grand opening of it’s new community center. I hope to have people contributing to the Lower 9th Ward NENA web site, from the computers that they have installed at the community center. I’m looking for some content commands, some people that can help in person or online at this center, and to help follow up on the new WordPress blogs that we are getting underway.

For those of you tuneing in from beyond the bayou, here’s a little more Chocote City for you. It’s Kalypso and Ray Nagin with Kalypso’s take on our city’s diversity.

How can you rig the election yourself? Go to Spam Gourmet and register. It’s a service that let’s you create disposable email address to catch spam. You can now create an email address by typing it out, the same way I do.

Update: You can cast all the votes you like at the UNOP voting form. You’ll need your email address, and a neighborhood and district. I live in the “French Quarter” which is in district one.