Alan Gutierrez

Mayor C Ray Nagin managed to forget to spend our recovery money on us. The AP is reporting in La. officials rebut Nagin’s money complaints.

That leaves over $595 million in federal money that is available to the city but has not been requested, said Col. Jeff Smith, chief of the homeland security office. Once the proper documentation is submitted, the money is available for replacing city property and structures damaged or ruined in Katrina and its aftermath, such as police cars and buses, the city jail, roads, and the sewer and water systems.

Those things all sound so nice.

Dr. Blakely says that we must go to New York, not to Washington. Don’t worry. He has friends in New York.

When is it okay for us to draw conclusions?

I was invited to a meet and greet with Dr. Ed Blakely last Saturday. I’ve not had time to write about it until now.

The meeting started with M.T. Sanyika and Shelia Danzy talking about how we are going to start to press for a recovery implementation. These were people who were part of the summer planning, so it was people from flooded neighborhoods, including Mid-City, Northwest Carrollton, the Historic 7th Ward, the Historic 9th Ward, and all over the East.

Talking about an implementation was heartening. We were told that primarily, recoveries need unity, and that we are all begining to display that unity. I can’t quite describe how they were hitting every cord, presenting funding matricies, where neighborhoods had detailed each park, school, commerical development, and how much each cost. It was recovery buffet. Just add political will.

For example, Steven Dominick said that plans for parks are not pie in the sky. If the park has been used as a FEMA trailer park, then the park will be remediated by the federal government to return it to a park, when the FEMA trailers are removed. This is where you start the funding the park, and use your political will to find other sources of federal and state funding.

Blakely started out talking about how he is spending a billion dollars of his own money to build a development in California. It was strange. It’s nice to be a player, but building a development in California is not the same thing as leading a recovery in New Orleans.

He talked about the 1991 Oakland fires, his recovery experience. It sounded good. Turn a Safeway into a reccovery center. Call your friend at Allstate to get people settled out when they walk in the door. That sounded reassuring.

He talked about basing the recovery around job creation, which resonnated with me. He spoke ill of the tourist industry, which really struck a cord. Spoke highly of medical and information technology. He made a case for New Orleans as a port city, gateway to Latin America, and a cultural center that uses the Internet to export that will begat the next Pixar with all this raw talent.

Then he said that we are not going to Washington, we are going to New York, which sucked the air out of the room. It was deflating. We need to take this to Washington this year.

Political will.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis spoke before Blakely. She was on message with recovery implementation, rather than planning, and afterwards, I told her that I for one, believe that Washington should be engaged.

A quote that I reference frequently in post-Katrina New Orleans is Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

In our recovery we frequently find instances of people who are acting in their own selfish interests, or so it seems. Often times, someone will note that the person is well intentioned. Whether it is promoting outragously expensive “green” construction, endless planning processes, preposterously large-scale civic participation programs, or stalled payment programs, the question of intent is used to mitigate the outcome.

I’m of the mind that malice and incompentence are two sides of the same coin.

However, in the New Orleans recovery, incompetence is offered as a legitimate reason for failure. Don’t be so hard on us, we don’t know what we’re doing. You try and fix New Orleans.

It boggles the mind that this is offered with a straight face. Questions about progress are taken personally, as if they were accusations, which they are, only because those quesitoned have no answers.

It prays on the decency of New Orleanians, because we’re all traumatized. We don’t want to beat anybody up. We just want answers, but the response is one of indignation.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, shouldn’t you step aside?

Karen Gadbois and I went to the Lower 9th Ward to visit the community center established by NENA, a neighborhood organization. While we were there we went past this home. It is a block off of St. Claude.

A foudnation and a roof survive, and will continue to survive. The home is reframed. The the neighborhood is deluged, but not destroyed. People are continuing to find their way home, despite everything that has stood in their way.

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?

Spoke with Dave Coustan yesterday, over dinner at Coop’s. Dave asked if ther there have been any notorious instances of astroturfing in the New Orleans blogs. I mentioned the carpet bloggers.

There is a group of people who have visited New Orleans and are writing breathless stories in a blog about secrets they’ve uncovered. I a recent video post, a they fear for their lives to write about them. It’s sounds like a radio drama of the days of old, where you couldn’t show horror, only describe it. It’s like Suspense).

They’ve adorned their post using the wealth of heartrending images available on the Internet, as if these were their own photographs.

There is little you can do about this. People are reading them. If someone contradicts them in the comment section, someone else writes a defense. Some locals have been helping them.

They have made content of tragedy. There is a market for everything, it seems. Another bucket into which to wring your sponge of daily anguish.

A local blogger even met with them, not understanding that they are producing a low-budget serial, that will say what it takes to increase page rank.

The long tail will find an audience that will listen to fictional accounts of Katrina, made up as they go along, and not respond with questions, but with emotions. It is participatory disaster porn.

Reading one book about the disaster has done wonders for my understanding. Books have been known to do that. I’ve got a new interest in the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Many people want to close the MRGO, and when you watch the disaster unfold, you can see how it funneled the storm surge into the Industrial Canal that collapsed into the 9th Ward and Gentilly. The MRGO is a channel that was dug to connect the Industral Canal to the Gulf of Mexico. It was dug through virgin wetlands causing great harm to those wetlands.

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.