Katrina Eyewitness Reports
After Katrina Tour- Chalmette, LA
Date: Sept 19, 2005
From: Ken Ford, President St. BERNARD CITIZENS for ENVIRONMENT Quality.
Denny,
We went to see my "War Room" (my radio room - where I kept records about the refinery pollution over 40 years ) It took a big hit -- the war room looks like a BIG bomb hit it.
Anne came with us and worked her butt off. Denny, I know you know it but
there is only one Anne. She one of the most dedicated environmental person I have
ever met or heard of. The world is so blessed with her, she is a natural for her
fellow people.
Chalmette looks like a bomb hit it and as tired as she was after doing so
much for Genny (wife) and me -- she found energy to get soils samples and
pictures. I know she came with good spirit to help us but I know
"environment" impact was on her mind. We do admire her as you know.
Really she has the whole group (LABB) and all environmental persons
working so hard to better our cause. I wanted to take more pictures of
her doing soil samples and more to show her dedication for the environment
but she did not want me to.
I know everyone knows how she is and I am so proud to have her and you etc., associated with our group. You and Anne have worked so hard to put together such a great group. I can't go on without talking about the Sierra club, (Daryl and all), Tulane, etc. After being in this mess, I stop to think how terrible this world would be without them and their dedication. Hoping I will be able to continue supporting all.
I may go to Florida in the near future (where
the next storm appears to be heading)
The invite is to good for the family to pass up. It is a short term thing
and after a few months I will be back... I am so disgusted with the officials
(EPA, La DEQ, ).
Our parish president Henry "Jr." Rodriguez has been for
years attending Corps Engineers meetings and more, saying that the levees were in a
bad way, they needed to be better and higher and much more. He grew up in
the marshes and water and represented his people with the highest regards.
I have attended meetings with him and Pete Savoir and Dan Arceunex. Pete a grown man, would break down and cry begging the Army corps and state to do something about the levees. He saw this coming, even built a model of N.O. and the levees system and let water run in this model, it actually happened. He saw St, Bernard residents drowning. Now every one seems to be "Monday night quarter backing". Like me with the environment, Jr., Pete and Dan Arcenart had been
talking to deaf ears.
Sometimes I feel like writing a book about how screwed up this world is. So many chapters would be of Denny Larson, Anne Rolfes, the Sierra Club, refinery reform and all the dedicated: Suzie(Canales - CFEJ Corpus) and the whole group (Bucket Brigade Coalition). All I can do is hope, all will continue.
We came to Metairie (N.O.), Monday, to help Brenda (daughter) with getting her house prepared to lease so she can pay the mortgage and insurance. I find myself almost trapped in this hell hole.
It's getting late and thought I would take a break and write this to you, relieves frustrations. Got to
have someone to bitch to!(Ha Ha)
Friend as always,
Ken Ford, President St. BERNARD CITIZENS for ENVIRONMENT Quality.
PS--- today at my house Monday, (I lived at #12 Carroll dr) and at # 27 (I think
it was ) The wall was marked 2 inside dead. Big X 2 dead That old boy was dying of cancer. He did smoke but lived by Mobil's pollutants. His wife stayed behind to go down with him, guess the same many of us would have done.
Still no definite word on Joy's (Board Member ST. Bernard Citizens) mother but they know she was left behind to
drown a goddamn shame makes me cry to thing ....getting teared up. Houses
down the block had floated into other houses.
One sad thing, is St Bernard has waited so long for help. It's like in the past, no one had heard of the refineries in
Chalmette or St Bernard. Our groups have shown there are refineries in St Bernard and now with the flooding, St Bernard, it is getting known for the problems that have been here for years, are real.
I read an article in one of the New York papers. The writer of this article should have been on a roof of a house that had been flooded, and left there to be the last one to be rescued if they could of gotten to him.
Knowing Junior Rodriguez (Parish President), and the real truth about him, makes me disgusted to read such an article.
I could list a hundred things that Jr. (Parish President) has done in the past, that an outsider would not understand. But there are always 2 sides to a story, as you know the good side is seldom shown. Only thing I can think about that article is you've got to consider the source.
Good night. Guess I should have proof read what I have written, before I sent it, but you can read between the lines and bypass the spelling.
After Katrina Photo Tour- Chalmette, LA
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Notes by Wilma Subra
September 16, 2005
Louisiana
The smell of death frequently slams into your face in Orleans
Parish. The smell of rotting vegetation is everywhere the land meets
bodies of water in St. Bernard and Plaquemine parishes.
Spray paint markings are on most building and indicate that the
search and rescue teams have been by to check for survivors or dead
bodies. Some of the structures were searched for the first time on
September 14, 2005 - 16 days after Hurricane Katrina changed the waters,
lands and lives of the people of Louisiana forever.
The storm surge transported sediments are prevalent throughout the
area. Sediment layers up to 6 inches thick coat the surfaces of
everything. In some areas the sediment layer has dried and is a powder
blowing in the wind when disturbed by recovery vehicles. In other areas
the sediment is still a wet sediment cake. While in locations where the
flood waters are still inches to feet thick, the sediment is covered with
a water layer coated with an oily rainbow colored sheen.
Personal belongings carried by the storm surge are snared in barbed
wire fences. Houses ripped from their foundations by the force of the
moving water are spread all over the landscape. Other home and business
structures are shredded or completely absent.
Automobiles have come to rest on top of houses,
leaning up against buildings and turned upside down. The marshes and
wetlands have been ripped apart and are littered with boats of all shapes
and sizes including ships and drilling rigs.
Downed trees and power lines have been pushed out of the road ways
in some locations and still block access to most areas.
Storm debris litters roof tops, indicating the flood waters were
higher than the eves of the homes. Newer homes have less roof damage,
fewer shingles missing, but major destruction to external and internal
walls and in most cases the insides have been completely gutted.
Industrial facilities released oily chemicals which spread in the
flood waters and coated homes and property with thick layers of gooey mess.
The damage is severe and wide spread. The silence is deafening.
The National Guard patrols the streets that have been somewhat cleared.
The people are absent. The area has not been opened to allow community
members to return to their homes. When and if the people are allowed to
return they will be met with massive destruction or total absence of
their homes, businesses and places of work.
Hurricane Katrina has changed Louisiana forever.
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Louisiana Refineries flooded and flaring!
Sept. 11, 2005
Today I flew in a helicopter over the Exxon Mobile Refinery in
Chalmette, the Murphy Refinery in Meraux and the Alliance Refinery in
Plaquemines Parish. All three of the refineries were shut down. All
three refineries were flaring. The areas within the refinery fencelines
were still flooded. The flood waters had receded some in the Chalmette
area but were still very high in the area of the Alliance refinery.
Storage tanks at all three refineries were standing in flood waters
within the berms and surrounded by flood waters outside of the berms.
Refinery units were still standing in flood waters.
The residential areas adjacent to the refineries were devastated from
wind and flood water damage. The entire area around each refinery is
covered with oily refinery sludge. The odor is extremely intense.
There was little physical evidence of damage to the refinery
structures. However based on the damage to surrounding areas there has
to be extensive damage to the units with in the refineries. The areas
just looked barren and devastated.
I took photographs and will make them available in a few days.
Wilma Subra
P. O. Box 9813
New Iberia, LA 70562
337-367-2216
subracom@aol.com
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Hurricane Katrina - Our Experiences
By Paramedics Larry Bradsahw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky
EMS Network News
www.truthout.org
Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's
store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The
dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48
hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and
cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and
managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and
fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew
increasingly thirsty and hungry.
The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and
the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an
alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed
the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic
manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse,
temporarily chasing away the looters.
We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived
home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or
look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video
images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists
looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.
We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images
of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the
"victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,
were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the
working class of New Orleans.
The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and
disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators
running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching
over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars
stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical
ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the
lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued
folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards,
"stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in
flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found
to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured
the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those
stranded.
Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from
members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only
infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.
On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in
the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference
attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for
safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with
family and friends outside of New Orleans.
We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the
National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses
and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had
seen them.
We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came
up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those
who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by
those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses,
spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water,
food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the
sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the
"imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later
learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were
commandeered by the military.
By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was
dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street
crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and
locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to
the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of
the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us
we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter
had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further
told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was
also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not
allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to
the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards
told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water
to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with
callous and hostile "law enforcement".
We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street
and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did
not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a
mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the
police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would
constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The
police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in
and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the
street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk
to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge
where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The
crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained
to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong
information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The
commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you
that the buses are there."
We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with
great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center,
many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we
were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately
grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then
doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches,
elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the
2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now
began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line
across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they
began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in
various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us
inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in
conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander
and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no
buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as
there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the
West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no
Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and
black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not
getting out of New Orleans.
Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from
the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided
to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on
the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We
reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security
being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival
of the yet to be seen buses.
All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the
same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be
turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others
to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were
prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot.
Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and
disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers
stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could
be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New
Orleans had become.
Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water
delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile
or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-
rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping
carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation,
community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung
garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and
cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built
an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and
other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals
could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for
kids!).
This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina.
When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out
for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your
kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people
began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a
community.
If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and
water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the
ugliness would not have set in.
Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing
families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our
encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.
From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media
was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and
news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were
being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up
on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of
us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous
tone to it.
Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was
correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of
his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the
fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades
to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded
up his truck with our food and water.
Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law
enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed
into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw
"mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together"
was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.
In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we
scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark,
we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo
Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and
definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their
martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.
The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact
with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an
urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and
managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen
apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They
explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant
they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were
assigned.
We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The
airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of
humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush
landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a
coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.
There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief
effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field
where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did
not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to
share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it
out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic
bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.
Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been
confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal
detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children,
elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically
screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.
This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt
reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker
give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street
offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the
official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist.
There was more suffering than need be.
Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.
Bradshaw and Slonsky are paramedics from California that were
attending the EMS conference in New Orleans. Larry Bradshaw is the chief
shop steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790; and Lorrie Beth Slonsky
is steward, Paramedic Chapter, SEIU Local 790.
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We've got a Love Canal down here
By rmadilo
TMP Cafe
Sep 07, 2005
St. Bernard President "Junior" Rodriquez says that his parish is covered
with oil from a nearby refinery tank which ruptured during hurricane Katrina.
Rodriguez says "We've got a Love Canal down here." Unfortunately St.
Bernard Parish is a little bit bigger than Love Canal. Homes are either
covered with oil and mud or as Rodriguez says "there is a mold growing"
on those not covered with oil, "that will kill you."
When asked when folks can come back, he said "there are no homes to come
back to. Maybe in three to four weeks they can come back and get a damage
assessment, and get some closure".
You are correct to invoke Love Canal. The hurricane's environmental
impact, in my mind, will be the toughest challenge.
There is some expertise, experience and common sense knowledge
about rescue, resettlement, "normal" post-disaster health problems and
even reconstruction.
I believe oil and plain old mud will be almost inconsequential risks and
problems compared to the problems of toxic chemicals and other hazardous
wastes that have been released from spills, disposal sites and
containers. Environmental analysis and cleanup in the US has not been
done well, on budget, or on time. The good-enough solutions or the walk-
away from the worst will not do for a city to be rebuilt.
McKibbon calls the displaced NOers environmental refuges. This is more
than an isolated natural disaster. Katrina was the first super-charged
natural disaster to get the attention of U.S. citizens.
"Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics
and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish.
Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which
the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and
unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But
it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives."
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From Sucker's Bets for the New Century
by Bill McKibben
TomDispatch.com
September 7, 2005
If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story -- the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world -- then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.
Over and over last week, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses, and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves.
But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future. A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places -- coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on -- and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees", forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.
Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on earth.
And then try to imagine doing it over and over again -- probably without the buses.
Because so far, even as blogs and websites all over the Internet fill with accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the much larger problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even beginning to address climate change, and the sad fact that global warming means the future will be full of just this kind of horror.
Consider the first problem for just a minute. No single hurricane is "the result" of global warming. But a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms were now lasting half again as long and spinning winds 50% more powerful than just a few decades before. The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico. It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippi -- the latter a state now governed by Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
So far the U.S. has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the progress of climate change: We're emitting far more carbon than we were in 1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings. Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature that's already driving our current disruptions. Now scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise five degrees before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far.
Which leads us to the second problem: For the ten thousand years of human civilization, we've relied on the planet's basic physical stability. Sure, there have been hurricanes and droughts and volcanoes and tsunamis, but averaged out across the Earth, it's been a remarkably stable run. If your grandparents inhabited a particular island, chances were that you could too. If you could grow corn in your field, you could pretty much count on your grandkids being able to do likewise. Those are now sucker's bets -- that's what those predictions about environmental refugees really mean.
Here's another way of saying it: In the last century, we've seen change in human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has stressed every part of our civilization. In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the same kind of rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere. That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more wind, more evaporation, more rain, more melt, more... more... more.
And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many times are you going to rebuild it? Even in America there's not that kind of money -- especially if you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria, and so on ad infinitum. Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to something less suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every year that passes.
Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.
Bill McKibben is the author of many books on the environment and related topics. His first, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming. His most recent is Wandering Home, A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape.
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Katrina's Toxic Brew May Save Uninsured
By rmadilo
TPM Cafe
September 8, 2005
Being a past member of the chemical industry I look with horror at the
mess created by the release of toxic industrial products into the New
Orleans area Parishes. I, and the news media, have assumed that the
problem of cleaning up this mess and paying for reconstruction of home
after home would be left to the uninsured homeowner. Most homeowners are
not insured for floodwater, so the insurance companies are going to get
out of this hurricane relatively easily.
But then I thought about something: chemical hazards follow the deep
pockets. If I own a gas station and the tank leaks, I have to pay for
cleanup. Of course I turn to my insurance policy to cover the expense.
I'm not sure what the usual coverage is for a gas station, but there are
thousands of them in NO.
If this thought turns out to be valid, business insurance could be
expected to pay tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs for the
entire area. Hopefully the Bush admin and the State EPA are on the case.
At the very least, residents of St. Bernhard Parish who had their homes
covered with oil from a nearby refinery should hope for compensation from
that refinery.
At the very least, residents of St. Bernhard Parish who had their homes
covered with oil from a nearby refinery should hope for compensation from that refinery.
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