HumidCity

Today I read Gambit Weekly’s online obituary of Ruth Grace Moulon, more famously known as Ruthie the Duck Lady, formerly known as Ruthie the Duck Girl, and known to friends and neighbors simply as Miss Ruthie.

Gambit included one not-so-minor detail that the Times-Picayune left out, or perhaps did not know at the time of their earlier publication:

“Her doctor said Ruthie’s death was directly related to the stress of evacuation.”

This little sentence is very important, and we all need to really think about it, long and hard.

Although it is not a thing that very many of us like to discuss openly, these mass evacuations are dangerous. Especially for the elderly and infirm. We don’t like to talk about the danger of evacuations because everyone knows that hurricanes are much more dangerous. And in 2005 we all got a good schooling on what happens if we fail to evacuate nursing homes properly, effectively, or at all. But still, mass evacuations are dangerous. It’s just the truth. We need to be able to admit that before we can even begin to make them less so.

Now, I will never imply that nursing homes should not evacuate their residents when a storm like Gustav is approaching the city. They certainly should. But we need to find a better, safer way to do it.

We also need to be more honest about what constitutes a storm-related fatality. Miss Ruthie was very ill at the time of the evacuation. She might not have lived much longer anyway – but now we’ll never know. How many other elderly folks died too soon as a direct result of that evacuation, or other evacuations? Are these deaths “not storm related” because the victims didn’t drown in their own attics? A hastened death is a hastened death. If the death came sooner than it otherwise might have, the death is storm-related. This can be debated, but it’s really pretty simple. Evacuations shouldn’t kill people.

I have heard of many such deaths as a result of the 2005 storm, including the death of the mother of a good friend of mine. These are old folks who lived their whole lives in New Orleans, sometimes never having set foot outside of the city – only to draw their last breath in a strange city, far from home. It’s a terrifying fate, and why so many of our elderly refuse to leave in the first place. And not even having their deaths being counted for the tragedy that it is – gone too soon, due to a monster storm. Storm-related death. The very least we can do is call this what it is. It is disrespectful to do otherwise.

With these evacuations, it is indeed important to get as many people out as possible. But with the elderly and infirm, we need to combine quantity with quality.

Perhaps these evacuation plans can include a way of making the trip safer, smoother and quicker for our elderly citizens. Maybe we can coordinate nursing home evacuations to occur during a specific window of time, a window that includes a special lane in contra-flow for nursing home buses and cars with handicapped license plates. Sort of like an HOV lane. A way to keep these folks from being stuck in traffic for many hours in the heat, breathing exhaust fumes and fretting as they do, a way to get them to their destination in a few hours instead of the better part of a day.

I’m not blaming anyone. I don’t want to play that game. But I wonder if these tragic deaths can somehow be avoided, or at least lessened. And I would like very much for them to be counted for what they are; not swept under the rug, not ignored, not forgotten. Counted. Acknowledged. Addressed. Shown all due respect and love without hesitation or excuse.

These shortened lives do matter. Even if they are only being shortened by a month or a week or a day – it is too much. These are our mothers, our fathers, our grandparents, our teachers, our life mentors. These are the people who gave us everything we’ve got; our culture, our livelihoods, our sense of humor, our sense of dignity, our zest for life itself. These are not disposable lives; they are treasures to us; our living history and our blood. They are where we came from, and who we will one day be. We owe them a lot, and we owe them better.

- Louis Maistros

*
http://louismaistros.com

HumidCity found its footing as a resource in the dark weeks following Hurrcane Katrina and the Great Levee Failure of ‘05. One of the main reasons was a distrust of conventional media to get the story straight.

Right now our near neighbors in Galveston and Houston are suffering many of the same trials that we have undergone and I must confess I doubt we can “get it right,” from our place here in New Orleans. With that in mind I have created a temporary login for Virgotex, an excellent Texas blogger and regular contributor to First Draft. Who is this Virgotex anyway?  In her own words:

A sentient carbon-based dyke geek nerd naturalist writer poet blogger photographer bureaucrat knowledge worker democrat mac user fat tv watcher music lover person living with five animals in Texas, pondering the nature of the time-space continuum, negotiating with the persistent illusion of reality.

Former proprietor here. Creator of, co-writer at, Got That New Package.  Also, due to clerical mixup or grave error in judgment, the fine people at First Draft let her guest blog there on Wednesdays.

In the next few weeks she will be bringing us the skinny from our neighboring state. Pease welcome her as a special guest blogger, we need her inside view as much as those outside of New Orleans need ours.

-Loki, Founder HumidCity

My days are strange.

Life seems to be one big ol’ conspiratorial plot designed to get my sorry rear outta bed and exiting my home. And it doesn’t help that my husband is away on a business/family trip until Thursday or thereabouts.

I miss him. So much.

It isn’t easy to focus on what I have to do without him, I know that now. I crave his presence, his listening ear, his sometimes sardonic, mostly considerate comments on the things I’m doing, as well as the crazy things that happen to him at work, or on his monster commute.

(When he went back to work after the storm, his trip on I-10 over to Baton Rouge was fine - until he got to his exit. The traffic light there was out, and it turned what was normally an excruciatingly long nearly four-minute wait for a traffic light under “normal” conditions into a forty minute crawl from the beginning of the off-ramp to just past the dead traffic light. If it were me in the middle of that mess, I would have gone seriously postal when I got to work that day just from the insanity. Hell, I’m glad he came home in one piece that night, and that he still had his sense of humor with him.)

When there was a possibility, early on last week, that we would have to evacuate again to make way for Hurricane Ike, he reminded me of his upcoming trip to the northwest, and I was suddenly forced to face the idea that Oh, NO, I would have to do the evacuation thing all by myself. Read the rest of this entry »

Department of Social Services secretary Ann Williamson has tendered her resignation to the Jindal Administration. This comes on the heels of the recent mismanagement of shelters during Hurricane Gustav. From showerless shelters to the understaffed food stamp program, the Gustav Evacuation is widely regarded as only half a success: they got the people out of harms way, but failed to provide for them at the final destinations.

Williamson is one of the few remaining Blanco era holdovers, but I don’t know if that’s truly germaine to the issue. When trying to relocate half a million people, there are bound to be problems and the unpredictable nature of storms can completely destroy even the best laid plans. I applaud the fact that Williamson is taking responsibility for what went wrong, but I think she needs to stay close to the office in order to help her successor pinpoint the parts of the system, (and the people under her command,) which broke down. Governor Jindal has appointed policy advisor Kristy Nichols as the interim DSS secretary.

One problem which is making the headlines is the deplorable conditions of the bathrooms and port-o-lets. Reports indicate that there were insufficient facilities located at shelters. There is a parade of evacuees on the news tonight literally sobbing as if their mother died because they had to step over or in urine and feces to use the bathroom. While I can understand the indignation, the sobbing I can do without. I’m assuming most of these people have never been to a French Quarter bar or Mardi Gras parade.

I may be out of line here, but you can’t blame the Jindal Administration because someone pissed on the floor. If the toilet is backed up or overflowing, move on to the next one. Put a sign on the door and tell someone in charge. Stand guard and point people to a working toilet. During Katrina, we had a dozen people in my mother’s house and her fifty-year old plumbing couldn’t handle the load. (No pun intended.) We peed in the backyard when we had to, visited neighbors if we could, but we didn’t keep overloading the system. If you’re in a situation like this, you need to show some common courtesy, decency and humanity to those you’re stuck with.

-M Styborski, Nation of Morons

Dear New Orleanians,

In the wake of Gustav, a number of buildings around town suffered severe damage and fell down. Since the middle of last week, city Code Enforcement inspectors have been surveying properties to determine if any are in Imminent Danger of Collapse (IDC).

I capitalize that because it’s an official city term. If a property is truly IDC, it’s likely a heap of rubble or very soon to be one. In that case, under a city law that has been on the books for years, the city can move to knock it down immediately and clear the debris, bypassing all the normal reviews (if it is in an historic neighborhood) and notification procedures.

Starting last Thursday, the city started issuing IDC demolition permits to its IDC contractor, Durr Heavy Construction. They issued 108 IDC permits on 104 properties (one property got two permits, another got three). This happened on Thursday, Monday and Tuesday.

But despite already having the tools in their legal bag to demolish buildings without historic review, and having already used that tool over 100 times, the mayor decided that wasn’t enough.

Today, I have discovered what was happening Friday, when there was no permitting going on. The Mayor was signing a executive order suspending the operations of the Neighborhood Conservation District Committee (NCDC) due to the “state of emergency” associated with Hurricane Gustav. This committee, which came into being a few months ago, reviews demolitions in historic neighborhoods. It is one of two such committees in the city, the other being the Historic District Landmarks Commission (HDLC). The mayor’s proclamation, for some odd reason, left that committee alone.

Now the city is issuing demolition permits on properties which were pending for review before Gustav came ashore. Whether they were affected by Gustav or not is apparently now irrelevant, because starting late yesterday, the city started issuing demolition permits to all comers, including itself, on any property - with a guarantee of no public scrutiny. There is currently no public input or review of these demolitions, including input by a property’s owners. The Mayor has declared himself king of the wrecking balls, and he’s going to rebuild the city by tearing it down.

The mayor’s proclamation tries to make the case that the NCDC would be an impediment to cleaning up houses affected by Gustav. So today, the mayor’s staff are ripping through the agenda for the September 2nd NCDC meeting, issuing demolition permits on every property on that list. I have serious doubts that Gustav was so selective as to knock down the exact properties that happened to be on an agenda compiled weeks before the storm formed.

Here’s the additional angle: the demolition permits being issued under the mayor’s declaration are getting issued to DRC Emergency Services. That is the city’s demolition company being paid with federal Katrina dollars.

What this appears to be is a naked grab at power, using Gustav’s glancing blow to Orleans Parish as an excuse. Read the rest of this entry »

This title is the most important line I take away from Maitri’s report of her trip with Karen Gadbois of Squandered Heritage down the bayou deep into Hurricane Gustav ground zero in Terrebonne Parish.

A good number of the men I talked with on the island work as roughnecks, roustabouts, derrick hands and contractors on offshore oil platforms. They spoke of the irony of working for an industry that destroys their land and ecosystem but offers them a steady paycheck. If they give up working as oilmen and start a petition for the removal of oil-producing infrastructure from their area, how else will they stay economically viable? Everyone agreed that digging their own graves is what feeds them, but their hands are tied.

This is the result of the inshore and offshore oil exploitation political leaders on the right are touting with their “Drill, Drill, Drill!” chants. I want to grab the woman on the American Petroleum Institute TV ad, the one who smiles at the camera and tells us how wonderful and green unfettered drilling will be, grab her by the hair and drag her down to Isle de Jean Charles show her what unrestricted drilling does, and defy her to smile into the camera ever again.

I want to herd all those happy Americans at the end of the API ad, the ones they tell us favor more drilling, into one of the unairconditioned school buses we use in evacuation and drive them down deep into Terrebonne and show them these people, show them what has happened to the land, and ask them if they are still happy to drill.

The ad suggests that drilling for oil is an environmentally sound activity. The ad does not go so far as many mostly Republican pro-oil congressman go and claim that the absence of oil spills during Katrina to demonstrate how safe the activity is. Perhaps that is because that is a bald-faced and willful lie.

Here in Louisiana we have prospered from oil drilling (although we do not receive the same royalty payments the other 49 states enjoy). People with little education whose parents and grandparents wrested a subsistence life off the land and water have made a good living in the oil patch. Louisiana is thick with companies that serve the oil beast, paying good wages and making their owners wealthy. We have dug with our own hands the 10,000 miles of canals that have drowned the marsh in salt and turned land into open water.

And so we have died in the thousands when hurricanes sweep over the open water that was once land that sheltered us. And the land upon which (and off of which) the coastal people have lived for centuries is vanishing around them, and their way of life with it.

We are losing an area larger than Delaware and the unique local culture of the Acadians (and the largely assimilated Houma who are, like my German ancestors from the Cote des Allemandes, Acadian in every way except lineage). At the end of the month, the paychecks are gone and what do these people have in compensation for the taking of their land and their lives? When the oil is gone the paychecks will be gone for good. Then what will they do? The people of the Acadian coast have built a life over 300 years that is as closely tied to the water as your’s or mine is to the air we breathe. Will we tell them to get over it, to move on and move to some distant city to take jobs at Wal-Mart?

If that is the best we can do, then I wish to announce that the American Experiment is over and the results are in: it failed.

I see that API ad (and you can’t escape it if you are watching the hurricane coverage on the news) and I want to stand up and ask all the viewers of CNN or the Weather Channel the question I have often posed, and then ask if they still want to drill:

Imagine this if you will: Los Angeles is the city most closely associated with America’s lust affair with the personal automobile, and production of the oil necessary to make that lifestyle possible is in large part responsible for coastal erosion.

If we applied Louisiana’s coastal erosion rate to the Los Angeles coastline (which Google tells me stretches 76 miles from Malibu to Long Beach), the city would have to move back from the sea a little under one mile a year. Would the Hummer continue to be so popular in SoCal if it were their land they were giving up at such an alarming rate in the name of cheap gas?

People in the nation to the north frequently whine and complain when we ask for help after hurricanes, or for the funding to build our levees and restore our wetlands. Louisiana is the new poster child for government dependence in their play book, the new Cadillac-driving welfare queen. This is no more true than Reagan’s fable from the 1980s. What we seek is fair and full compensation for the price we have paid, for the burdens we carry to make the Mississippi navigable and to provide the nation with oil and gas. America is taking our lands and our lives and pays nothing. It is not a question of the people of the Hurricane Coast of Louisiana depending on you. The question is: how much longer can Louisiana afford to carry America on its back?

When you are finished reading Maitri’s post then run don’t walk to your local bookstore and find a copy of Mike Tidwell’s Bayou Farewell, the sad tale of the slow death of the Acadian Coast.

Mark Folse was the author of the retired Katrina blog Wet Bank Guide, and currently blogs at Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans. A native of New Orleans, he returned to live in New Orleans post-Katrina after a 20 year absence.

We are officially out of the cone. For now. Fuck that, we are out of the cone till next year, so sez me, and that’s final.

Until then, I’ll have my rain plain, thank you, with a side of light breeze, hold the pickles and the crazy-ass winds, and keep my surge on the side in a little paper cup.

I know the cone is imaginary, but I’m still damn glad to be the hell out of it.

The 2008 hurricane season has not been as nuts as 2005, but still, plenty nuts. Florida got hit 3 times by the same hurricane (Fay). New Orleans was threatened by a big one on the anniversary of thee big one. Haiti got hit by four different hurricanes. Cuba has had its worst storm season in decades.

Which brings up a couple of other important points that we Americans tend to not think about much.

Everyone in New Orleans is going on about how difficult the Gustav evacation was – and it was difficult, don’t get me wrong. But not much has been said about Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, which has gone through some absolute devastation in these last few weeks – the heartbreaking tragedy of which continues to unfold even as I type this. They need help. Badly. Just because they are used to living without basic comforts does not mean it’s ok to turn a blind eye to this. Because they are poor doesn’t make them less than human. Anyone with a few dollars to spare can potentially make a positive difference by throwing it this way:

http://www.lambifund.org/

Money is tight all over, for me too, but I sent what I was able. My contribution was puny, but if you add your own puny contribution, spread the word, inspire more puny contributions, after awhile it’s all not so puny. So send a few bucks. You’ll feel very good about it if you do, and you’ll hardly miss the money at all with only a tiny bit of passing time.

And regarding Cuba – why does our government insist on insulting these people? What have they really done to hurt us? After these storms, we offered them a ridiculously small amount of aid, and insisted that their own government not be allowed to distribute it, but instead that we be allowed to distribute it ourselves through a private firm. That is a flat out insult, and a heartless one to boot.

The Cuban government said thanks but not thanks (good for them!), but suggested that they would like to be able to purchase some of our produce with their own money to feed their own suffering people in the aftermath of these disasters, if we don’t mind suspending our stupid trade embargo for a few fucking minutes. This does not seem unreasonable to me.

And really, what the fuck are we hoping to accomplish with this half century old embargo anyway? Who are we punishing exactly, and to what end? It is complete insanity and it must end.

It is especially heinous for our American government to continue on with this trade embargo under the current circumstances, and in light of the fact that Cuba continues to honor a century-old treaty that allows us to use Guantanamo Bay as if it is American soil, and for sometimes questionable purposes at that.

Most Americans don’t even know why we have rights to Guantanamo Bay in the first place. If you don’t know, don’t be embarrassed because you are not alone, but here’s the basic story: It is part of a treaty agreement from the Spanish-American War. Yes, the one that ended in 1898. At the time, Cuba was grateful to America for helping it gain independence from Spain, and gave us rights to keep a military base at Guantanamo because they assumed we’d always be their friends and help protect them from the Spanish. In other words, the original intent is now completely obsolete. We are not their friends. They are not threatened by the Spanish.

If Cuba can be good enough to continue honoring that century old treaty (which is now clearly against their own best interest), perhaps we can be big enough to end this cruel and pointless trade embargo.

It’s time.

- Louis Maistros

*
http://louismaistros.com

The two most insensitive things said to me this past evacuation week came from folks I keep thinking would know better, but keep demonstrating that they really don’t. I don’t know why I keep expecting something different from them, but I guess it’s ’cause, at heart, I am one naive cockeyed optimist doofus.

I sent out an email to the folks on our Queens synagogue’s listserve concerning the approach of Gustav and our evacuation, because I knew that many of our friends up in that area subscribe to it and are concerned for our well-being. “Don’t worry about us,” is what I said at the tail-end of the email. “Just pray for our city and hope that, this time, the disaster relief and response are at least a thousand times better than they were three years ago, almost to the very day.”

I told my dad about sending it out once we got to Oklahoma City, the place to where we evacuated, and he chided me for sending the message out to the entire listserve. “You know, there are people out there who really don’t care too much about news like that. You send things like that out to the people who ask.”

Dad, I love you, but if we only sent out messages of hope and requests for aid to people who asked for ‘em, we’d all be wading in deep dark shit and death!, I wanted to yell at him, but I was too damn tired and hungry. I was also in no mood to start an argument in a city where I didn’t know my way around, because I might well have been booted out of my dad’s car in the middle of Oklahoma City. I let it drop.

A flurry of emails resulting from that one I sent out demonstrated that many people in Queens did care about our well-being and were concerned for south Louisiana. Somebody on the listserve, knowing that my husband studies Torah weekly, even dedicated a commentary on the week’s Torah portion to us - a poignant discussion of the passage in Deuteronomy emphasizing the establishment of systems of justice. I thanked her for doing so and let everybody know we were fine, but that many other communities in Louisiana, such as the United Houma Nation, were still in desperate need of aid. The problem with having a storm such as Gustav come that close to us is that, yes, we ourselves were not hit badly, but somebody else (actually, many somebodies) close by was. It ain’t right to leave ‘em by the wayside when it is within one’s power to help.

The response from the kind woman mentioned above:

I don’t know what prompted you to move to New Orleans, but when you did so, you
certainly didn’t choose the best spot on the map. In a way, it reminds me of
living in Israel. There is widespread belief in Israel that they will be
fighting a war every three years. In New Orleans, it’s the forces of nature
that you’re battling.

In the spirit of “Justice, justice shall you pursue,” I must state that this is a person who doesn’t know my husband and me that well, and doesn’t know our history with New Orleans, and really has little to no understanding of who we are and why we love it. So there’s the benefit of the doubt right there.

Where that benefit gets revoked, however, is where we are chided for not living in “the best spot on the map”. Any and all understanding from me goes straight down the tubes with the “forces of nature that you’re battling” business.

These comments come from somebody living in New York City. And there are a gazillion reasons why it is not the best spot on the map. The higher costs of living there, for one. How most pieces of their rapid transit are only fairly rapid if you are headed for Manhattan, or within it. How much a blackout seriously paralyzes that great city. How one has to get out of the city limits at least once a month just to feel like a human being again rather than a rat in a maze.

As for the “forces of nature” bit - well, that has been a reality of living here for centuries. What is consistently ignored in such a flip statement is how man has royally screwed this up, especially in recent years with regards to the erosion of the wetlands and the unreliability of the levee system. Government is still not all that helpful in these areas, and money and manpower being sent overseas to wage endless war is not giving us in this country many happy returns. Especially when most people just want to come home.

No more freaking wars overseas, or even right here in our backyards, where people are fighting for their right to live where they want to.

I’m tired of all this.

Be kind to me, y’all. Tread carefully ’round me. Because the clueless insensitivity of others right now is flooring me much more than Gustav ever could, and ever did.

Liprap

Liprap’s Lament-The Line

Friends and Allies,

New Orleans filmmaker Lily Keber and I recently completed our first work as correspondents for Democracy Now, with a special report we filmed in the hours before Gustav landed in Louisiana. The report features Saket Soni from the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice, Bill Quigley from Loyola Law Clinic, Carol Kolinchak from Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana, and many others. We tried to highlight some of the concerns people feel around both the evacuation, and the state of New Orleans three years after Katrina.

The report aired on Democracy Now on Tuesday.  Below are two links to the report, as posted on Youtube. The first was posted by Democracy Now and has higher resolution video, but the end is cut off.  The
second version was posted by us, and is lower-res, but the end is intact.  The third link is the link for the entire episode of Democracy Now that aired the report.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dxtoUreG-4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtfcMkdoNhk
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2008/9/2

For more info and current updates, including info from much harder hit places in Louisiana like Houma, and also reports from the virtually unmentioned casualties in Haiti, please see the following links:

http://gustavsolidarity.org
http://gustavinfo.org/
http://www.haitiaction.net/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080903/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/tropical_weather

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and kind wishes.

in solidarity,

Jordan

I do not have the energy to write a new post here on this subject so please go over to Katrina: An UnNatural Disaster and read what I wrote for them. Comments are hugely appreciated, leave them on the actual post not here.

Here is an exceprt to get you started:

A few days ago my wife and I evacuated from New Orleans, piled into a friend’s car with our four cats. Thus began a series of events that simultaneously evoke the horrors of three years ago and put a vicious post-Katrina spin on them. I am going to tell you what this kind of evac is like. Be ready, because it is not pleasant.

First comes the mad packing. What can fit in your car? What can be left behind to make room for neighbors? There is always something to be secured around the house no matter how complete your prep may have been.

The soundtrack to this is the panicky, fearful misinformation coming from our political class. Despite claims by the mayor, Gustav was not the “Mother of All Storms,” a phrase whose use was hardly conducive to anything other than panic. Neither was the storm 900 miles wide; its hurricane-force winds only reached 50 miles from its center (note Katrina stretched 105 miles from its center).

Katrina was more than 50 percent stronger than Gustav. Panic and threats that anyone found on the street would go directly to the state prison at Angola, something I believe is usually against the law, constituted the majority of the official voices on the airwaves. At the time, we had none of the facts handy about this “Mother of All Storms,” just a litany of fear voiced before a backbeat of polemic. I am honestly surprised I did not hear the phrase “run for your lives.”

Read the rest here.

Loki, HumdCity Founder