Abandonned by government, man finds mother's body.

On the Left Tip.

Robert Green naturally assumed that his mother's body would be found in the recovery effort and would be taken to - well, to wherever the bodies of the victims of Katrina were taken. The process he had to go through to even get that information was ridiculous. For weeks after the hurricane he literally got the runaround. Finally, they provided Joyce's X-rays and their own DNA samples to what seemed like the right agency to locate his mother's remains. They called the Coroner's office every day. Nothing. No Joyce.

Finally Robert's twin, David, had had enough. Enough of being forgotten, enough of the runaround, enough of being told that their mother's body couldn't be located. He loaded up on shovels and a pick axe and tools and returned to the vicinity in the 9th ward where he thought his mother's body may be located. He recognized a landmark from that harrowing day and, not three minutes later, found the remains of his mother. This happened today. He didn't have to dig - he didn't need the pick axe or saw or shovel.

All that was left of Joyce was her skull, clothes, and skeleton - the ravages of four months of being the abandoned dead had taken its toll.

Saints to play all games in Louisiana in 2006

NOLA.com: Times-Picayune:

"Tagliabue said the team would train and play its eight regular-season home games in Louisiana, at the Superdome and Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. The Superdome is undergoing repairs and should be football-ready by mid-September.

Tagliabue said he told Saints players that playing games in Louisiana in 2006 is not a one-year experiment.

'Our goal was to make it a multi-year effort,' Tagliabue said"

Thanks Tagliabue, now can you do something about the crazed owner.

NOAA will run out of greek letters if this keeps up.

Tropical Storm ZETA Public Advisory

Antoine's

Open!

Grassley goes after Red Cross records

NOLA.com:

Lawmakers intensified their scrutiny of the Red Cross on Thursday as the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee asked the organization for correspondence, minutes of board meetings and other records.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned the effectiveness of the agency's Board of Governors in a letter requesting an array of documents. He said the review will determine "whether the current board and governance structure meets the high level of competence and engagement" that is expected of the agency.

The agency has come under fire from critics who say it failed to respond quickly enough after Hurricane Katrina. In particular, they believe the response in some low-income, minority areas was inadequate. Others have faulted it for balking at cooperation with grass-roots organizations even as it collected the bulk of hurricane relief funds.

Doubts about the levees raised during planning --- then ignored

More evidence that Katrina, like the Challenger disaster, was the result of bad judgement and corner-cutting. It was a man-made catastrophe, and responsibility falls directly on the Corps of Engineers.
NOLA.com

Bea said the discussion in the 16-year-old "design memo" points to the key decision that created fatal problems on the 17th Street Canal levee and could reveal a systemic problem that will show up during investigation into the London Avenue and Industrial Canal levees, which also breached during the Aug. 29 storm. "From all the data we have, from all the documents made available to us, that exchange highlights where the key mistake was made in the design process, and how it was allowed to stand," Bea said this week. "The design engineers didn't account for the weak layers in that swamp, and the Vicksburg office picks that up in review. But the New Orleans office says it's our professional judgment this is OK. In our business, that's an acceptable answer. But it's an answer Vicksburg can disagree with -- but it didn't. "And from the documents we have, the issue is never raised again. At least not until Katrina comes along."
. . . . . . .

"It's pretty clear, looking back on it with the information we have available at this point, that Vicksburg didn't like what had been done," he said. "We'll never know why they didn't pursue it."

Tickner, now living in North Carolina, could not be reached for comment. Fred Bayley, the chief engineer in the Vicksburg office at the time, retired in 1993. Now 73, he said he doesn't remember the issue or much of the details of the project. What he remembers most about New Orleans is the challenge its tortuously weak and layered soils posed for engineers.

"Even if you took borings every 5 feet, you might not get an accurate picture of what you were dealing with down there," he said. "Everything you did down there was a risk, because of those soils."

Chiseling by mortgage company draws investigation.

As if flood victims didn't have enough to deal with, now mortgage companies are delaying insurance payments.

Nola.com

Over a dozen formal complaints have been filed with Attorney General Charles Foti's office, alleging that Countrywide has received insurance money meant for homeowners needing to repair their homes, but held on to the cash for an unreasonable amount of time, Foti spokeswoman Kris Wartelle said. Many such insurance checks require a signature both from the homeowner and the mortgage company before the homeowner can receive the cash. One Louisiana homeowner told investigators that Worldwide held his $111,000 in insurance payments for more than a month, forcing him to produce $50,000 to pay contractors repairing his storm-damaged home, Wartelle said.

No, Alaskan oil will not solve this.

"Since oil began to be drilled in 1859, the world has consumed 900 billion barrels - nearly half of the planet's reserves (according to an oil industry expert quoted by the Wall Street Journal), which means we'll have oil for another 50 years at the most," said Francisco Mieres, a professor of postgraduate studies on the oil economy at Venezuela's Central University.

But because consumption is increasing every year, driven by economic growth rates like those of China - which have ranged between seven and 11 percent a year - "oil will perhaps only last until 2030, even including reserves like Alaska's and the Athabasca tar sands" in Alberta, Canada, Mieres told IPS.

"Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job"

Call it the wrong phrase at the wrong time but "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" was named today as US President George W Bush's most memorable phrase of 2005.

The ill-timed praise of a now disgraced agency head became a national punch line for countless jokes and pointed comments about the administration's handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and added to the president's reputation for verbal gaffes and clumsy turns of phrase.

Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, a nonprofit group that monitors language use, says Bush's statement in support of the then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency may be remembered for years to come.

Katrina music.

They're trying to wash us away.

Blanco: January session likely

Time to abolish the levee boards.

Bosnia agency to help with identification of dead

The International Commission on Missing Persons, created in 1996 and based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, reached agreement with Louisiana health officials. They plan to perform DNA tests on as many as 350 bone samples, CNN reported.

Nearly 1,100 bodies were recovered in the wake of Katrina; 170 have yet to be identified.

Katrina didn't discriminate by race or income -- only by age

Four months after Hurricane Katrina, analyses of data suggest that some widely reported assumptions about the storm's victims were incorrect.

For example, a comparison of locations where 874 bodies were recovered with U.S. Census tract data indicates that the victims weren't disproportionately poor. Another database, compiled by Knight Ridder of 486 Katrina victims from Orleans and St. Bernard parishes, suggests they also weren't disproportionately African-American.

Both sets of data are incomplete; Louisiana state officials have released no comprehensive list of the dead. Still, they provide the most comprehensive information available to date about who paid the ultimate price in the storm.

The one group that was disproportionately affected by the storm appears to have been older adults. People 60 and older account for only about 15 percent of the population in the New Orleans area, but the Knight Ridder database found that 74 percent of the dead were 60 or older. Nearly half were older than 75. Many of those were at nursing homes and hospitals, where nearly 20 percent of the victims were recovered.

Lack of transportation was assumed to be a key reason that many people stayed behind and died, but at many addresses where the dead were found, their cars remained in their driveways, flood-ruined symbols of fatal miscalculation.

Galatoire's

Open!

More incredible waste not tied to Louisiana "corruption."

Yahoo! News:

"'Based on our work related to prior emergency response efforts, we have raised concerns regarding weaknesses' within those programs, the audit by Homeland Security Inspector General Richard L. Skinner said.

Moreover, 'when one considers that FEMA's programs are largely administered through grants and contracts, the circumstances created by hurricanes Katrina and Rita provide an unprecedented opportunity for fraud, waste and abuse,' the report found.

'While DHS is taking several steps to manage and control spending under Katrina, the sheer size of the response and recovery efforts will create an unprecedented need for oversight,' the report said."

This article is hard hitting. It documents the numerous ways that the taxpayer is getting ripped off by multi-level sub-contracting, whith each level adding more cost. It costs as much to put a blue tarp on a roof as it would to completely re-roof the house with standard shingles. And the top contractors won't talk about what they do, or show their books.

From blue tarps to debris removal, layers of contractors drive up the cost of recovery, critics say. Top-tier contractors say it's the only way to get the work done.: "Critics acknowledge some administration is needed, and that the sheer scale of the various jobs leads to increased overhead costs. Still, the difference between the price of the contract and the money collected by those doing the work appalls them, they say.

'When you have this nesting, or tiering, you're losing a lot of money to friction as it goes from sub to sub down to the worker bee who's actually turning a wrench or putting on a blue tarp,' said Steve Ellis, vice president of programs at the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Keith Ashdown, a colleague of Ellis', decried the 'blank-check mentality' that he said often results in overspending in the wake of disasters. 'I guarantee we're going to come back to this after everything has been reviewed and find we paid (upscale retailer) Nordstrom prices when we should have been paying Wal-Mart costs,' he said."

Note to congressmen who thought Katrina money would be wasted by "corrupt" Louisiana politicians.

The Times, Sunday Times:

"The American Red Cross was facing fresh embarrassment over its response to Hurricane Katrina today as it emerged that at least 19 agency workers stole more than $200,000 from the victims' fund.

Prosecutors in California have charged 49 people in connection with the fraud in which workers in a Red Cross call centre in Bakersfield are alleged to have handed out code numbers to friends and relatives entitling them to collect relief cheques of up to $1,565 (£908).

Mary Wenger of the US Attorney’s office in Sacramento, California, said today that she expected more charges as the investigation progressed. Ms Wenger said that preliminary calculations suggest at least $200,000 (£116,000) had been stolen, adding: 'We expect that figure to grow.'"

Bush Team Rethinks Its Plan for Recovery

Bush Team Rethinks Its Plan for Recovery
That's s Post's headline. Had us going for a minute. We thought maybe we'd see some new thinking on Katrina recovery. But the article is only about Bush's attempts to shore up his falling poll numbers.

Would Louisiana be better off without the Saints?

USATODAY.com :

The Saints are contractually obligated to remain in the city until 2010, with the state paying them more than $180 million to do so. But there are ways out of that contract. After the 2006 season, the Saints can pay Louisiana $81 million to leave town. And because of a clause in the contract, the Saints can leave without penalty if the Superdome is unusable.

The NFL will announce in the next week where they will practice and play for 2006, league spokesman Greg Aiello says.

'We would like to have the Saints play as many games as possible in New Orleans next year,' Aiello says.

But even if the Saints leave, the Superdome is a moneymaker for the city. Events and meetings keep the building occupied 45 to 50 weekends a year. That's why Gov. Kathleen Blanco has said rebuilding the Superdome is a priority.

'In some ways, the state might be better off without the Saints,' Tulane's Roberts says. 'They are expensive, and the building remains a magnet . . . "