Word: louisiana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Watching helpless New Orleans suffering day by day left people everywhere stunned and angry and in ever greater pain. These things happened in Haiti, they said, but not here. "Baghdad under water" is how former Louisiana Senator John Breaux described his beloved city, as state officials told him they feared the death toll could reach as high as 10,000, spread across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. No matter what the final tally, the treatment of the living, black and poor and old and sick, was a disgrace. The problem with putting it all into numbers is that they stop speaking...
...force, dissolving tax base, neglected infrastructure, rising poverty and a murder rate that inspired old-timers to pack a gun beneath their tuxes on their way to the Mardi Gras parade, could hardly have been less equipped to cope with a catastrophe that everyone knew was coming. "Half of Louisiana is under water," former lawmaker Billy Tauzin used to say, "and the other half is under indictment." Three of the top state emergency officials were recently indicted for mishandling disaster funds...
...Louisiana staggered under the blow, but others all along the Gulf Coast were ravaged as Katrina, still spitting tornadoes and spraying wood and shingles and glass, made her way slowly up to Canada to die at last. A sudden twirl coming ashore meant that the Mississippi coast got smacked the hardest. In many towns, what the winds spared the floods claimed, as the gusts flung water into the streets in storm surges as high as 25 ft. "It was like the houses were playing bumper cars around here," said Biloxi fisherman Alan Layne. There were cemetery coffins tossed around...
...funds for flood control and storm preparations, mangled the chain of command, missed every opportunity. And an angry debate opened about how much the demands of the Iraq war, on both the budget and the National Guard, were eating into the country's ability to protect itself at home. Louisiana Republican Congressman Jim McCrery--working the phones with FEMA, the Army, the White House, state officials--argues that Katrina revealed how much doesn't work. "Clearly, with all the money we've spent, all the focus we have put on homeland security, we are not prepared for a disaster...
...more would have been expensive--in the billions, most likely. But certainly less costly than the Katrina recovery will turn out to be. Preventive work, however, would have had to start in the 1990s. That's how long the improvements would have taken. In 1996, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project to upgrade levees and drainage and pumping stations along the Mississippi River. But Congress and successive Administrations were never willing to fund the project fully. Under George W. Bush, the shortfall was acute: from 2001 to 2005, the Corps asked for almost $496 million, according...