There is, of course, an enormous amount of material we all could be reading about Hurrican Katrina and its aftermath, doubled this time because of the questions about government incompetence and even private sector procedures. Hard to pin any one piece down, so here are a few:
Amid the evacuees: what churches are doing in Houston
The Southern Baptists are a presence to contend with in the South, and that is a good thing this week. With a strong and long-established presence in the region, have set up disaster stations up and down the Gulf Coast. Their disaster relief effort is a marvel of efficiency, timetables, trucks, mobile ham radio centers, and mass production of meals. Their equipment gleams and their people are fresh and beaming due to a constant rotation of teams of volunteers bringing order to chaos. CT visited Southern Baptist centers in Mobile, Alabama, Biloxi and Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Hammond, Louisiana.
As the third-largest relief organization in North America, the Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board works closely with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army
Good links at Get Religion, including questions about why Mississippi gets like, a paragraph, in Newsweek’s package on the hurricane, and a link to this column by Eugene Robinson, who is quickly turning into one of my must-reads. This column touches briefly on the dependence on gambling money in the Biloxi area, and lightly brushes against the tension that dependence produces with religion. The last sentence wraps it up nicely.
Christianity Today has links to theodicy-related pieces
There are many, many pieces related to relief, a lot of stories indicating that Catholic groups around the country are, indeed, using those empty convents and other facilities for a good purpose. Here’s a Catholic Charities news release on some examples.
Nuns from a Vietnamese order finding refuge in NC
And then…there’s the political debate. I don’t have the energy to post at length about it, but really, all I can say is that I find it frustrating that it’s almost impossible for human beings to look at this situation objectively, it seems, without the need to reflexively protect one’s political party or favorite leader or theory of government. This hurricane was, in part, such an enormous force, bearing down on a region and city just waiting to be swamped. This morning on NPR, I heard theories about why St. Bernard Parish was so grievously impacted – an enormous wall of water, they’re saying, enough to move a barge 200 hundred feet, something that wind cannot do. It’s hard to plan around that possibility. short of complete evacuation.
(The Chicago Tribune contains the heartbreaking detail of the nursing home they have found that wasn’t evacuated and was full of bodies:
In Violet, more than a dozen bodies were reportedly found tied together. In Chalmette, some 30 people died in the St. Rita Nursing Home. They didn’t evacuate and drowned.
"I can confirm that," Rodriguez said. There was an evacuation plan, he said, but the nursing home didn’t implement it.
The bodies have not been removed yet. "I can guarantee they haven’t," he said.
Louisiana officials are considering filing criminal charges against the nursing home owners, said Robert Johannessen, communications director for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
The state requires nursing homes to have evacuation plans in place in the event of a hurricane, laying out how the residents will be moved and where they are going, he said, adding that such a plan is required in order to get a state license.
"We want to see where they designated their individuals be evacuated to," Johannessen said. "There’s lots of questions for ownership about why that didn’t happen.
Moreover, the larger a bureaucracy, the slower it moves and the more difficult it is to deal with. But this isn’t just a government problem for, the people who are having fits dealing with FEMA are also having – and will continue to have – fits dealing with insurance companies, (private sector – beyond the usual challenges will be arguments about which damage was caused by wind (covered) and which by flood (not) ) and the Red Cross has shown itself, in a growing number of examples this week, to be so large that it no longer has the flexibility to deal quickly and put out small fires in locations where it doesn’t have an established presence. Subsidiarity, anyone?
But I do believe that the politics as usual situation in regard to Brown is, while unsurprising, still a joke – no, not a joke because it’s too tragic:
When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer–a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn’t attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the iaha, he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of fema.
It’s bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don’t qualify them. But Brown wasn’t a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the iaha, he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what’s known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government’s most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works–or, rather, doesn’t.
Not that Michael Brown is personally responsible for everything that FEMA has done wrong – folding it into Homeland Security didn’t help. The massive, complexities of permissions that must be negotiated between federal, state and local officials is being revealed as extremely damaging to the health and lives of victims, especially the poor. The government of Louisiana and New Orleans are reaping what they have sown for the past fifty years. I’m a former Florida resident who keeps a close eye on life there. I have to say that while the conditions of Florida are different – geography enables evacuation more quickly and easily than it does in southern Louisiana – a year after serious hurricanes, I still hear of complaints about FEMA and the insurance companies, but I don’t hear complaints about local government – the governors and local officials of the recent past deal with these situations efficiently and seem prepared in a way that the Louisiana "leaders" did not.
It’s an interesting conversation, that would be more interesting if the politics could be removed, but that’s too much to hope for.
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