Forgive the lateness of this post, but a gargantuan thunderstorm took hold of all electronic activity right over txyankee’s house today (seriously, it wasn’t raining as hard anywhere else in Houston, or even Stepford, just right on this house), and this seems to have wiped out all internet/cable service for most of the day. Along with this morning’s adventure in cat-herding, my title of errand girl for cataclysm, seems to follow everywhere I go. Should you wish an audience with Her Disasterness, it is highly recommended that you take out a foolproof insurance policy first.
70130 Zip Code Re-Entry: There is some confusion over why the 70130 zip code (mine, of course) wasn’t mentioned in the re-entry schedule. Rumors abound that unless you’re a business owner, a resident of this zip code will not be allowed in until September 23rd. This has not been confirmed. Garden District businesses are included in Central Business District re-entry scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, and the rest of us should be allowed to return the middle of next week with the Uptown folks. See this map below (courtesy SFGate), which includes “dewatering” updates and phased re-entry guidelines:
70130 Included In Central Business District Re-Entry (from SFGate)
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Tulane Provides Legal Aid To Hurricane & Flood Victims: Introducing From the Lake to the River – The New Orleans Coalition for Legal Aid & Disaster Relief. The purpose of this independent coalition is to bring together law school faculty, practicing lawyers, students as well as non-lawyers to “to facilitate the fair distribution of federal, state, and private disaster relief to New Orleanians (wherever they may be) in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.” maisnon, Chai, Jenny E. and other legal beagles out there, take note. If you would like to offer your aid, please contact katrinalegalaid@gmail.com.
The Coalition will serve as a contact point and clearinghouse for legal information … serve as a watchdog and oversight group to ensure that public and private resources are distributed on an equitable basis … conduct research on areas of law relevant to the relief effort (e.g., benefit programs, insurance, bankruptcy). We are particularly interested in providing help to those low-income victims who have been unable to obtain support or assistance through other channels.
Here is the full text of the Purpose & Action Plan along with the Katrina Coalition Contact List.
This is a great example of proper resource allocation, if it works with minimal bureaucracy and head-butting. There are enough passionate and caring people involved that it will work for those who are already starting to get cheated on insurance and building contracts. Almost makes me want to be a lawyer … almost.
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New Orleans Water Quality: An interesting article on historical vs. present New Orleans water quality (bad, and now worse – we aren’t called Cancer Alley for nothing). Rebuilding has to include “a full-fledged clean up,” higher drinking water standards and the sustainability of southern Louisiana’s clean water supply.
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Lessons Learned From The Grand Forks Flood: In April of 1997, Midwesterners watched as the Red River burgeoned and its floodwaters drowned large portions of the city of Grand Forks, North Dakota. This flood displaced 60,000 people and downtown Grand Forks burned. Sound familiar?
Mac says, “I am going to ask [friends who stayed in Grand Forks] about long-term problems, or things they didn’t realize until later. This could help us all with longer term planning, and we can be better prepared about what to expect. I think it will also help with the legal aid project, because we can look at the legal issues that arose there and see what might apply to NOLA. This is the first web page I found on the subject, but there is a ton of info out on it.”
Tried to write a response to your Grand Forks comment, but I hit a button on this stupid euro keyboard and either lost it mid-sentence or sent it to you by accident. Ah well, I’ll try again anyway:
Grand Forks, NoDak is my home town–born there, schooled there, family’s there. When our town was swallowed into the maw of Nature and spit back out, it was definitely a traumatic experience for everyone. Prior to the flooding event, our area experienced one of the worst winters in a long long time, where power was lost many times and temperatures were well below zero for weeks. Then the ice melted too quickly in the spring, and the flood came and drowned everything; because like New Orleans, we basically live on a flood plain that stretches for miles and flood waters are only held at bay by Army Corps levees. The levees were designed in that period of American engineering when we decided we could tame nature with dams and levees. Sound familiar? Anyway, during the flood, fires erupted in the downtown area buildings and destroyed what little we had left, because we had no water pressure to put out the fires out, despite being surrounded by water. We had fire, ice and water destroy our town–I didn’t see any locusts, but it was freaky like a bad horror flick from the 70s anyway. In the disjoint with reality, many of us found ourselves actually laughing, given the absurdity of all these events smashing the city at once. Everyone evacuated, and our city of around 60,000 was graced with no deaths from the flooding. Why? Because we were smaller, economically and cultural more homogeneous, and yes, almost everyone had a functional car.
We lived for a month in neighboring communitees, not really knowing when we could return to even see our homes. Nobody could even confirm what kind of damage occurred to their respective homes, so there was the very distinct feeling of floating in limbo, a prolonged period of shock. When we returned–oy, what a mess. The first thing to remember in the aftermath is: buy gallons of bleach, tall rubber boots, and watch out for infection. My parents had 7 feet of raw sewage in their basement (while others closer to the river actually had two stories of flooding and had to raze their homes in the end). In the process of cleaning out furniture and carpeting, my dad got a very small cut on his heel. This evolved into a Staph infection in about a day, and we had to get him to a hospital in a neighboring town because there was no running water or power in ours, and he wanted to keep his foot. He recovered slowly, but it demonstrated how one must be careful–you will get very tired in trying to fix and clean things, and then you will get hurt. So rest often and bring nourishment and water.
Vigilance! The black mold will come at you with a vengeance and will stay like a hungry, bad relative. No matter what you think, if your house was flooded you absolutely must remove all dry wall or plaster and bleach the house down to its bones. Grand Forks is a dry dry dry place, and we still had mold attacking us for years. Those who did not bleach with an almost religious zeal found that they had to later anyway. My parents just found another occurence of black mold underneath the linoleum in the basement this year! They again had to rip things up, bleach and scrape, and try again. Peolple who avoided removing their dry wall developed respiratory complications in the following months and years from the spores that were constantly being released. Basically, after flooding, your house will try to choke you if you don’t strip it down in the healing process.
Grand Forks is largely recovered in appearance, eight years later. It is definitely not the town that it was before–it is different and has new characteristics. My favorite bar on the river got rebuilt and lost character–it no longer attracts the bikers and everyday joes that it used to. The light bulbs are brighter because their not covered by 50 years of smoke and dust, and the tables were replaced so they don’t have love notes and offensive remarks scrawled into them. But now we have a renewed interest in creating a business community downtown on the river’s edge, and we have started a farmers market for the first time, despite being surrounded by hundreds of miles of farmland. Regarding the river is now more of a humbling experience. There are a lot of areas that used to have houses, which now hold parks; in an new effort by the current Army Corps to push the levees back and give the river a little more space to naturally flood. While it will take generations to put down some roots and make the place feel like a home again, I feel that there was a great bonding experience that was associated with the reconstruction. To me, the thing that made the renovation possible was really grass-roots community spirit. Everybody seemed to look at their neighbor, who was also wading through shit trying to pull together some semblance of normality in what was once home, and just ask if they wanted some help. You were exhausted and shocked at the situation, but you knew, so was everybody else. I don’t remember a large scale group-hug organized by the politicians, but neighbor was helping neighbor, and that made the reconstruction possible. So watch your neighbors back, and give him or her a hand even when you might feel too tired to do so. The shared experience will pull you back up.
Best regards,
Jeffrey