Yes, Virginia, There Is A Minimum Wage Again In Lousiana: Two months after it suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in Katrina-affected areas, the legal requirement for employers to pay the prevailing wage in the region, the Bush Administration has reversed its decision.

According to the Washington Post, the administration decided “to waive a provision of the Davis-Bacon Act that guarantees construction workers the prevailing local wage when they are paid with federal money. The administration said the waiver on hurricane-related work would save the government money and speed recovery efforts.”

The minimum wage will be reinstated this coming Tuesday, November 8, and back pay will not be issued.

Pressure from liberal and conservative groups alike prompted the change of the White House’s mind; Republican congresspeople argued on behalf of blue-collar constituencies and voiced a fear of a region overrun by illegal immigrants who are paid oppressive wages.

“Gulf Coast workers and businesses have complained that they are being left out of the recovery. While the federal government spends more than $60 billion on recovery, they say that out-of-state companies receive most of the contracts and that many of those firms pay workers less than the prevailing wage — which is often the union wage … 75 unionized electricians said they lost their $22-an-hour jobs rebuilding the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station near New Orleans because a Halliburton Co. subcontractor found workers to do the job for less.”

While I understand the need for the reinstatement of Davis-Bacon from the perspectives of regional economic stabilty and the wage abuse of migrant workers, I feel that the presence of such workers in New Orleans is not a bad thing. Very few locals would do the work and in such horrible circumstances; in fact, plenty of New Orleanians would not accept such jobs even before the hurricane hit and the repealment of the prevailing wage. That’s my $0.02 in support of the employment of (evidently Mexican) migrant workers in my city. Someone’s got to do the work, and they do it well.

—

Houston Offers Evacuees A Year Of Free Rent: The Houston Chronicle reports that “the city is offering evacuees a voucher good for 12 months of rent in clean, safe apartments, with free electricity and gas heating.”

Though Houston expects to be reimbursed by FEMA for this humongous expenditure, this is a great move on the part of city officials wishing to get evacuees, who are still in shelters 70 days after the hurricane hit their home, into stable housing.

The city already has issued about 35,000 vouchers, ranging from one-bedroom apartments for two people to four-bedroom apartments for larger families … the vouchers will pay a market rate for low- to mid-quality apartments, up to about $1,150 for a four-bedroom apartment … that’s roughly equivalent to low class-B, or class-C apartments … above class-D apartments, which are often poorly managed or rundown.

More than 12,000 vouchers have been cashed in, each signifying an evacuee family has signed a lease. The city then pays the landlord directly … [Mayor Bill White’s office] expects at least 60,000 evacuees to find housing here because of the program.

… although the vouchers are valid for apartments in an eight-county area, many complexes outside Harris County have refused to participate … the program is voluntary for apartment managers, and some newer apartment buildings may be too expensive to qualify.

By contrast, Atlanta has made virtually no provisions for long-term housing, and Dallas has sought to house fewer than 1,000 families.

—

Writing In Exile: New Orleans teacher, Abram Himelstein, has relocated to Houston and writes for Houston Chronicle-hosted In Exile: Blogging For New Orleans. Himelstein is famous for working with six John McDonogh Senior High School students in the Neighborhood Story Project, which was featured as a May cover story in The Gambit, New Orleans’ best weekly.

By bridging the gap between the written page and life in their various neighborhoods, the students forged ties between John McDonogh Senior High and the neighborhoods served by the school. They also helped topple the stereotype that John Mac is nothing more than a bad school — a perception that the young people are acutely sensitive to in light of a shooting at the school two years ago.

In This is where we walked, hunted, danced and sang, Himelstein talks of driving around the Ninth Ward during his return to New Orleans and going by the home and haunts of Waukesha Jackson, one of the Neighborhood Story writers. And Walter’s, the now-flattened neighborhood bar where Waukesha’s grandparents loved to dance up until the storm hit.

As an archivist and family genealogist, I wonder how many stories were lost after Katrina badly damaged some of the oldest parts of New Orleans. There is hope in our youth, when in them is incited a curiosity to learn about their past and an eagerness to record it. Maybe now they understand the importance of living in the moment and making as much of it as possible. So that they may live well and pass on great stories to their grandchildren as Waukesha’s grandmother did.

Five books by these students have been completed and released, and are available for purchase. Please support our kids and their current need to write more than ever. At times when all is dark around us, our inner strength shines a light on the path forward. For these young ones, their new-found ability to express themselves through writing, a powerful and profound gift, is a timely torch to a possibly boundless future from a bleak past. Onwards and upwards, I say, let’s give such beauty a hand.

Just Do It: My blog calendar indicated this morning that there are no entries yet for November, and we are three days into the month. If we can’t depend on the daily and verbose nature of VatulBlog, what can we count on? The truth of the matter is that there is so much going on in New Orleans right now and it has come time to DO rather than TALK. Activity in New Orleans is at an all-time high since the hurricane hit two months ago – residents and evacuees have reached Acceptance, at least when it comes to making decisions on businesses and homes. They are going about the gruesome matter and all it entails – dealing with building contractors, roofers, insurance adjusters, surveyors, realtors, trash removal, Entergy, water, appliance stores, moving trucks, dump trucks, and the horribly time-consuming yet unavoidable chore of remaining on hold on the telephone for all of these services.

This is how a city rebuilds, not in a loud flurry of everyday activity, but in punctuated equilibrium, fits and starts followed by long lulls of interminably slow progress. Moving forward will not and cannot happen at the same pace for everyone in New Orleans given each individual’s personal situation and that different parts of the city were impacted in different ways. Also keep in mind that New Orleans is not like Grand Forks, ND, for instance, in that our socioeconomic demographics are all over the place. New Orleanians will rebuild (or not) how they can.

This isn’t to say that today’s post is devoid of interesting discoveries. Read on …

—

Flawed Walls Led To Flooding: Aha! So, the soil underlying the levees and floodwalls wasn’t the only culprit. In a previous post, I begged to differ with the results of a study that pinpointed the soil under key water barriers as the cause of levee failure. Given that almost all of Orleans Parish is underlain by (surprise, surprise) swamp peat and clay, why did the levees fail where they did?

Large portions of western New Orleans would have remained dry but for poorly-conceived and poorly-built levees. Four teams of engineers independently concluded and testified as such before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, as per an NPR report. The research by each of these engineering teams yields a two-fold problem:

1) Pockets Of Ancient Swamp – The construction of levees over pockets of “unsteady ground,” e.g. a portion of the 17th Street Canal where stumps of cypress trees, indicative of ancient marsh, were discovered. Again, I don’t believe it’s very easy to find soil devoid of organics and clays in most of New Orleans, but if people knew the real risks of living where they did, the loss may not have been as widespread. While humans end up living where they wish, full disclosure is only ethical.

2) Levee Pilings – Water did not top levees, but went under them. Why? It wasn’t the soil. One study shows that pilings went down to only 11 feet at the London Ave. Canal where it failed, while in an unbreached area, similar pilings went down to 26 feet. At this time, it is unclear whether specifications were inadequate (“different documents give different specifications for how deep the wall of the 17th St. Canal was to go”) or it was “human malfeasance” in the form of dishonest contractors cutting corners.

This brings up yet another question: Is a difference in piling height the sole reason for failure? The Army Corps of Engineers, who built some and contracted out others of New Orleans’ levees and floodwalls, will spend the next 8 months exploring scenarios and will “rationally test various hypotheses” for levee failure. The results will come out in July, right on time for the next round of hurricanes.

—

Real Estate Transactions: A point of clarification – The fact that not a single real-estate transaction has taken place in Orleans Parish in the last two months does not indicate the lack of interest and/or activity. Titles have to be researched before such a transaction is considered legal and this service will resume very soon. Until then, verbal and written agreements abound. As a resident informed me recently, the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association is very strong and actively interested in rejuvenating their neighborhood. Even if a few individual homeowners lack the requisite motivation, the association on a whole prefers redevelopment.

—

The Wisdom Of Our Ancestors: Today’s Times Picayune contains a population map of New Orleans in 1878. If the map of flooded New Orleans ca. 2005 is emblazoned inside your head as it is in mine, you will notice that very little of today’s flooded zones was inhabited back then.

“… the storm served up an unwelcome reminder that the city“s expansive interior, pumped dry in the first few decades of the 20th century, is mostly reclaimed swampland. The killer storm essentially re-created what was here when Bienville founded the city in 1718.”

I urge readers to look at the comparison maps in the article. Now, does anyone wish to argue with me over over the wholesale blame of “pockets of swamp material” under Lakeview and Ninth Ward levees?

Are we getting smarter as we move into tomorrow? Maybe our intelligence should not be called into question as much as being cocky, running roughshod over nature and failing to synthesize the lessons of science and history to construct a better future. Brilliant fools are we.

The subtext of today’s post: Do not build on low-lying swampland. Are you taking notes, kids?

The V-R Family’s Love Affair With Extensive Flooding: Eight weeks after Hurricane Katrina and associated flooding drove me out of my home in New Orleans, my parents now enjoy a winter stay in Chennai, which flooded badly after a severe cyclonic storm hit the coastal South Indian city this past weekend.

[Cyclone is the generic term for an organized, tropical, low-pressure system with wind speeds higher than 40mph. What is referred to as a severe cyclonic storm in that part of the world is your average, friendly-neighborhood hurricane here.]

Some statistics from The Hindu —

Families marooned: Two lakhs (200,000)
No. of relief centres: 121
No. of residents in relief centres: Three lakhs (300,000)
No. of food packets distributed: 10.5 lakhs (1,050,000)

Just to give you an idea, the number of Chennai residents currently in shelters is approximately 75% of the New Orleans population prior to Hurricane Katrina.

The Rising Waters motif is getting old. 2005, officially the year of the Drowning Monkey, began with a phone call from my mother, in Chennai on her last winter vacation there:

Mom: “The sea water is rising on the high road and looks like it’s going to make it to our [four blocks from the Bay of Bengal] home. We don’t know what’s going on.”

Me: “2 + 2 … square root of … carry the 3 = !!! … Ohhhh! You just got hit by a tsunami from this morning’s earthquake in Aceh.”

Mom: “Is that what it is? [turns on TV] Yes, you are right, it is a tsunami. No one here even knows what that is. Imagine the number of beach-dwellers who just lost their lives or homes. I have to go now, there is a horde of people moving onto the sidewalks outside our house.”

Thankfully, the tsunami surge did not make it as far as my parents’ home and my aunt got only a few inches in her seaside apartment, but you remember the aftermath of the Southeast Asian quake and tsunami. Following that, Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Beta in the Gulf of Mexico. And now, most low-lying areas of Chennai are still underwater and residents are angry. Sound familiar?

Praise the pantheon yet again, beyond a lack of power for two whole days, my parents were not affected by the most recent influx of water either. Yet, the losing emotional battle with the flashing neon sign that reads Nature 5 Humans 0 is severely disheartening. While discussing this with a colleague earlier, I remarked, “It’s time for a change of pattern. Bring on the locusts and invading aliens already.” It seems I’m to be careful what I wish for.

Here are some pictures of traffic and city living during the flood, taken compiled by Chennai blogger, Jaggy. The images remind me of New Orleans during tropical storms, while others show buses and motorists plodding forth, cyclone-related flood or not. Life must go on.

—

HAPPY HALLOWEEN! If you hadn’t noticed, the color palette of this blog has been gearing up for the second most beloved of Maitri’s Annual Events for a while. Now you know the madness behind the method.

Did I have a great weekend? Eating, shopping, and calaveras across the border in Mexico followed by Halloween, margaritas in Nuevo Progreso, all with W, one of the coolest girls from my graduate school days. For three days, I didn’t eat, sleep or think on New Orleans / Houston pathologies. Even quasi-homeless bloggers in limbo need breaks.

For those of you in town, there’s going to be a group cleanup of Canal Street tomorrow. From nola.com:

New Orleans will hold its second city-sponsored cleanup Saturday, this time on Canal Street. Two weeks ago, volunteers were called upon to help clean Magazine Street following Hurricane Katrina.

“This is another way for us to help bring our businesses back,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a press release. “It’s up to the other business owners and citizens of this great city to help them to get back on their feet. We need everybody to come out and help revive our famous Canal Street.”

Volunteers are asked to bring gloves, brooms, dust pans, rakes and garden clippers to the Aquarium of the Americas beginning at 9 a.m. Other cleaning supplies will be provided.

Residents and business owners are asked to move cars to allow for debris removal.