Off to the Gulf Coast

Tomorrow morning I'm off to the Gulf Coast to do hurricane relief work. I'm flying from San Francisco through Houston to Biloxi, Mississippi.[ 1]

I was in Portland, Oregon, from the end of August through the middle of this month, for a series of classes. I'm a second-year student in a three-year MA program in "conflict facilitation and organizational change"; it's a distance learning program punctuated every six month by two-week residencies. It amounts to a lot of learning and practice in group facilitation, strongly grounded in psychology and psychological practice.

The night before the first day of classes was when Katrina made landfall. So, no shit, there I was, sitting on my hands in help-the-world class when it was increasingly clear that the world needed helping right now. I had a few tough nights, lying awake and wondering if I should just gas up the car and go. I did some investigating, and found that even though the Bay Area chapter of the Red Cross was completely uninformative about whether or not they could use or train volunteers, the Portland chapter had disaster relief training scheduled for just after my classes were over. I decided to stick around for a couple more days to take the training. I did so, and now have a certificate that says I've taken "Introduction to Mass Care" and "Shelter Management".

The advice of the RC staffing people in Portland was that I should go home as I had hoped to do and volunteer through my local chapter, certificate in hand. I drove home on Friday the 16th, filled in an application at the local RC chapter on Saturday the 17th, talked briefly with the staffing coordinator on the following Thursday, and took another training class ("Client Casework") on Friday, just hours before Hurricane Rita made landfall.

After the class, the instructor was in the front of the room giving us advice on filling out paperwork, and she said, "We aren't likely to deploy for Katrina any more; and since Rita hasn't landed, it isn't a disaster yet and so we don't have any plans." While she was speaking, Interstate 45 north out of Houston was lined with the cars of evacuees who had run out of gas in the traffic jam.

I was already having doubts about the Red Cross at that point, and this sealed them. I decided to go on my own as a freelance volunteer. Badgerbag, who had volunteered to work on information services at the Houston Astrodome, put me in touch with Grace Davis's Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief, and this in turn led me to the people in Biloxi with whom I expect to be working.

I expect communications to be iffy while I'm out there. I've been less than assiduous about keeping As I Please up to date, and this isn't likely to get better any time soon. I hope to have notes to upload when I come home, though.

Wish me luck.

[1] I'm actually more surprised that the Gulfport-Biloxi Airport is open a month after Hurricane Katrina than I am that Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport is open a week after Hurricane Rita.

Nat'l Enquirer Reports Katrina Drove Bush to Drink

The National Enquirer reports that when George W. Bush heard the news of the levees breaking in New Orleans, he responded by turning to drink:

BUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS

By JENNIFER LUCE and DON GENTILE

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

The story goes on to quote a "Washington source" who claims that Bush "has been sneaking drinks for weeks."

It's easy to sneer at the Enquirer, but their legal department is pretty sharp. I take this story a lot more seriously than, say, the report last year in the notoriously flaky Capitol Hill Blue that Bush is strung out on antidepressants. Heck, reporters for the Enquirer are more likely to understand how to source a story than top-flight reporters for the New York Times like, say, Judith Miller.

(via commenter sean on Eschaton)

I Feel Like a Character in a John Barnes Novel

According to the National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Rita is now a Category 5 storm, and is predicted to slam into Texas somewhere between Corpus Christi and Galveston late on Friday night.

And we've got ten more weeks of hurricane season ahead of us.

What Would You Pack?

Suppose you were headed into the heart of the disaster zone, where Katrina's eye made landfall, to do relief work. You expect that, once in the zone, you will need to be self-reliant, with neither food, water, nor shelter provided you for at least two days. You also expect that you may have to walk at least part of the way to your destination, so you can only bring what you can carry on your back. (Assume you are able-bodied and strong.) What would you pack, and how would you carry it?

You can find one generalized set of answers at Jim MacDonald's Jump Kits page. How would you modify it for the Gulf Coast in September?

Astrodome Lockdown Explained?

A story on the AP wire describes Red Cross distribution of debit cards to storm survivors evacuated to Houston and snafus that arose in the process. It doesn't actually mention the lockdown of the Astrodome reported first-hand by Badgerbag, but it does allude to police being called in for "crowd control." The shelter's head, Coast Guard Lt. Joseph Leonard, is quoted as saying "We have a very dynamic situation outside."

I speculate that this "dynamic situation" prompted shelter officials to lock the dome down, shutting out countless storm survivors as well as relief workers.

NB: I've gotten some feedback indicating that some people aren't sure whether Badgerbag's eyewitness account is authentic. Badgerbag might shield her public identity on the Internet, but she is a real person whom I have met and for whose integrity I have a high regard. If she says she was there, she was there. If she says she saw it, she saw it.

(via SFGate)

Best. Picture. Evar.

(via PNH at Making Light)

Astrodome Lockdown

Badgerbag, volunteering at the Astrodome in Houston, reports that Astrodome has been locked down:

Casinos of Destruction

Mississippians paid the price for their state's peculiar laws about gambling when Hurricane Katrina struck. The law allows only "riverboat" gambling, which in practice means that casinos are built up upon large, rudderless barges permanently moored on the waterfront.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that when Katrina made landfall, the storm surge and ferocious winds tore casino barges from their moorings and washed them ashore, causing substantial damage:

"That sombitch smacked my building, swept all my merchandise and guns out, and pushed that safe clear across the parking lot," said John Godsey, standing in the rubble that used to be his pawnshop and looking up at the wrecked Casino Magic right next to it in the parking lot. "This building would probably still be standing if the casino hadn't hit it." ...

The lavish Palace was lifted sideways onto a walkway, and the adjacent Sports Zone gambling hall cleared a path a half-mile inland. The east side of the city around its shell is a disaster zone, with splintered wood from former houses littered for miles.

The 134,500-square-foot Grand Casino Biloxi, the state's largest coastal casino, cut a swath of wreckage across Highway 90 where one part wrecked the historic Hotel Tivoli and a museum under construction, and another part flattened apartments and homes.

If the law had allowed casinos to be built on solid ground, the damage in Biloxi, severe though it was, would have been substantially lessened.

Any Port in a Storm

Elf Sternberg is watching Fox News' coverage of the Gulf Coast emergency so that you don't have to:

I will say that of all the channels on the air, I can understand why FOX gets the attention it does. They're most in-the-midst of it, they get the best folks on the air, they're actually interviewing cops and doctors on the ground rather than politicians or theorists. They're good at covering disasters.

At one point some reporter was interviewing a doctor at a Red Cross recovery center in Gulfport and the talking head in the studio asked, "Who are all those people in the bright shirts behind you?"

"The ones in red vests are Red Cross. The ones in the bright yellow shirts are Scientologists, who are volunteering their expertise as grief counselors."

More like grief vultures.

I imagine that in general my opinions about the Scientologists are very similar to Elf's. In this particular case, though, I don't want to criticize. Those people are there on the ground, on the scene. They are doing something, and it is almost certainly making at least a little difference for the better.

This leaves me with a question: In between cracking wise about the 101st Fighting Keyboarders and taking part in Operation Yellow Elephant, what are you doing to relieve the suffering that Katrina left in her wake? Besides clicking on a button labeled "Donate", I mean.

Bush's Chernobyl

Here's what I remember about the Chernobyl disaster: veiled reports that something had gone drastically wrong with a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, while the government of the Soviet Union doggedly insisted that there was no problem, that nothing had gone wrong. The evidence of nuclear disaster was there for all the world to see in the form of radioactive dust spreading through the upper atmosphere.

Then, suddenly, the Soviet government came clean, both at home and abroad. Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the lying simply couldn't continue, and broadened this notion to the whole of the Soviet government. The new policy became known as glasnost' ("openness" [or, more cynically, "publicity"]) which in turn was the foundation for perestroika ("reconstruction"). The process ultimately resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Hurricane Katrina has ruined the Gulf Coast, flattening and flooding cities, killing uncounted thousands, rendering many tens of thousands homeless refugees, taking as much as a third of the United States' supply of petroleum offline, not to mention capactiy to refine and transport it. Federal emergency management officials bluster defensively, but the fact on the ground is that there is essentially no federal capacity to respond to disaster.

More and more people are thinking that the Bush administration's response to the challenge of Katrina and her aftermath is a miserable failure. This perception spreading far beyond the Blue blogosphere. Crooks and Liars shows us an MSNBC report on Bush's flaccid address to the nation on Wednesday followed by a response from a survivor in Biloxi, Mississippi: "President Bush shouldn't be the president no more. President Bush ain't doing his job." And TBogg , who is reading The Corner at NRO so you don't have to, finds that even the Cornerites are giving Bush a failing grade.

Hurricane Katrina is George W. Bush's Chernobyl. The reality that he and his people were making for themselves has collapsed like a house of cards. George Bush is going down. Let's hope he doesn't take the Constitution with him when he does.