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Studies (II)

Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina

August 3, 2006
The New york Times
By FELICIA R. LEE

NEW ORLEANS — From the beginning Spike Lee knew that Hurricane Katrina was a story he had to tell. Watching the first television images of floating bodies and of desperate people, mostly black, stranded on rooftops, he quickly realized he was witnessing a major historical moment. As those moments kept coming, he spent almost a year capturing the hurricane’s sorrowful consequences for a four-hour documentary, “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” to be shown on HBO this month.

The film, which Mr. Lee directed and produced, comes 20 years after the August 1986 debut of his first hit, “She’s Gotta Have It,” about Nola Darling, a Brooklyn graphic artist, and her three lovers. The provocative films that followed (“Do the Right Thing,” “Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X,” among others), with their searing cultural critiques, cemented Mr. Lee’s reputation as his generation’s pioneering black filmmaker. This year he had a commercial and critical success with “Inside Man,” about a bank heist.

Like him or not, Mr. Lee, 49, is an artist many people feel they know. People, black and white, approached him and the “Levees” crew here, he said, imploring: “Tell the story. Tell the story.” “It becomes like an obligation we have,” he said.

Mr. Lee’s reputation helped get his camera crew into the city’s water-soaked homes, he said. It allowed him to stretch out a complex story, with themes of race, class and politics that, he said, have too often been sensationalized or rendered in sound bites. He received permission, for example, from Kimberly Polk to film the funeral of her 5-year-old daughter, Sarena Polk, swept away when the waters ravaged the Lower Ninth Ward. “She came to me in a dream,” Ms. Polk says in the film. “She said, ‘Mama, I’m falling.’ ”

“Levees” opens with the Louis Armstrong song “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” and offers black-and-white images of the city’s Southern-with-a-twist past — Mardi Gras, Confederate flags — interspersed with scenes of children airlifted from demolished houses, a door marked “dead body inside.”

This gumbo of a film lingers on the politics of disaster response, the science of levees and storms, the city’s Creolized culture, the stories of loss. Many faces are familiar: politicians like C. Ray Nagin, the city’s mayor, and Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana; celebrities like Harry Belafonte, Kanye West, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Sean Penn; and the native son and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who talks about New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz. “It’s like somebody violating your mama,” Mr. Marsalis says of the flooding.

Mr. Lee said he intended most of the “Levee” stories to come from the ordinary people who endured the Superdome’s makeshift shelter or long searches for loved ones. So “Levees” includes many people like Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, depressed and outraged after her family was evacuated to different places around the country and she waited four months for a government trailer. “Not just the levees broke,” she says in the film. “The spirit broke.”

And there’s Paris Ervin, a University of New Orleans student, who fled Hurricane Katrina but left behind his mother, Mary Johnell Morant. Months later, after their home was officially searched and marked empty, the police found Ms. Morant’s remains in the kitchen, under a refrigerator. It took two more months for the coroner’s office to identify her officially and release the body.

As a kind of thank-you to the many residents like Mr. Ervin, the first half of “Levees” will be first shown free on Aug. 16 to 10,000 people at the New Orleans Arena. HBO is to show the first two hours of “Levees” on Aug. 21 at 9 p.m., the last two on Aug. 22 at 9 p.m. It will be shown in its entirety at 8 p.m. on Aug. 29, the anniversary of the hurricane, one of the country’s worst natural disasters.

The critics and audience will have the final say on whether “Levees” is the thorough examination that Mr. Lee intends. His views are clear. “What happened in New Orleans was a criminal act,” he said, a tragic backhanded slap to poor, black or politically insignificant people. “The levees were a Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there. In the famous statement of Malcolm X, the chickens came home to roost. Somebody needs to go to jail.”

Douglas Brinkley, the author of “The Great Deluge,” a book about Hurricane Katrina said: “When I heard Spike Lee was coming down, I felt grateful. I thought the media perspective — while good — still showed that a lot wasn’t being asked.” Mr. Lee is “grappling with the larger question of why so many African-Americans distrust government,” said Mr. Brinkley, a professor of history at Tulane University, who appears in the film.

Just as Michael Apted’s “7 Up,” documentary series followed a group of people, filmed first as children, Mr. Lee said he hopes to return to the people profiled in “Levees.”

One 90-degree Saturday, some of those interviewed gathered in a big meeting room at the Courtyard Marriott Hotel, not far from the Convention Center. Each person was photographed within a frame, intended to convey the idea that each interview is a portrait.

“It’s really just a mood,” Cliff Charles, the cinematographer on “Levees,” said of what he was trying to capture in the various portraits.

“Levees” has no voice-over narration and is stitched together by the witnesses and commentators. Sam Pollard, the producer and supervising editor, said they had made 30 or so versions of the documentary, wading through hours of film for the moments and the elements that best tell the story.

Mr. Pollard, who like Mr. Charles is black, has worked with Mr. Lee on two other documentaries, “4 Little Girls,” about the girls killed in the bombing of a black church in Birmingham in 1963, and “Jim Brown: All American,” about the former pro football star. Mr. Pollard said Mr. Lee came up with the film’s title last year, before they started shooting.

On the set Mr. Lee asked all the questions from a typed list. (“You have to say the question in the answer,” he said to those he interviewed. “Don’t look at me, keep looking at the lenses.”)

The interview lineup on that day in May included Joseph Bruno, a lawyer, talking about the complexities of flood insurance, among other topics; the musician Terence Blanchard (who also did the score for the film); Calvin Mackie, a mechanical engineer; Brian Thevenot and Trymaine Lee (who had Mr. Lee autograph his videos), reporters from The New Orleans Times-Picayune; and Mr. Brinkley.

Mr. Lee’s direction was terse, although he is more soft-spoken than his public image suggests. He told Mr. Mackie, whose father had lung cancer and was supposed to start chemotherapy the day the hurricane hit: “Talk about your father and stepmother. Say their names too.”

Mr. Mackie, 38, a professor of engineering at Tulane, was mourning their deaths. His 43-year-old stepmother Linda Emery Mackie’s breast cancer had metastasized in the weeks after the hurricane. His 63-year-old father Willie Mackie’s cancer treatment was delayed for six weeks, his health records lost. They died days apart in March.

“I hope that the documentary opens America’s eyes to how we continue to struggle here,” Mr. Mackie, who is black, said after his on-camera interview. “No matter how you feel about Spike, and I don’t like all his movies, people know about his integrity and his unrelenting commitment to African-American people, to tell our stories. You talk about street credibility, well, he has a cultural credibility.”

“Levees” started out as a two-hour, $1 million film. HBO executives looking for a Hurricane Katrina project snapped it up. Mr. Lee and his crew were able to get into New Orleans after Thanksgiving, Mr. Lee said, and he quickly realized that he needed two more hours and $1 million more to give the story a full airing. He got it.

Sheila Nevins, the film’s executive producer and the president of the documentary and family division at HBO, said “Levees” was an easy sell, at both prices.

“I realized this would be the film of record,” she said. “When Spike interviews a forgotten American whose kid floated away in the water, he lets them raise up their poetry. They’re able to express to him what they’re not able to express to anyone else.”

With all those hours of conversations and interviews, he certainly ended up with themes that went beyond the floodwaters, Mr. Lee said.

“Politics. Ethics. Morals,” he said, when asked what Katrina and in turn “Levees” was really about. “This is about what this country is really going to be.”

Spike Lee on Hurricane Katrina, NYT, 3.8.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/03/arts/television/03leve.html?hp&ex=1154664000&en=81ba7b97b6adc4a9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

La. Doctors Outraged at Murder Accusation

July 22, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:47 p.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- To Louisiana's attorney general, the doctor and two nurses arrested this past week are murderers. But many in the medical community are outraged at the arrests, saying the three caregivers are heroes who faced unimaginable horrors as Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and trapped them and their patients.

Dr. Anna Pou and nurses Cheri Landry and Lori Budo were accused of being principals to second-degree murder in the deaths of four patients at Memorial Medical Center three days after Katrina hit. The charge carries a mandatory life sentence, though the state will turn the case over to the New Orleans prosecutor, who will decide whether to ask a grand jury to bring charges.

Pou, Landry and Budo are accused of killing four patients, ages 61 to 90, with morphine and a powerful sedative called Versed.

Dr. Ben deBoisblanc, director of critical care at Charity Hospital, said he and others are angry at the accusations against a doctor and nurses who risked their own safety, and provided care in a chaotic and frightening situation.

''This doctor and these nurses were heroes. They stayed behind of their own volition to care for desperately ill people. They had an opportunity to leave and chose not to,'' he said.

Memorial Medical was swamped with 10 feet of water and isolated by Katrina's flooding. The 317-bed hospital had no electricity and the temperature inside rose over 100 degrees as the staff tried to tend to patients who waited four days to be evacuated.

Attorneys for the trio say they are innocent. DeBoisblanc and others fear the accusations may discourage other health professionals.

''We have people who are volunteering their services and putting their lives on the line. It's going to make it less likely they'll do that in the future,'' said Dr. Peter deBlieux, an emergency room and intensive care doctor who stayed at Charity Hospital during Katrina.

DeBoisblanc said it's also likely to make doctors less eager to return as the city tries to recover from the hurricane.

''If you think that going after physicians and nurses while hardened criminals are ruling this town, if you think that's an image that's going to bring people back, you've got to be kidding yourself,'' he said, noting the recent rash of violent crime in New Orleans.

Kris Wartelle, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office, said the agency had to investigate the claims at Memorial because it must enforce the law.

''Where is the sympathy for the victims? Why is there no outcry for the people who would have not died had they gotten out?'' she said. ''These are not terminal people begging to be put out of their misery.''

Pou, Landry and Budo were the first medical professionals charged in a monthslong criminal investigation into whether many of New Orleans' sick and elderly were abandoned or put out of their misery in the days after the storm.

''This case is not over yet,'' said Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti.

Hundreds of people were stranded in the hospital with no power to run lights or elevators and no running water. Anyone willing to carry a gun was deputized to watch the entrances as people broke into nearby buildings.

''We had no communication floor to floor, much less to the outside world. We were surrounded by water. It was hotter than Hades,'' said Dr. Gregory Vorhoff, who was at Memorial after the storm but left to seek help before the alleged killings. ''It was as bad as you can imagine.''

Under such conditions, even patients who might have been able to walk or were relatively stable before Katrina could easily have lapsed into critical condition, doctors say.

''It's very easy for a relatively healthy person to go down quickly,'' said Dr. Daniel Nuss, Pou's department head at Louisiana State University, where Pou has given up clinical duties until the case is resolved.

He and other doctors said the morphine and Versed that investigators found in the patients' bodies are commonly given to relieve suffering and anxiety.

''If you didn't find sedatives and analgesics in these people, I would think that was inhumane,'' deBoisblanc said. ''The very fact that you found these drugs means nothing.''

La. Doctors Outraged at Murder Accusation, NYT, 22.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Katrina-Hospital-Deaths.html

Louisiana Doctor Said to Have Faced Chaos

July 20, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and SHAILA DEWAN

NEW ORLEANS, July 19 — She arrived at Memorial Medical Center to treat several patients as Hurricane Katrina’s winds were gathering and did not leave until days later, when the water and the temperature and the body count had risen beyond endurance.

By the time the ordeal ended, her friends and supporters say, Dr. Anna M. Pou was one of the few doctors left in a hospital that had become a nightmare.

Overheated patients were dying around her, and only a few could be taken away by helicopter, the only means of escape for the most fragile patients until the water receded. Medicines were running low, and with no electricity, patients living on machines were running out of battery power. In the chaos, Dr. Pou was left to care for many patients she did not know.

But did she cross a line during those harrowing days, using lethal injections to kill several patients who were in extreme distress? The attorney general of Louisiana says Dr. Pou did, and on Tuesday recommended that she be prosecuted for murder.

Her supporters, though, say there is another explanation: she was using drugs to try to calm and comfort patients who had nearly reached their limit.

Eugene Myers, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who helped train Dr. Pou, said that what she had told him shortly after the hurricane sounded heroic.

He said Dr. Pou had told him that she and Lori Budo and Cheri Landry, two nurses who have also been arrested in the case either helped evacuate the last patients or tried to make them comfortable with pain medications.

Asked about the accusation that she had given the patients lethal doses, he said: “That is not in the character of Anna Maria Pou. Here’s a woman whose absolutely dedicated to excellence in patient care.”

Richard T. Simmons Jr., Dr. Pou’s lawyer, said that on the Monday after the storm passed, she tried unsuccessfully to save a dying man in the Lifecare section of the hospital, a separate ward that treated acute-care, mostly elderly patients.

Lifecare had evacuated its hospital in Chalmette just before the storm, and sent its acute patients to its wing at Memorial, adding to the number of patients in desperate need of treatment there, he said.

By Wednesday and Thursday, with New Orleans flooded, a credit union being looted across the street and gunshots heard outside, hospital staff members had concluded that some patients were simply not going to leave the building alive.

“There were just extenuating circumstances here in what occurred,” Mr. Simmons said, “and I ask everyone to wait till we know more about the patients’ condition and the condition of the hospital before making any judgments.”

At least 34 patients died in the hospital in the days after the storm.

Dr. Pou was known among fellow doctors as a fierce advocate for her patients and a prominent specialist in the difficult field of endocrine surgery. Her father was a doctor, as were two of her uncles, and she was so devoted to medicine that a résumé listing her continuing education courses, scholarly publications and teaching activities stretches for 21 pages.

Another doctor who knows her well, Peter Deblieux, described Dr. Pou as having an excellent reputation in her field. “This isn’t some marginal, flaky physician,” he said.

Dr. Pou allowed herself to be photographed Wednesday, but refused to speak with reporters about the case.

Others who went through the storm cited the extreme circumstances of Hurricane Katrina in defending Dr. Pou and said they were unhappy with the attorney general’s recommendation of criminal charges.

“There are a lot of doctors who have a lot of problems with this,” said Dr. Richard Vinroot, who was at Touro Infirmary during the storm. “It’s going to have an impact on a lot of people, because nobody is going to want to stay for a storm again.”

For all the accolades, however, Mr. Simmons refused to discuss the specifics in the criminal affidavit prepared by the state attorney general’s office: that Dr. Pou and the two nurses went from room to room with a set of syringes and vials, injecting at least four patients with a combination of drugs intended to kill those who could not easily be evacuated from the hospital.

The state’s forensic pathologist found traces of both morphine and a central nervous system sedative in the tissue samples of several patients who died, drugs that they were not supposed to have in their bodies.

Mr. Simmons said that evacuating patients from the hospital had been far more difficult than the state’s attorney general, Charles C. Foti Jr., has indicated, and he disputed Mr. Foti’s assertion that the patients would have survived if they had been evacuated. He said the sickest patients could not have been evacuated on the inflatable boats being used. And he said that to take patients to the roof for helicopter rescues, orderlies had to squeeze them through a 3-foot-by-3-foot hole in a hospital wall and push them on gurneys up the ramps of the parking garage before carrying them onto the roof.

Mr. Simmons said some patients also died while being transported under those conditions.

“This case may present a lot of end-of-life issues faced in hospitals on a daily basis, and they are very sensitive issues,” Mr. Simmons added. “We’re dealing with patients who basically were dying, patients who we believe wouldn’t have made it out. So we will be contesting that part.”

Dr. Pou grew up in New Orleans, the seventh of 11 children of Hispanic and Italian heritage in what her sister Jeannie Pou, a nurse, describes as a close family. Their father came to New Orleans from the Dominican Republic when he was a teenager, and Dr. Pou decided to follow in his footsteps while she was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, but she did not attend medical school there until eight years later.

She also had medical residencies or fellowships in Memphis, Pittsburgh and Indiana and taught for five years at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston before returning to New Orleans in September 2004. Her résumé lists dozens of papers, articles and presentations on diseases and surgery of the throat.

The affidavit released Tuesday by Mr. Foti’s office quoted several hospital employees describing meetings in which, they said, Dr. Pou talked about patients who “were probably not going to survive.” At least three employees said Dr. Pou had talked of administering “lethal doses” of morphine to those patients. One also saw her with packs of morphine and syringes, and another witness said that out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the two nurses inject one of the patients with something.

Mr. Foti arrested the three women on Tuesday. They were later released on bail. He said a grand jury working under the direction of the Orleans Parish district attorney would decide whether to bring formal charges.

“This is not euthanasia,” Mr. Foti said, accusing the three women of playing God with at least four patients, ranging in age from 61 to 90. “This is plain and simple homicide.”

But Dr. Michael Ryan, who worked with Dr. Pou in Galveston, said she did not have a “God complex.”

“She always put her patients’ interests before all else,” Dr. Ryan said. “I don’t think she would intentionally harm any of her patients.”

Christopher Drew reported from New Orleans for this article, and Shaila Dewan from Atlanta. Adam Nossiter contributed reporting from New Orleans, Brenda Goodman from Atlanta and Happy Blitt from New York.

Louisiana Doctor Said to Have Faced Chaos, NYT, 20.7.006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/us/20doctor.html?hp&ex=1153454400&en=5a8725f594241a17&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Patient Deaths in New Orleans Bring Arrests

July 19, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and SHAILA DEWAN

BATON ROUGE, La., July 18 — A doctor and two nurses were arrested Tuesday after the Louisiana attorney general accused them of using lethal injections to kill four elderly patients in a New Orleans hospital last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Quoting other hospital staff members, a state affidavit portrayed the doctor, Anna M. Pou, as methodically ordering up a list of patients remaining at the flooded Memorial Medical Center, three days after the storm. Many had already been evacuated from the hospital, which was surrounded by five feet of water and was baking in 100-degree-plus heat. The sickest, however, were still there.

“A decision had been made to administer lethal doses,” Dr. Pou told a witness, according to the affidavit, released by the office of the attorney general, Charles C. Foti. Then, the authorities said, a witness saw Dr. Pou and the nurses filling syringes.

A 61-year-old patient identified only as E. E. was chosen. “She was going to tell patient E.E. that she was going to give him something to help with his dizziness,” the affidavit said. Dr. Pou entered E. E.’s room, it said, and closed the door.

Dr. Pou, a 50-year-old surgeon, and the two nurses, Lori Budo, 43, and Cheri Landry, 49, were not formally charged with a crime.

The information collected by Mr. Foti’s office was turned over to a grand jury in Orleans Parish for a formal indictment and eventual prosecution. All three women were released without bail Tuesday. But the arrest warrant prepared by the attorney general says the three committed second-degree murder, a crime that could draw a life sentence.

“This is not euthanasia; this is plain and simple homicide,” Mr. Foti said several times at a news conference here, although he declined to ascribe a motive to the killings.

He also said that the investigation was not over and that additional charges and arrests could be imminent.

A spokeswoman for Eddie Jordan, the New Orleans district attorney, said the charges would be presented to the grand jury.

Rick Simmons, a lawyer for Dr. Pou, said she was “absolutely innocent.”

“She volunteered for storm duty and stayed there for five days,’’ Mr. Simmons said, “and then the State of Louisiana abandoned the patients and the hospitals and everybody else.”

Mr. Simmons declined to discuss the details of the complaint, saying formal charges had not yet been filed.

Lawyers for the nurses could not be reached.

What happened in the hospitals of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — particularly at Memorial Medical Center, where at least 34 patients died — has for months been the subject of intense speculation and anxiety in the city.

Many have suspected that one of the storm’s darkest chapters was written in the towering hospital, now empty, on Napoleon Avenue in the Broadmoor district.

With Tuesday’s announcement by Mr. Foti, the fear that critically ill, elderly patients had been put to death was given more fuel.

Mr. Foti described a long, complicated investigation, sometimes contested by hospital officials and involving the testing of tissue samples from victims.

The tests revealed morphine and another powerful sedative, Versed, in what Mr. Foti said was a lethal combination. According to the affidavit, medical records showed that none of the four patients had been receiving either drug in their regular medical treatment.

He said the doctor and two nurses had decided who would live and who would die.

“They took the law in their own hands,” Mr. Foti said. “They’re not the lawgiver.”

The patients would have lived through the evacuation if they had not been killed, he said.

The attorney general’s affidavit did not address why a doctor and two nurses might take the lives of sick patients while others were being rescued from the flooded hospital.

Mr. Foti said he was not required to provide a motive, but Mr. Simmons said the attorney general did not have one.

“If it’s homicide, the usual motives are greed, revenge, profit, jealousy, those type of things,” Mr. Simmons said. “None of that existed. The reason they can’t give any motive is because there’s no homicide.”

Only scattered hints were offered by the affidavit, which suggests that the hospital was desperately trying to evacuate its patients and that officials there were determined that no one alive should be left there. It describes a hospital drama on Thursday, Sept. 1, the last day before large-scale help arrived in the city.

The affidavit offers a peek into discussions among hospital staff members, undertaken in intensely difficult conditions.

The victims were actually patients of Lifecare Hospital, an intensive-care unit that leased space from Memorial and had a separate staff. With chaotic evacuations taking place, many by boat, Dr. Pou and a Memorial official who has not been charged by Mr. Foti told witnesses that the Lifecare patients “were probably not going to survive,” according to the affidavit.

But the patient identified as E. E. — the only one whose case is discussed in detail — was described as “aware, conscious and alert.” He also weighed 380 pounds and was paralyzed.

A nurse close to E. E. was asked by Dr. Pou to sedate him, but the nurse refused. “I take full responsibility,” a witness quotes Dr. Pou as saying.

One of the witnesses said she saw a nurse, later identified as Ms. Budo, give an injection to the oldest of the victims, identified as 92-year-old R.S., and then heard R.S. say, “That burns.”

The affidavit suggests that many staff members at the hospital were familiar with Dr. Pou’s plan, and that it was openly discussed. At the very least, there was widespread knowledge that “we’re not going to leave any living patients behind,” as Susan Mulderick, described as “incident commander” for Memorial Medical Center, is quoted as saying in the affidavit.

But the affidavit also portrays witnesses being barred by staff members from entering an area on the second floor where Lifecare patients were housed on that final day.

Although only the initials and birthdates of the victims were given, Lou Ann Savoie Jacob, who lives in Henderson, Nev., said the attorney general’s office had told her that R.S. was her mother, Rose Savoie.

Like many others who lost family members during Hurricane Katrina, Ms. Jacob went through the agony of not knowing what had befallen her mother, when and where she had died or when her body would be returned. But the agony was made worse by the knowledge that Ms. Savoie, whose family members regularly lived into their 90’s, had been recovering well.

“I kind of suspected that she was euthanized because I saw her on the 28th of August in the hospital,” the day before the storm, Ms. Jacob said. “She was sitting up, talking to us, no IV’s; her blood was good.”

Asked if she would consider the death of her mother a homicide, Ms. Jacob hesitated.

“In a way I don’t blame those nurses,” she said. “It was a terrible thing they went through. They made a decision, and maybe it was wrong, maybe it was right. I don’t know. I was not there. But I know I would have liked my mother to pass in a different way.”

However, Ms. Jacob said, “I don’t think they should have euthanized all those people. I think maybe some of them could have come through.”

Paulette Watson Harris, a daughter of another of the four patients, Ireatha Butler Watson, was interviewed by The New York Times several months ago and said she thought her mother, who had dementia and gangrene that prevented her from walking, might have died of heat exhaustion.

On Tuesday, she said she was shocked to hear that her mother’s death at age 90 might have been a homicide, although she said she had been suspicious because of the lack of information from the hospital.

“I think it was a selfish move on the doctor’s and the nurses’ part if they decided to do this,” said Ms. Harris, who lives in Jefferson, La. “I have never been in that situation before, but I don’t think the choice would be mine to end someone else’s life just because I think they’re miserable."

Ms. Watson said she had hired a lawyer and called the arrests “a step in the right direction.”

Dr. Pou, who has been practicing medicine for 16 years, is on the staff of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. Her biography on the L.S.U. Web site said she is an associate professor.

Adam Nossiter reported from Baton Rouge, and Shaila Dewan from Atlanta. Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta.

Patient Deaths in New Orleans Bring Arrests, NYT, 19.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/us/19patients.html?hp&ex=1153368000&en=c2d41d6152c8668e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid NYT 27.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/washington/27katrina.html

'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid

June 27, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, June 26 — Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion.

A hotel owner in Sugar Land, Tex., has been charged with submitting $232,000 in bills for phantom victims. And roughly 1,100 prison inmates across the Gulf Coast apparently collected more than $10 million in rental and disaster-relief assistance.

There are the bureaucrats who ordered nearly half a billion dollars worth of mobile homes that are still empty, and renovations for a shelter at a former Alabama Army base that cost about $416,000 per evacuee.

And there is the Illinois woman who tried to collect federal benefits by claiming she watched her two daughters drown in the rising New Orleans waters. In fact, prosecutors say, the children did not exist.

The tally of ignoble acts linked to Hurricane Katrina, pulled together by The New York Times from government audits, criminal prosecutions and Congressional investigations, could rise because the inquiries are under way. Even in Washington, a city accustomed to government bloat, the numbers are generating amazement.

"The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste — it is just breathtaking," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and chairwoman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Such an outcome was feared soon after Congress passed the initial hurricane relief package, as officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross acknowledged that their systems were overwhelmed and tried to create new ones on the fly.

"We did, in fact, put into place never-before-used and untested processes," Donna M. Dannels, acting deputy director of recovery at FEMA, told a House panel this month. "Clearly, because they were untested, they were more subject to error and fraud."

Officials in Washington say they recognized that a certain amount of fraud or improper payments is inevitable in any major disaster, as the government's mission is to rapidly distribute emergency aid. They typically send out excessive payments that represent 1 percent to 3 percent of the relief distributed, money they then ask people to give back.

What was not understood until now was just how large these numbers could become.

The estimate of up to $2 billion in fraud and waste represents nearly 11 percent of the $19 billion spent by FEMA on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as of mid-June, or about 6 percent of total money that has been obligated.

"This started off as a disaster-relief program, but it turned into a cash cow," said Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, a former federal prosecutor and now chairman of a House panel investigating storm waste and fraud.

The waste ranged from excessive loads of ice to higher-than-necessary costs on the multibillion-dollar debris removal effort. Some examples are particularly stark.

The $7.9 million spent to renovate the former Fort McClellan Army base in Anniston, Ala., included fixing up a welcome center, clinic and gymnasium, scrubbing away mold and installing a protective fence between the site and a nearby firing range. But when the doors finally opened, only about 10 people showed up each night, leading FEMA to shut down the shelter within one month.

The mobile homes, costing $34,500 each, were supposed to provide temporary housing to hurricane victims. But after Louisiana officials balked at installing them inland, FEMA had no use for them. Nearly half, or about 10,000, of the $860 million worth of units now sit at an airfield in Arkansas, where FEMA is paying $250,000 a month to store them.

The most recent audit came from the Government Accountability Office, which this month estimated that perhaps as much as 21 percent of the $6.3 billion given directly to victims might have been improperly distributed.

"There are tools that are available to get money quickly to individuals and to get disaster relief programs running quickly without seeing so much fraud and waste," said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of the forensic audits unit at the G.A.O. "But it wasn't really something that FEMA put a high priority on. So it was easy to commit fraud without being detected."

The most disturbing cases, said David R. Dugas, the United States attorney in Louisiana, who is leading a storm antifraud task force for the Justice Department, are those involving government officials accused of orchestrating elaborate scams.

One Louisiana Department of Labor clerk, Wayne P. Lawless, has been charged with issuing about 80 fraudulent disaster unemployment benefit cards in exchange for bribes of up to $300 per application. Mr. Lawless, a state contract worker, announced to one man he helped apply for hurricane benefits that he wanted to "get something out of it," the affidavit said. His lawyer did not respond to several messages left at his office and home for comment.

"The American people are the most generous in the world in responding to a disaster," Mr. Dugas said. "We won't tolerate people in a position of public trust taking advantage of the situation."

Two other men, Mitchell Kendrix of Memphis and Paul Nelson of Lisbon, Me., have pleaded guilty in connection with a scheme in Mississippi in which Mr. Kendrix, a representative for the Army Corps of Engineers, took $100 bribes in exchange for approving phantom loads of hurricane debris from Mr. Nelson.

In New Orleans, two FEMA officials, Andrew Rose and Loyd Holliman, both of Colorado, have pleaded guilty to taking $20,000 in bribes in exchange for inflating the count on the number of meals a contractor was serving disaster workers. And a councilman in St. Tammany Parish, La., Joseph Impastato, has also been charged with trying to extort $100,000 from a debris removal contractor. Mr. Impastato's lawyer, Karl J. Koch, said he was confident his client would be cleared.

A program set up by the American Red Cross and financed by FEMA that provided free hotel rooms to Hurricane Katrina victims also resulted in extraordinary abuse and waste, investigators have found.

First, because the Red Cross did not keep track of the hundreds of thousands of recipients — they were only required to provide a ZIP code from the hurricane zone to check in — FEMA frequently sent rental assistance checks to people getting free hotel rooms, the G.A.O. found.

In turn, some hotel managers or owners, like Daniel Yeh, of Sugar Land, exploited the lack of oversight, investigators have charged, and submitted bills for empty rooms or those occupied by paying guests or employees. Mr. Yeh submitted $232,000 in false claims, his arrest affidavit said. His lawyer, Robert Bennett, said that Mr. Yeh was mentally incompetent and that the charges should be dismissed.

And Tina M. Winston of Belleville, Ill., was charged this month with claiming that her two daughters had died in the flooding in New Orleans. But prosecutors said that the children never existed and that Ms. Winston was living in Illinois at the time of the storm. The public defender representing Ms. Winston did not respond to a request for comment.

Charities also were vulnerable to profiteers. In Burbank, Calif., a couple has been charged with collecting donations outside a store by posing as Red Cross workers. In Bakersfield, Calif., 75 workers at a Red Cross call center, their friends and relatives have been charged in a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in relief.

To date, Mr. Dugas said, federal prosecutors have filed hurricane-related criminal charges against 335 individuals. That represents a record number of indictments from a single hurricane season, Justice Department officials said. Separately, Red Cross officials say they are investigating 7,100 cases of possible fraud.

Congressional investigators, meanwhile, have referred another 7,000 cases of possible fraud to prosecutors, including more than 1,000 prison inmates who collected more than $12 million in federal aid, much of it in the form of rental assistance.

Investigators also turned up one individual who had received 26 federal disaster relief payments totaling $139,000, using 13 Social Security numbers, all based on claims of damages for bogus addresses.

Thousands more people may be charged before the five-year statute of limitations on most of these crimes expires, investigators said.

There are bigger cases of government waste or fraud in United States history. The Treasury Department, for example, estimated in 2005 that Americans in a single year had improperly been granted perhaps $9 billion in unjustified claims under the Earned-Income Tax Credit. The Department of Health and Human Services in 2001 estimated that nearly $12 billion in Medicare benefit payments in the previous year had been based on improper or fraudulent complaints.

Auditors examining spending in Iraq also have documented hundreds of millions in questionable spending or abuse. But Mr. Kutz of the accountability office said that in all of his investigative work, he had never encountered the range of abuses he has seen with Hurricane Katrina.

R. David Paulison, the new FEMA director, said in an interview on Friday that much work had already been done to prevent such widespread fraud, including automated checks to confirm applicants' identities.

"We will be able to tell who you are, if you live where you said you do," Mr. Paulison said.

But Senator Collins said she had heard such promises before, including after Hurricane Frances in 2004 in which FEMA gave out millions of dollars in aid to Miami-Dade County residents, even though there was little damage.

Mr. Kutz said he too was not convinced that the agency was ready.

"I still don't think they fully understand the depth of the problem," he said.

'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid, NYT, 27.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/washington/27katrina.html?hp&ex=1151467200&en=fc734cc14df0b54d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide

June 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEW ORLEANS, June 20 — Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the commander of the Police Department's Mobile Crisis Unit here, spends much of each workday on this city's flood-ravaged streets trying to persuade people not to kill themselves.

Last Tuesday in the French Quarter, Sergeant Glaudi's small staff was challenged by a man who strode straight into the roaring currents of the Mississippi River, hoping to drown. As the water threatened to suck him under, the man used the last of his strength to fight the rescuers, refusing to be saved.

"He said he'd lost everything and didn't want to live anymore," Sergeant Glaudi said.

The man was counseled by the crisis unit after being pulled from the river against his will. Others have not been so lucky.

"These things come at me fast and furious," Sergeant Glaudi said. "People are just not able to handle the situation here."

New Orleans is experiencing what appears to be a near epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress disorders, one that mental health experts say is of an intensity rarely seen in this country. It is contributing to a suicide rate that state and local officials describe as close to triple what it was before Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke 10 months ago.

Compounding the challenge, the local mental health system has suffered a near total collapse, heaping a great deal of the work to be done with emotionally disturbed residents onto the Police Department and people like Sergeant Glaudi, who has sharp crisis management skills but no medical background. He says his unit handles 150 to 180 such distress calls a month.

Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the deputy New Orleans coroner dealing with psychiatric cases, said the suicide rate in the city was less than nine a year per 100,000 residents before the storm and increased to an annualized rate of more than 26 per 100,000 in the four months afterward, to the end of 2005.

While there have been 12 deaths officially classified as suicides so far this year, Dr. Rouse and Dr. Kathleen Crapanzano, director of the Louisiana Office of Mental Health, said the real number was almost certainly far higher, with many self-inflicted deaths remaining officially unclassified or wrongly described as accidents.

Charles G. Curie, the administrator of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said the scope of the disaster that the hurricane inflicted had been "unprecedented," and added, "We've had great concerns about the level of substance abuse and mental health needs being at levels we had not seen before."

This is a city where thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end, where the vibrancy of life can be found only along the slivers of land next to the Mississippi. Garbage is piled up, the crime rate has soared, and as of Tuesday the National Guard and the state police were back in the city, patrolling streets that the Police Department has admitted it cannot handle on its own. The reminders of death are everywhere, and the emotional toll is now becoming clear.

Gina Barbe rode out the storm at her mother's house near Lake Pontchartrain, and says she has been crying almost every day since.

"I thought I could weather the storm, and I did — it's the aftermath that's killing me," said Ms. Barbe, who worked in tourism sales before the disaster. "When I'm driving through the city, I have to pull to the side of the street and sob. I can't drive around this city without crying."

Many people who are not at serious risk of suicide are nonetheless seeing their lives eroded by low-grade but persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness and stress-related illnesses, doctors and researchers say. All this goes beyond the effects of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Curie said. Beyond those of Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.

"We've been engaged much longer and with much more intensity in this disaster than in previous disasters," he said.

At the end of each day, Sergeant Glaudi returns to his own wrecked neighborhood and sleeps in a government-issued trailer outside what used to be home.

"You ride around and all you see is debris, debris, debris," he said.

And that is a major part of the problem, experts agree: the people of New Orleans are traumatized again every time they look around.

"This is a trauma that didn't last 24 hours, then go away," said Dr. Crapanzano, the Louisiana mental health official. "It goes on and on."

"If I could do anything," said Dr. Howard J. Osofsky, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Louisiana State University, "it would be to have a quicker pace of recovery for the community at large. The mental health needs are related to this."

The state estimates that the city has lost more than half its psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and other mental health workers, many of whom relocated after the storm. And according to the Louisiana Hospital Association, there are little more than 60 hospital beds for psychiatric patients in the seven hospitals that remain open here.

Because of a lack of mental heath clinics and related services, severely disturbed patients end up in hospital emergency rooms, where they often languish. Many poorer patients were dependent on a large public institution, Charity Hospital, but it has been closed since the storm despite the protests of many medical professionals who say the building is in good condition. Big Charity, as the locals called it, had room for 100 psychiatric patients and could have used more capacity.

"When you don't have a place to send that wandering schizophrenic directing traffic, guess what? Law enforcement is going to wind up taking care of that," said Dr. Rouse, the deputy coroner. "When the Police Department is forced to do the job of the mental health system, it's a lose-lose situation for everyone."

"When the family comes to see me at the coroner's office," he added, "it's a defeat. The state has a moral obligation to reinstitute this care."

Sergeant Glaudi and others said some people struggling with emotional issues had no prior history of mental illness or depression.

The symptoms cut across economic and racial lines; life in New Orleans is difficult and inconvenient for everyone.

Susan Howell, a political scientist at the University of New Orleans, conducted a recent study with researchers from Louisiana State to see how people were coping with everyday life in the city and neighboring Jefferson Parish. Ms. Howell managed a similar survey in 2003.

"The symptoms of depression have, at minimum, doubled since Katrina," she said. "These are classic post-trauma symptoms. People can't sleep, they're irritable, feeling that everything's an effort and sad."

The new survey was conducted in March and April, and canvassed 470 respondents who were living in houses or apartments. Since they were not living in government-issued trailers, it is likely that they were among the more fortunate.

Jennifer Lindsley, a gallery owner, also feels the sting of missing her friends.

"When you can't get ahold of people you used to know, it leaves you feeling kind of empty," Ms. Lindsley said. "When you try to explain it to people in other cities, they say: 'The whole world is over it, so you've got to get over it. Sorry that happened, but too bad. Move on.' "

Some people have decided to leave solely because of the mood of the city.

"I'm really aware of the air of mild depression that pervades this entire area," said Gayle Falgoust, a retired teacher. "I'm leaving after this month. I worry about living with this level of depression all the time. I worry that it might affect my health. I know the move will improve my mood."

A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide, NYT, 21.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/us/21depress.html?hp&ex=1150948800&en=9f71fcbb003d88f8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Fraudsters stole $1bn of Hurricane Katrina relief cash, Congress told

· Agency's failings allowed 'assault on taxpayer'
· Money spent on jewellery, champagne and porn

Thursday June 15, 2006
Guardian
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington

About $1bn (£542m) in relief meant for victims of Hurricane Katrina was lost to fraud, with bogus claimants spending the money on Hawaiian holidays, football tickets, diamond jewellery and Girls Gone Wild porn videos, the US Congress was told yesterday.

The fraud, exposed through an audit by the Government Accountability Office, found a staggering amount of abuse of the housing assistance and debit cards given out by the beleaguered Federal Emergency Management Agency as a way of granting relief to those who lost their homes to Katrina.

Testimony presented to the house committee on Homeland Security yesterday revealed that Fema paid housing assistance to people who had never lived in a hurricane-damaged property - including at least 1,000 prison inmates - and made payments to people who were living in free hotel rooms. In one instance it paid out on a property damage claim from a cemetery in New Orleans - to a person who had never lived in the city. In another it paid compensation for a vacant lot.

"Fema paid over $20,000 to an inmate who used a post office box as his damaged property," Gregory Kutz, the GAO's director of audits, told the committee.

The extent of the fraud was uncovered the day after the first tropical storm of this year's hurricane season landed near Tallahassee, Florida. Concerns remain that despite the torrent of criticism and soul searching after Hurricane Katrina, the agency remains ill-equipped to deal with coming storms.

Predictions that this year will bring another season of severe storms has raised tensions along the Gulf coast, where, nearly one year after Katrina, tens of thousands of people continue to live in Fema trailers, their homes still in ruins. "It is key that Fema address weaknesses in its registration process so that it can substantially reduce the risk for fraudulent and improper payments before the next hurricane season arrives," the GAO report said.

The audacity of the fraud exposed shocked the congressional committee yesterday. As much as 16% of the relief distributed by the agency was lost to fraud, the auditors said. They also said it was likely they were underestimating the scope of the fraud.

"We expected it, but we didn't expect it on this magnitude," Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the house homeland security investigations panel, told reporters. "It's an assault on the American taxpayer."

During the audit investigators filed their own bogus claims and used other undercover methods to discover that most of the improper payments occurred because Fema failed to verify the identity of those making claims, or to confirm their addresses.

In the largest instance of abuse by an individual, Fema made 26 payments to someone who submitted claims for damaged property at 13 different addresses in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, using 13 different social security numbers. Only one of the social security numbers was valid, and a search of property records revealed that the individual had never lived at any of the 13 addresses. In addition, only eight of the addresses actually existed.

Fema also paid rental assistance to people who were already enjoying luxurious hotel accommodation - footing an $8,000 hotel bill in Hawaii for someone who simultaneously received $2,358 in rental assistance.

Fema debit cards also turned out to be an easy mark for those bent on fraud. Among some of the charges the GAO found unnecessary to satisfy legitimate disaster needs were $3,700 on a diamond watch, earrings and ring, a one-week all inclusive holiday in the Dominican Republic, $200 of Dom Perignon champagne, fireworks, $1,000 for a Houston divorce lawyer, and a considerable amount for adult erotica.

Fema recovered some of the mis-spent funds. However, the agency remains unable to account for 381 debit cards worth about $760,000.

Backstory

Hurricane Katrina was the first major test of the new disaster response plan set up by the Bush administration, and Fema, the US government agency with primary responsibility for disaster recovery, failed miserably.

Congressional inquiries since have exposed a dysfunctional and divided bureaucracy that became overwhelmed by the enormous numbers of those who were trapped in their homes amid rising waters or stranded in squalid shelters. Former Fema director Michael Brown became a symbol of the divide between a slow-moving and incompetent bureaucracy and the tragedy unfolding on the ground.

Fraudsters stole $1bn of Hurricane Katrina relief cash, Congress told, G, 15.6.2006,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,,1797717,00.html

Study Finds Huge Fraud in the Wake of Hurricanes

June 14, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, June 13 — As much as $1.4 billion in government disaster aid to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — nearly a quarter of the total — went to bogus or undeserving victims, a new Congressional investigation concludes.

It is a scale of abuse that Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and chairman of the House subcommittee leading the inquiry, said far exceeded even his worst fears, despite months of accumulating evidence that the fraud-prevention system at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was woefully inadequate.

"It is shocking and appalling," Mr. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor, said.

The improper or fraudulent payments went to a dizzying array of con artists or other undeserving recipients, according to the analysis by the Government Accountability Office, which is set to announce its findings at a hearing Wednesday.

In one case, a man stayed more than two months on the government tab at a hotel in Hawaii that cost more than $100 a night. At the same time, he was getting $2,358 in government rent assistance, even though he had not been living in the property he claimed was damaged in the storm.

Emergency aid was used to pay for football tickets, the bill at a Hooters in San Antonio, a $200 bottle of Dom Perignon, "Girls Gone Wild" videos, even an all-inclusive weeklong Caribbean vacation, the report says. More than $5 million went to people who had provided cemeteries or post office boxes as the addresses of their damaged property.

FEMA also provided cash or housing assistance to more than 1,000 prison inmates, totaling millions of dollars; one inmate used a post office box to collect $20,000. Some of the inmates may in fact have owned property that was damaged, but most should not have been eligible for the aid.

In another case, 24 payments, totaling $109,708, were sent to a single apartment, where eight people each submitted requests for aid eight times, each time using their own Social Security numbers.

Another person collected 26 payments using 13 different Social Security numbers — a total of $139,000 — even though public records show the individual did not live at any of the addresses reported as damaged.

Aaron T. Walker, a FEMA spokesman, said the agency was moving to correct management weaknesses that might have contributed to the fraud, including establishing a system that will block multiple registrations for aid filed under a single Social Security number.

Separately, the agency has identified 1,500 cases of possible fraud, referring them for possible prosecution. It has collected $16.8 million after asking people to return money if they got more than they deserved.

Mr. Walker said the need to distribute aid rapidly after the storms made it impossible to check out claims initially. "FEMA's highest priority during a disaster is to get help quickly to those in desperate need of our assistance," he said.

The findings, which are to be released Wednesday in testimony by Gregory D. Kutz of the Government Accountability Office, follow up testimony that Mr. Kutz gave before a Senate committee in February. At the time, he refrained from giving an estimate of the total of the fraud, other than to say that perhaps millions of dollars was at stake.

The more precise estimate comes after a detailed examination of a random sample of 250 of the 2.6 million payments made as of February, which total over $6 billion. Investigators visited properties claimed as damaged and checked to see if the applicants had submitted multiple claims, or invalid or false Social Security numbers.

The investigators also tested the system by creating their own fake applicants, who collected a total of $6,000 in disaster assistance. (The checks were never cashed.)

Investigators concluded that fraudulent or improper payments probably ranged from $400 million to $1.4 billion, leading them to settle on $1 billion as their most likely estimate, representing about 16 percent of the distributed aid.

Families were eligible up to a total of $26,200 in aid, including $2,000 that came as emergency cash assistance right after the hurricanes passed as well as about $790 a month to rent temporary housing. They could also get free hotel rooms, although they were not supposed to stay in a hotel while getting rental assistance, as the auditors found many did.

Mr. McCaul said he was prepared to recommend legislation to mandate tougher accounting practices if the agency did not prove it had taken steps to prevent further abuses.

"When you have federal and state prisoners applying for the taxpayers' money — while they are in prison — and then the disaster aid, that is a real assault on the American taxpayer," he said. "I don't have any tolerance for that."

Study Finds Huge Fraud in the Wake of Hurricanes, NYT, 14.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/us/nationalspecial/14katrina.html

Reports Reveal Hurricanes' Impact on Human Landscape NYT

7.6.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/us/nationalspecial/07census.html

Reports Reveal Hurricanes' Impact

on Human Landscape

June 7, 2006
The New York Times
By RICK LYMAN

After the twin barrages of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year, the City of New Orleans emerged nearly 64 percent smaller, having lost an estimated 278,833 residents, according to the Census Bureau's first study of the area since the storms.

Those who remained in the city were significantly more likely to be white, slightly older and a bit more well-off, the bureau concluded in two reports that were its first effort to measure the social, financial and demographic impact of the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast.

The bureau found that while New Orleans lost about two-thirds of its population, adjacent St. Bernard Parish dropped a full 95 percent, falling to just 3,361 residents by Jan. 1. The surveys do not include the influx in both areas that has occurred this year as more residents begin to rebuild.

While the New Orleans area lost population, the Houston metropolitan area emerged with more than 130,000 new residents, many of them hurricane evacuees. Whites made up a slightly smaller percentage of Houston's population — 62.8 percent of the city in January compared with 64.8 percent last July, a month before Hurricane Katrina hit.

In Harris County, which includes Houston, median household income fell to $43,044 from $44,517, while New Orleans area's actually rose, to $43,447 from $39,793.

The physical impact of the hurricanes is well documented. Now, with these reports, bureau officials said they hoped to begin drawing into sharper focus the human landscape, showing in stark statistics how the storm's impact was felt most keenly by the poor, members of minorities and renters.

"One of the keys for me is that the data we are seeing really supports the anecdotal stories we've been hearing for months," said Lisa Blumerman, deputy chief of the bureau's American Community Survey. "We now have quantitative data that supports the stories from the storm."

One of the reports looked solely at population gains and losses, while the second studied demographic shifts before and after the storm.

The reports' findings had been expected, said William H. Frey, a demographer for the Brookings Institution. Still, he said, there were some small surprises.

It was not only New Orleans but also the entire metropolitan region that became whiter, less poor and more mobile, Mr. Frey said. At the same time, he said, assumptions that the evacuees who went to nearby Baton Rouge, where the population grew by nearly 15,000, were disproportionately poor and black were proven incorrect. A more middle-class group settled there, while the poorer and more vulnerable, who had less choice about where they landed, went to more distant cities.

Demographers in the affected states said yesterday that they were skeptical of some of the methodology in the studies, wary of the results and unsure how helpful the reports would be in measuring the human impact of the storms. Steve Murdock, the state demographer of Texas, said the studies underestimated the number of hurricane evacuees in Houston by limiting their measurements to individual households and failing to count people living in hotels, shelters and other group environments.

"I can tell you that I learned nothing new about Texas," Mr. Murdock said. "These are very limited data. The truth is, nobody knows how good this data really is."

Caroline Leung, an economic researcher at Louisiana Tech University, said she had been trying to reconcile some conflicting data in the two reports and came away confused. The underlying trends may be valid, Ms. Leung said, "but I would not rely too much on those population numbers."

Census officials emphasized that the special reports used a somewhat different methodology than typical bureau studies, saying some of the numbers might be slightly less concrete than normal.

"But we felt the need to do this quickly, because the impact of the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast population is really without precedent," said Enrique Lamas, chief of the bureau's population division.

Of the 117 counties and parishes used in the studies — those identified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as eligible for disaster assistance — only 40 lost population in the four months after the storm, and 99 percent of the losses came in the top 10 parishes and counties, comprising New Orleans and Lake Charles in Louisiana and Gulfport and Biloxi in Mississippi.

The black population of the New Orleans metropolitan area fell to 21 percent from 36 percent, the bureau found.

Reports Reveal Hurricanes' Impact on Human Landscape, NYT, 7.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/us/nationalspecial/07census.html

Army Builders Accept Blame Over Flooding

June 2, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans last year, the Army Corps of Engineers concludes that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction and not built to handle a storm anywhere near the strength of Hurricane Katrina.

"The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only," said the draft of the nine-volume report, released Thursday in New Orleans.

Several outside engineering panels that have been critical of the corps have come to similar conclusions, and have found a more extensive chain of flaws in the design, construction and maintenance of the 350-mile levee system.

But the 6,113-page report is remarkable for being a product of the corps' own official investigation, which brought together 150 experts from government, academia and business to study what went wrong and how to build better systems for the future.

The region's network of levees, floodwalls, pumps and gates lacked any built-in resilience that would have allowed the system to remain standing and provide protection even if water flowed over the tops of levees and floodwalls, the report's investigators found. Flaws in the levee design that allowed breaches in the city's drainage canals were not foreseen, and those floodwalls failed even though the storm waters did not rise above the level that the walls were designed to hold.

But the system was also overwhelmed in significant ways by Hurricane Katrina, and some degree of flooding would have happened even if the floodwalls had not been breached by the surging waters, the report stated.

"Regardless of breaching or no breaching, there would have been massive flooding and losses" from the hurricane, Lewis E. Link, the director of the study and a senior research engineer at the University of Maryland, said in an interview. "The losses were increased because of the breaching that occurred."

The investigators found no evidence of negligence or malfeasance by the corps or its contractors, but said the corps had failed to take into account the tendency of the local soil to sink over time, leaving some sections of levee lower than they should have been. The corps did not re-examine the heights of levees even after it had been warned about the degree of subsidence, the report said.

Similarly, the corps designed the system to protect New Orleans against a relatively low-strength hurricane, the report found, and did not respond to warnings over the years from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that a stronger hurricane should have been the standard.

The report suggested the corps has had trouble keeping up with the fast-changing world of geotechnical engineering, and does not share critical information among its many parts. Although the corps had indications that the floodwalls might fail under intense storm conditions, "the pieces were not put together to solve the puzzle," the report said. More must be done, it concluded, to share information among those who do research and those who design and build systems.

The report, which is already being used in the repair and improvement of New Orleans's flood protection, warned that the area "remains vulnerable" to any storm with surge and wave conditions like Hurricane Katrina's.

The chief engineer of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said in an interview that the report showed that "we missed something in the design," particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.

According to the report, the corps designers did not anticipate the way the floodwalls would fail as water climbed high against them: in several breaches, including the one at the 17th Street Canal, the force of the water pushed the floodwall back slightly, opening a gap deep into the earthen levee below that allowed water to course down under high pressure and push the wall aside.

General Strock did not go so far, however, as to apologize on behalf of the corps for the decades of decisions that went into the system.

"It is what it is," he said. "Call it a mea culpa, or call it a dry recognition, or admission, or whatever — but we're not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this."

Nonetheless, he made it clear that he believed outside influences had played a role in the problems of the flood protection system, though he said that did not absolve the corps. As one example, he cited plans by the corps in the 1970's to put large barriers at the narrow openings between Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico.

The corps backed off from that plan after a court challenge from environmental groups and then proposed floodgates at the city's drainage canals. But local officials of the levee boards and sewerage and water boards blocked that plan, as well. So the corps went with the next fallback plan of building floodwalls in the canals.

"Each time, we backed off," General Strock said. "Each time we did that, we assumed an increment of risk. I don't think anybody looked back and said, 'Risk, risk and risk adds up to unacceptable levels.' "

He said this was not an effort to lay blame at the feet of others, because ultimately the corps had responsibility for what it built.

"At the end of the day, we have to stand by the decisions," he said. If the corps builds floodwalls, he said, those floodwalls have to stand up to the test and the system has offer the intended level of protection. "And we didn't get there," he said.

The corps announced this week that it had substantially met its goal of repairing the city's hurricane protection system by June 1, the beginning of hurricane season, though there was significant work still to be done, including on two of the three enormous gates at the mouths of the city's major drainage canals.

If an unseasonably early hurricane approaches with threats of a storm surge, corps officials say, they will drive sheets of steel across the mouths of the canals and remove the rainwater with portable pumps. That could lead to street flooding, but should prevent the catastrophic breaches that allowed Lake Pontchartrain to pour billions of gallons into the center of the city.

A setback was announced this week as a 400-foot section of levee in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, shifted as it neared completion. The marshy soil of the area could not support the weight of the earthen levee structure, which slumped and bulged. It is being repaired.

Robert G. Bea, an engineering expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been critical of the corps, said he was impressed by the level of criticism in the report.

"This report has got a tone in it that is not like anything we have seen before," Dr. Bea said. "They're coming forward now."

But he said he wished that the corps had admitted other failures and gone further in delving into the internal reasons for those failures. A report by Dr. Bea and colleagues, released last month, said organizational dysfunctions within the corps had created an environment with little responsibility or accountability, and within which safety concerns could be easily played down.

The Thursday report did not address that question in depth, but General Strock said it would be dealt with in a subsequent study.

Army Builders Accept Blame Over Flooding, NYT, 2.6.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/us/nationalspecial/02corps.html

https://ipet.wes.army.mil/