New Orleans’ Biggest Enemy

September 5, 2005

The powers that are will try to keep as many people away from New Orleans as long as possible. Just like in Iraq, they will spend as much money as possible with friendly contractors, before hiring the first local guy. Keeping the locals out, will make this easier.

That little beast below will be their excuse, even after the city will have been pumped dry.

Mayor Ray Nagin said he had asked the President personally to immediately start spraying. With each new generation of mosquitoes, with each week, the problem will increase immensely.

So where are the spray planes? They are needed NOW.

It is also a general mistake to keep the population out, when provisioning is possible. You need the people to restart the economy. Who will reopen a shop, if there is nobody to buy stuff? Build tent cities in the dry parts of the city and ask people to come back. Pay them to clean the city. Start it NOW.

You can deliver electricity, water and sewage infrastructure to a tent city. There is no need to keep people without any privacy in the Astrodome. Start it NOW.

Posted by b on September 5, 2005 at 12:22 UTC | Permalink

Comments

yeah, excellent. The way to get it a living city as soon as possible is to get the local citizens in as soon as possible. Rather than the supposed welfare eaters sit and watch emode-a-tv all day is to get them to work. Everybody loves that stuff. Pay the returning locals minimum + $4 or more to get them to clean up their city.
Who the heck ever named that darth company Blackwater? It sounds like they come in, poison the wells, do a couple of nighttime cleansings of the local capable citizens and whatever else the CIA dreamed of but was never able to do adequantly, and move on. this is just an aside.
yeah, hand up not hand out sounds good. teach a man to fish and on and on.

Posted by: christofay | Sep 5 2005 13:27 utc | 1

Live on WWL TV St.Tammany Parish President Kevin Davis
“3000 electricity workers are here”
“The FEMA team will not be here yet for several days”

Posted by: b | Sep 5 2005 13:28 utc | 2

Christofay- not all of those poor were unemployed. there were people there who held jobs in the tourist and hospitality industry, as dishwashers, for one example, and other jobs that pay a non-living wage.
They couldn’t afford to get out, didn’t have a car, didn’t have money for a “vacation” at a hotel, worked in jobs that didn’t provide insurance.
This is also a part of the reality of the poor in the U.S. –they work, yet cannot get by in American society even while doing a decent day’s or night’s work.
b- from what I understand, mold is an issue that can be a real problem for people..mold isn’t just a nuisance. some molds are lethal to humans, and exacerbate problems for people with bronchial problems. apparently cities need a change to dry out, too.
The French Quarter, such a base for the economy, suffered the least damage (so I guess god spared the epicenter of sin city, contrary to what the bible-thumpers would have us believe) so maybe it will be able to open bizzes before all those places in the basin are functional.

Posted by: fauxreal | Sep 5 2005 13:38 utc | 3

Last evening I heard Mayor Nagin say that he now thinks the major pumping could be completed in just a few weeks. Running water an power ought to follow soon after, as long as the army doesn’t designate the existing power company workers as Ba’athist deadenders or something.

I wonder if Nagin hasn’t realized that the best, and perhaps only, way for him to keep his city is to get its residents back into it as soon as possible. Not only can they do much of the clean-up, but the streets should be a lot safer and the army could go back to not being in our cities.

Posted by: cymack | Sep 5 2005 13:40 utc | 4

Faux:
I was just rolling along with the top of the post writing from the Billmon. Whether it is a living wage I don’t know. But it is a wage. I wrote “supposed” as I talked with my Bush voting mother this morning who mentioned the “welfare recipients” so I meant it as a way to get the local economy rolling again. I agree, I think, with you that life at the lower rungs has to be tough, but those lower rung jobs are gone for a while. This is something to take it’s place, it could be better than simply a substitute. But considering that a lot of people who have to agree, keeping it Wal-mart-esque might be a necessity.
It would certainly be better than hiring Hallie Burton as the general contractor which hires other contractors who hire companies that hire the most recent undocumented immigrants that end up working at the same Wal-mart pay scale.

Posted by: christofay | Sep 5 2005 14:07 utc | 5

–New Orleans’ worst enemy?
We heard this on CNN (on satellite radio) last night while we were driving home and almost ran off the road. It was an exchange between anchor Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s senior Pentagon correspondent, about the military seeking to explain it’s slow response to Katrina:
MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn’t move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.
And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.
And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn’t really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.
BROWN: Yes, I mean, I’m glad you told us that. And they have every right to believe they believe and think the way they think. I mean, and I mean that. But you’ve got people who have been living as refugees. It is not hard to understand why our first heart beat goes in their direction. We’ll worry about the bureaucrats later.
WHY ON EARTH would anyone care about the victims when the Pentagon hasd a reputation to maintain??????
Jeebus. You’d think they were all Baudrillardistas.

Posted by: fauxreal | Sep 5 2005 14:31 utc | 6

Rove feeding reporters bullshit again, and they lap it up?
From TPM:
As we’ve discussed over the course of the day, the Washington Post ran an article today in which they reported, on the say-so of an unidentified “senior Bush official”, that as late as yesterday Louisiana Gov. Blanco still hadn’t gotten around to declaring a state of emergency. This, allegedly, had prevented a more rapid federal response.
Only this claim seemed to be belied by a copious public record, not least of which was the actual declaration of a state of emergency dated August 26th, 2005, available on the state of Louisiana website.
and, following up on this:
Monday’s Times, not surprisingly, confirms that the White House damage control operation is being run by Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett.
excuse me while I step away from my computer as my head explodes.

Posted by: fauxreal | Sep 5 2005 14:45 utc | 7

Roberts, now Rove argggghhhh!
I feel like I’m being assailed by a blitzkrieg of stupidity by this administration. They’re doing so many dumb, damaging things at once that I can’t keep track. If I take the time to even halfway explore a single facet of their idiot activity, dozens of others will slip right past me. I can’t keep up with their botched war AND the botched hurricane relief AND whatever jack-booted, mouth-foaming, subhuman they’re trying to appoint. They’ve made a sea of mistakes and I can’t hold the whole thing in my vision long enough to make sense of it.
I feel like that is precisely their plan. And, to my horror, it’s working.

Posted by: Anonymous | Sep 5 2005 15:06 utc | 8

All this criticism of FEMA is totally unjustified: we should remember the bang up job they did in September 2001
(they even set up shop on Pier 92 the night before the 9/11 attacks took place), and their hard-driving push for record breaking speed in the removal of the smouldering and molten 9/11 evidence, thus saving it from the danger of prying eyes and inquiring minds.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Sep 5 2005 15:12 utc | 9

I bet the delay is that Haliburton don’t own any spray planes yet. Anyway, there’s a bidding process to go through.

Posted by: Colman | Sep 5 2005 15:30 utc | 10

The aim was, and is, to empty the city completely. That is quite clear. And it will go ahead.
For what reasons exactly – well.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The quickest, easiest, cheapest and most discreet way of killing people is to let air borne diseases take a hold. That is why water plants and water infrastructure are regularly bombed.
There is no clean war, no fair fight; the imagine of the valiant soldier who shoots to kill a legitimate enemy is foodstuff for the TV addicts, who can sympathise and identify with that kind of institutionally legitimised, and thus personally acceptable, killing. (Look at all the recent prop harking back to WW2 being bruited about..)

Posted by: Noisette | Sep 5 2005 17:18 utc | 11

–bit old, response to other threads, anyway–
A proper catastrophe management system should predict, prevent, guard against, and then rescue, relieve, manage, and repair as best as possible. This is understood by everyone, even if the operational details are murky. Usually, it is the rescue/relief part that is uppermost in mind, as we all know that accidents and catastrophes are exceptional and often truly unpredictable, and lives are then at stake.
The only way to satisfy the largest number, and do the best job, is by:
a) making the communit(ies) participate in planning, understand the risks and possible measures, etc. Delegate..or set up a command structure in some other way.
b) maintain communication before, during and after. Authorities, Gvmts. who do not communicate with their citizens at the possible / appropriate point in time (sometimes only after; in the case of NO, years before and then a few days before..) are no longer Authorities. Without contact, the natural – that is, accepted by all parties – dominant cum cooperative role is lost.
That is what took place in NO. For example, I have asked (elsewhere): Did NO have sirens? Did NO citizens know that it was necessary to have about one battery operated radio per Appt. block / house / industrial building / etc ? I suppose not, though the experts questioned considered me foolish and didn’t answer – one response was that in America everyone has TV!
c) Be prepared to use the forces present on the ground, and those that are very nearby, specially if road-out or transport-out is in some way predicted. This comes back to a) and setting up chain-of-command, etc.
d) Complete transparency throughout. Loss of life may be inevitable.
e) Post – event analysis, done by experts, not pols or concerned citizens, interest groups, etc.
Other recent hurricanes / typhoons:
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
Truthout
At least 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm, and early Monday, Cuban President Fidel Castro toured parts of western Cuba, which was ravaged by Hurricane Charley a month ago.
CNN
Sept. 1 2005. China evacuated more than 790,000 people as powerful Typhoon Talim slammed into its east coast yesterday after barrelling across Taiwan, where it left three dead and dozens injured.
smhAu
Googling will bring up more varied sources / better info.

Posted by: Noisette | Sep 5 2005 17:38 utc | 12

Himalaya Dreaming
First, if your home was flooded up to the gills, then your insurance company would move you into a motel, while some low-bid contractor stripped the sheet-rock and insulation from the walls, ripped the carpeting and pads off the floor, basically tore the whole building back down to its frame.
Multiply that times 500,000, and it’s easy to see why the city was evacuated, especially since its now under defacto martial law.
The mayor may claim the city can be drained in a couple of days or weeks. He’s not doing the math. Those 3000# sandbags lobbed into the breach are a disaster waiting to happen. They were meant to staunch the flood, not become a levee. They are going in still, because of bureaucratic inertia.
So as the water is pumped down, the levees will have to be rebuilt correctly. This will take more than weeks to accomplish. I’d guess many months.
Then, and only then, can non-emergency crews move safety about the city, tearing out an incredible volume of ruined wallboard, insulation, fixtures, finishes, trims, a virtual pyramid to the sun, and that’s just the commercially-insured stuff.
Then Der Bush will have to decide how Congress is gonna spin $50,000,000,000 out of flax straw, so that people can apply for FEMA loans. Add another $100,000,000,000 for Fed administrative overhead.
That’s going to take at least two months. More.
With the ongoing war in Iraq, you and I will be
$250,000,000,000 deeper in deficit by December.
Then you’re going to have to find four qualified craftspersons per each house, times 500,000. More tradespeople than exist in all the entire United States, to start the tearoff and reconstruction.
The greatest construction boom since Alaskan Oil.
It takes about three months or so to tearoff and rebuild a typical house, back to liveable use. Figure you will get maybe 50,000 tradespeople
at most, you’re looking at 30 months to get all the insured and uninsured housing back in shape.
Add another $15,000,000,000 for the attorneys and their class-action delays to FEMA settlements.
Add another $5,000,000,000 to buy up the 500,000
ruined vehicles, before they get cleaned up and detailed and sold “as-is” in some northern used- car lots to suckers next spring. A “new” Caddie!
Now you’re pushing up against the 2008 elections.
In fact you’re pushing hard. So Der Bush will have to goose the reconstruction program with a IDIQ cost-plus time-plus-overtime-plus-materials general contractor. HAL-KBR is already in line.
You can expect the final ribbon-cutting on the final home, with a new car in the final driveway, and a bright Red-White-and-Blue bow and balloons, sometime around the 4th of July, 2008.
You and I will be $1,250,000,000,000 deeper in deficit by then. Who cares?! The re-construction boom, (and the Canadian tar sands boom), will be the greatest reconstruction since the Civil War.
The Republicans are going to take that election in a cake-walk, with visual emoticons like that.
A Neo Thousand Year Reich is almost a done deal.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
P.S. Mosquitoes don’t bite dead people! They can’t breed until they find a living victim,
rather like the Fed pol’s of WA DC.
P.P.S. Congress must *immediately* overturn its softwood lumber tariff against Canadian imports!
P.P.P.S. If, as the technical journals are now saying, tar sands can be recovered for less than $5 per ton, which equates to one or two barrels, which means Canadians can sell a billion barrels of recovered tar sands crude oil for under $15,
then Congress better do their homework on trade issues now, before an approaching tidal wave of intra-continental prosperity washes over US:CN.
The Canadians, in their right, had better start marching on Ottawa, making damn sure those tar sands royalties go to the Canadian people, and not HAL-KBR-ARAMCO-ROYAL-DUTCH-SHELL. Not for nothing did the people of Alaska demand, and get, their share of royalties from public lands oil.
Every Alaskan gets $1000 check, every year. And each check is plowed right back into the economy.
– – – – – – – –
The business of Corporate-Socialist government is to make sure the maximum rate of extraction of capital is fiated away from the people, with the largest possible share of that capital siphoned off into the bank coffers of the elite, and the greatest possible burden for maintaining that extraction is laid on the heads of the people.
Rather like a range-cattle operation. Move ’em up, head ’em out. Tag ’em, and bag ’em. Yahoo!

Posted by: tante aime | Sep 5 2005 19:17 utc | 13

@tante aime – your numbers are wrong
but let me start with the 17th street canal. From the highres airial pictures I could not detect any big commercial application of that canal. Just shut it down by ramming metal into the opening of that canal to the sea. Later replace that with a flood door that can be closed when a flood comes and is open otherwise – standard in Netherland.
Pumping can be done faster by simply using more pumps. They are transportable and available.
New Orleans parish has some 498,000 inhabitants. Definitly not each of these persons has a house. Definitly not every house was flooded. Definitly not all houses were build from wood. Your rant is off on several other things do.
Do you want to be taken serious?

Posted by: b | Sep 5 2005 19:36 utc | 14

On health and mosquito problems and much more and therfore long Hurricane Katrina Analysis – CFR Global Health Program from specialist in desaster recovery in tropical areas (which NO is in many ways).

Most of these troublesome mosquito species reproduce rapidly in precisely the conditions now present, post-hurricane. Some prefer massive stands of still, warm, polluted water: that would be New Orleans. Some, such as albopictus and Yellow Fever carrier Aedes aegypti like small pools of unsalted water, such as fresh rainwater that accumulates in tree stumps and debris. One of their favorite breeding sites is the dark, warm, water-filled cavity of an abandoned tire, for example.
America’s commitment to mosquito control has been declining steadily since we eradicated malaria, and even fear of West
Nile Virus didn’t spawn a massive re-commitment to funding mosquito abatement programs. Worse, to my knowledge nobody has ever had much success in clearing mosquitoes from the sort of massive water- soaked ecology that now is New Orleans, nor the scale of water-pooling debris found along the Gulf tri-state area. It is perhaps ironic that the only real experience with this scale of insect control for the last two decades has been in developing countries: the CDC and State health folks should be reaching out to PAHO and the insect control expertises of Africa and the Caribbean right now. If we cannot manage to get ahead of the insects, there could very well be a disease crisis ahead.

Posted by: b | Sep 5 2005 20:12 utc | 15

Roshi Bob spins a fantastic yarn here http://roshiboblog.blog-city.com/the_boy_king.htm about a Boy-King and a giant named Katrina. It’s an incredibly gruesome tale that couldn’t possible be true.
Jim

Posted by: JC | Sep 5 2005 20:53 utc | 16

The boy-king’s serfs, after another rude awakening, are beginning to rub the sand from their eyes. They are finally realizing that their naps are but the inevitable results of too deeply imbibing the boy-king’s spin potion. And as the boy-king’s detractors begin to embrace the sleepy serfs and offer them solace and habit breaking sustenance the serfs fully awake and drown the boy-king in his own spin potion. And they all live happily ever after. 🙂

Posted by: Juannie | Sep 5 2005 21:14 utc | 17

I need some help. I continue to read so many comments about how poverty stricken Louisiana is – one of the poorest areas in the US – and I don’t understand. I live in an area that shares at least commercial similarities with NO:
A major marine shipping terminal, Pacific terminus for the railways handling significant prairie grain exports, tourism and cruise ship business, abundant natural resources, multi-ethnic population, tolerant environment.
How, with similar conditions, can Louisiana be poor while British Columbia is so comfortable? I just can’t grasp the distinction. Can somebody explain?

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Sep 6 2005 0:28 utc | 18

Allen, if you happen to be the fellow who writes a local politics column in Vancouver, I assume you are asking a rhetorical question.
But assuming that you are not, here goes…..
As someone who is from the Left Coast of Canuckistan like you are, but who has also spent some time in the South in general, and Louisiana in particular, it comes down to exploitation of the underclass.
We have worked hard up here to reduce it. The powers that be down there have worked hard to increase it.
And if the Fraser Institute (our local Scaiffe/Melon-type neandercon think tank) gets its wish we too will reverse course and go Norquist.
Remember, there are some folks, a select ‘creme de la creme’ few (another local Vancouver thing) in the Gulf Coast States that are very, very wealthy indeed.

Posted by: RossK | Sep 6 2005 0:57 utc | 19

As I have been reading the stories that are starting to emerge about the 5 contractors shot by police, and the Mayor of Slidell threatening to shoot any FEMA officials that continue (!) to interfere with rescue and salvage operations, it strikes me that karma bites. Is this the first step towards open warfare between various factions of U.S. governement for control of territory? Talk about bringing Iraq home…

Posted by: Ferdzy | Sep 6 2005 1:34 utc | 20

ROSS, no I don’t write a column, actually barely read the local papers. And I have Southern roots of a sort.
I’m 61 years old but grew up as a USAF brat. I did kindergarten and grade 1 in Biloxi, grade 5 in El Paso, and in between were postings in Shreveport, Pensecola, Mobile, Sumter and Albany Ga. That was half a century ago and the KKK was still active then, lynchings still happened.
I thought things had changed over that time, that Americans had matured, that the country had become more cohesive and more just.
Obviously we can’t take anything for granted any more, we have to question every political option, we can’t let the Fraser Institute gain any more influence. Actually we have to go back 25 years and re-start our national dialogue about civility and the commonwealth. The US lost the idea of commonwealth; maybe they can regain. We have to reinforce ours.

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Sep 6 2005 2:02 utc | 21

An interesting event in San Francisco happened today. St. Mary’s Cathedral (aka Our Lady of Maytag for those who have seen it) is preparing to take 300 evacuees for two months. Staff were told to avoid calling them refugees or victims.
Sheriff’s deputees surrounded the site to prevent local homeless from trying to get some help as well. I’m sure this has been and will be occurring all over the country.
The plane didn’t arrive today. No one is really sure when it will.

Posted by: biklett | Sep 6 2005 3:35 utc | 22

BEN MORRIS, SLIDELL MAYOR, 3:32 P.M. – We are still hampered by some of the most stupid, idiotic regulations by FEMA. They have turned away generators, we’ve heard that they’ve gone around seizing equipment from our contractors. If they do so, they’d better be armed because I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them deprive our citizens. I’m pissed off, and tired of this horseshit”
WWL, 3:11 P.M. – Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish is desperate for relief, but parish President Aaron Broussard says officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned back three trailer trucks of water, ordered the Coast Guard not to provide emergency diesel fuel and cut emergency power lines. Why? FEMA has not explained. . .

from http://www.prorev.com this day.
so what the heck is FEMA’s mission — to maximise disruption, interfere with aid efforts, and generally get more people killed, sick, dehydrated, etc?
does this remind anyone but me of the Keystone Kops aspects of the old USSR, with duelling bureaucracies trying harder to shoot each other in the foot than actually to get anything done? and some dead-eyed benchwarmer nixing every practical suggestion because it didn’t appear in some list in the two-inch-thick rulebook? gawd what a species. Douglas Adams was right.
contest opening now: what does FEMA really stand for?

Posted by: DeAnander | Sep 6 2005 5:08 utc | 23

De’s contest:
Former excellently managed agency.
Faintly evil, mainly absent.
Flop, every method. Assholes.

Posted by: jonku | Sep 6 2005 5:53 utc | 24

FEMA
Furiously Effete Malfunctioning Anthropoids

Posted by: catlady | Sep 6 2005 6:13 utc | 25

Free Enemas, Make Appointment

Posted by: biklett | Sep 6 2005 6:20 utc | 26

Fatal End of a Metropolis of America.

Posted by: jm | Sep 6 2005 6:26 utc | 27

Failure Equals Meritorious Achievement

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 6 2005 6:27 utc | 28

From executive: mock action.
For every murder, accountability.
Fire execrable motherf*cker again.

Posted by: jonku | Sep 6 2005 6:32 utc | 29

Both of these linked from antiwar.com:
50,000 troops now in ‘Katrina zone’
Invade and occupy Iraq. Invade and occupy New Orleans.
These are regular army troops. They’ve crossed the Rubicon.
We can force people to quit city, say police
There any number of evil reasons to do this.
I haven’t heard a convincing good one.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Sep 6 2005 7:00 utc | 30

GREAT Interview

Posted by: vbo | Sep 6 2005 7:31 utc | 31

Quote:
They’ve crossed the Rubicon.
***
Yap, we are watching the end of USA Empire…live…

Posted by: vbo | Sep 6 2005 7:34 utc | 32

The problem was that crossing the Rubicon didn’t herald the end of the empire, but the beginning. It was the republic that ended that day, and the empire that began. How about an enabling act to give Bush greater powers to deal with the aftermath of the disaster?

Posted by: Colman | Sep 6 2005 7:43 utc | 33

Nobody’s giving Bush any greater powers now.

Posted by: jm | Sep 6 2005 7:46 utc | 34

Allen–
It’s not that things haven’t progressed, it’s just that they have regressed so much since the ’80’s.
After all, this is one place where even Clinton what with his move to the middle lane on the right side of the Freeway has to take some blame.
Moral of the story….no one can be complacent. After all, between the big wars the situation was reversed re: Canada and the States and their respective relationships to working folks.
And I would think we might hear some shudders on this issue from some of the Europeans here as well (especially in France and Germany?).
____
Apologies for the snark above….thought you might be Allen Garr.

Posted by: RossK | Sep 6 2005 7:48 utc | 35

Colman , I didn’t mean it literally and of course I don’t expect (any) Empire to “fall” over night…but things are going from bad to worse for this administration so let’s just say it’s a beginning of the end…
This sad event just exposed “the nudity of the King” so completely and plainly…

Posted by: vbo | Sep 6 2005 10:58 utc | 36

FEMA == Federal Engineering of Martial Authority

Posted by: b real | Sep 6 2005 14:38 utc | 37

FEMA – What I see is far more sinister that just incompetance.
Bush – No one will give him more powers? Wait for Patriot Act 2, coming to a disaster near you. Plus, he has enough to do whatever he wants anyway. The media may hobble him to enhance their own falling credibility, but they would never mortally wound him.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 6 2005 14:49 utc | 38

“And I think you might have to add also the criminal element. I haven’t been able to confirm this, but I was told they just opened the jails and let people out”
this is from vbo’s interview w/hitchens. what balony. i heard an interview w/senator mary L describing the transfer of prisoners. . after reading juan cole’s salon piece from john francis lee’s previous post i don’t give any weight to anything hitchen’s says any more.

Posted by: annie | Sep 6 2005 15:22 utc | 39

FEMA: Fail Extravagantly, Medals Awarded

Posted by: citizen | Sep 6 2005 17:32 utc | 40

Or in the privacy of DC parties…
FEMA: Fuck ‘EM All

Posted by: citizen | Sep 6 2005 17:33 utc | 41

vbo, you might be right about the beginning of the end. I’m just afraid what flailing the corpse of this regime will do as it falls.

Posted by: Colman | Sep 6 2005 17:44 utc | 42

few endtimers make ascension

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 6 2005 18:09 utc | 43

Something nasty:
Ray Nagin was on TV and said the water coulor has changed in some places and they were doing some test do determine toxics.
Via Boing Boing Solit Waste Magazine reports.

The Agriculture Street Landfill (ASL) is situated on a 95-acre site in New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana. The ASL is a federally registered Superfund site, and is on the National Priorities List of highly contaminated sites requiring cleanup and containment. A few years ago the site, which sits underneath and beside houses and a school, was fenced and covered with clean soil. However, three feet or more of flood waters could potentially cause the landfill’s toxic contents – the result of decades of municipal and industrial waste dumping – to leach out.

Satellite pictures do show the Agricultre Street flooded

Posted by: b | Sep 6 2005 18:10 utc | 44

FEMA= the Future: Earth and Man Annihilated

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 6 2005 18:20 utc | 45

Watch out the CIA doesn’t poison the waters.

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 6 2005 18:21 utc | 46

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