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Bill Quigley in New Orleans Hospital: “No Water, Sick,
No Heat, Call Somebody for Help”
The Drowning of New Orleans: Hurricane Devastation Was Predicted
Homeland Emergency: Disaster Relief is Suffering Under New
DHS Bureaucracy
"Katrina's Real Name is Global Warming"
Bill Quigley in New Orleans Hospital: “No Water,
Sick, No Heat, Call Somebody for Help”
We go to New Orleans and Law Professor Bill Quigley who
is trapped in Memorial Hospital with hundreds of other people.
There is no water or electricity in the hospital and relief
efforts have yet to reach them. [includes rush
transcript]
We go now to New Orleans and the second part of our conversation
with Bill Quigley. He is law professor at Loyola University
and is currently trapped with hundreds of other people in
Memorial Medical Center on Napoleon Avenue without food, water
or electricity. I spoke to him on his cell phone on Tuesday
night from the hospital. He has been volunteering there since
the hurricane hit, helping his wife, Debbie, an oncology nurse.
We tried through out the day Wednesday to reach Bill Quigley
and could not get through to him. A colleague who exchanged
text messages with him told us that his last message, sent
Wednesday evening, read: "no water, sick, no heat, call
somebody for help." When his colleague called the Red
Cross, they told her they could not help and that she should
call the Coast Guard. She tried for several hours reach the
Coast Guard without success.
- Bill Quigley, speaking Tuesday night. He begins by describing
the situation in the hospital.
The Drowning of New Orleans: Hurricane Devastation
Was Predicted
The New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote three years ago, "It's
only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct
hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect
us, but we grow more vulnerable every day." We look at
the lack of infrastructure preparedness in the Big Easy.
The death toll from Hurricane Katrina continues to climb
dramatically with the mayor of New Orleans estimating that
the number of dead in the devastated city could well be in
the thousands. Conditions continue to deteriorate after two
levees broke, sending water coursing through the streets.
An estimated 80 percent of the city - which lies below sea
level - is under water, up to 20 feet deep in places with
miles and miles of homes swamped. Food and water supplies
are dwindling and bodies float in the floodwaters. As the
evacuation of the Superdome begins, officials said there was
no choice but to abandon the city, perhaps for months.
As the devastation continues to unfold, many people around
the country are wondering how a catastrophe of this magnitude
could have occurred. Well, some have been warning of such
an impending disaster for years. Three years ago, the New
Orleans Times-Picayune won journalism awards for an exhaustive
five-part series called "Washing Away" which began
with the words: "It's only a matter of time before south
Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions
have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable
every day." The newspaper seems to be living its own
prophecy. As the hurricane passed but the water continued
to rise, the staff of the Times-Picayune was forced to evacuate
its downtown headquarters.
- Mark Fischetti, contributing editor of Scientific American.
In 2001 he wrote an article titled "The
Drowning of New Orleans" that warned only massive
reengineering of southeastern Louisiana could save New Orleans
from a catastrophic flood.
- John McQuaid, reporter for the Washington bureau of the
New Orleans Times-Picayune. He co-authored Washing
Away, a major investigative series in 2002 examining
the implications of a hurricane like Katrina hitting New
Orleans.
Homeland Emergency: Disaster Relief is Suffering
Under New DHS Bureaucracy
The Department of Homeland Security is spending billions
on domestic spying and counter terrorism – is disaster
relief getting sidelined? We look at the first major test
of the massive homeland security bureaucracy with Matthew
Brzezinski, author of “Fortress America.”
New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin estimated Tuesday that hundreds,
maybe thousands of people have died since Hurricane Katrina
hit the city. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is scrambling
to find temporary housing for tens of thousands of people
and to rescue people stranded on roofs and in the now-uninhabitable
Super Dome. We turn now to the politics behind FEMA's relief
efforts and ask the question - would Katrina have been so
devastating if disaster relief had not been incorporated into
the Department of Homeland Security?
FEMA was created in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter and President
Bill Clinton elevated the head of FEMA to a cabinet-level
position in 1992. But after September 11, 2001, President
Bush moved the agency under the umbrella of the newly created
Department of Homeland Security. While FEMA oversees both
disaster preparedness and relief, it may soon be reduced to
coordinating only post-disaster efforts. Critics say this
narrower mandate would limit the effectiveness of FEMA's work
and that operating within the Department of Homeland Security
consigns disaster relief to a lower priority than counter-terrorism
related activities.
- President Bush, speaking yesterday afternoon about the
strategy of the federal government in coordinating relief
efforts:
"The people in the affected regions expect the federal
government to work with the state government and local government
with an effective response. I have directed Secretary of
Homeland Security Mike Chertoff to chair a Cabinet-level
task force to coordinate all our assistance from Washington.
FEMA Director Mike Brown is in charge of all federal response
and recovery efforts in the field. I've instructed them
to work closely with state and local officials, as well
as with the private sector, to ensure that we're helping,
not hindering, recovery efforts. This recovery will take
a long time. This recovery will take years."
- Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security speaking
at a news conference Wednesday in Washington:
"Truckloads of water, ice, meals, medical supplies,
generators, tents, and tarpaulins. There are currently over
1700 trailer trucks, which have been mobilized to move these
supplies into position. The coast guard has worked heroically
for the last 48 hours rescuing or assisting well more than
1000 people who were in distress and held high and dry above
the flood waters."
Thousands remained stranded in New Orleans, in homes and
in hospitals with no running water or electricity. We turn
now to a look at the new infrastructure for disaster management
in the United States.
- Matthew Brzezinski, author of "Fortress America:
On the Frontlines of Homeland Security-An Inside Look at
the Coming Surveillance State." He is a contributing
writer for The New York Times Magazine and former foreign
correspondent at The Wall Street Journal.
"Katrina's Real Name is Global Warming"
As the Bush administration promotes regulations that allow
more pollution from power plants, we look at the increased
impact of human-induced global warming in the form of extreme
weather events such as Hurricane Katrina.
The Bush administration has drafted regulations that would
ease pollution controls on older, dirtier power plants and
could allow those that modernize to emit more pollution, rather
than less. The language could undercut dozens of pending state
and federal lawsuits aimed at forcing coal-fired plants to
cut back emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur dioxide
and nitrogen oxide. The draft rules were obtained by the Washington
Post from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Meanwhile, as the Gulf Coast struggles to cope the devastation
left behind by Hurricane Katrina, a number of analysts around
the country and the world are reflecting on the unusual severity
of the storm and are making a connection with global warming.
In Germany, Environmental Minister Jurgen Tritten sparked
a political firestorm this week when he penned an article
in a German newspaper saying "Greenhouse gases have to
be radically reduced worldwide. The US has, up until this
point, had its eyes closed to this emergency." He linked
Hurricane Katrina to global warming and America's refusal
to reduce emission.
In 2001, the Bush administration announced it would not ratify
the Kyoto Protocol that has been signed by 120 countries.
The global treaty went into effect earlier this year without
the support of the United States.
In an article in the Boston Globe Tuesday, journalist and
author Ross Gelbspan writes, "The hurricane that struck
Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National
Weather Service. Its real name is global warming." Gelbspan
goes on to write, QUOTE "Unfortunately, very few people
in America know the real name of Hurricane Katrina because
the coal and oil industries have spent millions of dollars
to keep the public in doubt about the issue."
- Ross Gelbspan, special projects editor of The Boston
Globe. He conceived, directed and edited a series of articles
that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984. He is author of "The
Heat is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth's Threatened
Climate" and "Boiling Point: How Politicians,
Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists are Fueling
the Climate Crisis -- and What We Can Do to Avert Disaster."
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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