June 2006 Archives

Today we closed on the sale of our house. The Walker-Stiles house was our home for six years, and a few years back we were able to get it declared a City of Austin historic landmark. But now a new family moves in.

We haven't lived in it since February, and we've got big adventures waiting for us in our new home in New Orleans, so I'm not as broken up about it as I thought I'd be, although I got a little choked up doing a last pass through last night making sure we hadn't left anything behind.

Liam was a pre-schooler and Cassidy was just starting first grade when we moved here. We've had many crawfish boils in the back yard. We've lost many a baseball down the storm drain on the corner. In the early summer, we could catch enough fireflies in the front yard that you could make a lantern jar like they do in Disney cartoons. We could skate on the pine floors in our socks. Liam once did a spectacular face plant in the dirt from the swing in the front yard that made lots of blood, but he came through it OK. When you'd yell up to call the kids for dinner, you could hear the thump-thump-thump of running down the stairs. And every once in a while you'd catch the kids out on the back porch roof where they'd climbed out from Cassidy's bedroom. We had a pair of cardinals make a nest in the corner bush every year. We had tons of pecan trees, but the squirrels always got all the pecans. And having pecan trees and live oaks meant it was raking season 9 months out of the year.

It was a great old house.

Life goes on.

The building above is the old Travis House apartment building. Decades ago it was the Austin YWCA. A few years back I think it was some kind of halfway house. Now it's abandoned, condemned, all windows boarded up. If you wander around inside, you'll find it full of debris, broken glass, standing water, and a completely destroyed industrial kitchen.

No power, thus no AC. No light, not even from the windows, since they're boarded up.

Nowadays it's owned by the Austin Fire Department, which made it an ideal place for us to do an urban search and rescue exercise on Saturday. With full gear, fake victims inside, a complete simulation.

The first exercise, a tour organized and guided by the instructors, I got assigned to a fire team, which basically meant I would go in first, carrying an 18 pound fire extinguisher with one hand and a flashlight in the other, looking for smoldering hotspots to put them out before the search teams could come through looking for victims and hazards. After we got our briefing, I took off my overloaded 24-hour pack and set it on the ground and the instructor laughed and said "Oh no...you'll need that pack to survive".

So we did a room-to-room search, humping fire extinguisher, full pack, dust mask, googles, helmet with headlamp, and flashlight. Three teams searched three floors. By the time we came out, we looked like we'd taken a shower in our clothes, completely drenched in sweat.

The second exercise, the instructors basically picked a student at random and said "You're the incident commander...there's been a tornado and victims are trapped inside. You need to search the three basement levels. Organize and make it happen." And then they stood back and watched. And timed us.

Basement levels? Ulp.

I've never done any training that felt so real. I got assigned to a search team to search the second underground level, and as soon as we headed down the basement stairs, we enountered the fog machine that they'd added to make it interesting.

Pitch black, in fog, in an industrial basement with no map, with only the "left hand rule" or "right hand rule" to keep you on course without getting lost in the dark. Almost immediately my partner and I found a baby in a broken elevator. And this is where you discover how training and reality can get all tangled up in your head when you're disoriented and stressed and exhausted. We had been told that search teams do not pull out non-ambulatory victims, they just note where they are and report back later so that a rescue team can go in. But it was a baby. And that seemed weird. We weren't sure what to do. But we noted her, started to move on, and the instructor had to break character to tell us, "If it's a baby or small child, you always pull them out immediately." Common sense, right? Well, a lot of things that are common sense in a dark smokey basement are actually dangerous, and we had fallen back on our training, but our training was incomplete.

So we go back, we grab the baby, we run back upstairs and out of the building to take the infant to triage, and the first thing the medic says is "Is she breathing?"

Fuck. We hadn't even checked. The panic of "get the baby out" made us forget all the basic rules of first aid. We hadn't checked airways, we hadn't checked for signs of injury, we hadn't done anything but grab the baby and run for it. If it had been a real baby, we might have killed it.

We blathered some lame excuse about "unresponsive" and handed it off and headed back in.

More screwups followed later. Coming out after a search and reporting an unconscious victim under debris, but in our quest to get water while we debriefed, we forgot to report the victim to the one person who was responsible for sending a rescue team in. So the victim sat under debris for an extra 20 minutes until the mistake was discovered.

Don't get me wrong. All in all we did a fantastic job. My fellow trainees were a great assortment of professionals and volunteers, all of whom took their training very seriously. But it made me think of a recent discussion over at Mr. Clio's bemoaning the fact that only trained personnel are being allowed to search for bodies in New Orleans. The thing is, there is a lot to know to be able to do this stuff in a safe and effective manner, and vigilante rescue heroes can often make a bad situation worse.

That being said, the training for Urban Search and Rescue is not especially time consuming, and although it requires a reasonable amount of physical fitness, it's not something that needs a Navy SEAL attitude or physique. I'm certainly not triathlete material.

I chatted with the instructor Saturday about my upcoming move to New Orleans, and bemoaning the fact that there doesn't seem to be any sort of CERT organization there or much in the way of volunteer SAR teams, and he strongly encouraged me that with a little effort and research and recruiting, I could start one myself. We would need to make some connections with local authorities, but we could form a private, volunteer, non-government-affiliated 501(c)3 Search and Rescue outfit with a minimum of five people willing to do the training. We then charter ourselves through the organization that ran the Saturday training, and we become an official search and rescue resource which can be activated during emergencies.

Those of you bemoaning the fact that "only trained professionals need apply", and those of you looking for volunteer opportunities for the next storm, here's an opportunity to become one of those trained professionals on a part time volunteer basis.

When I get to town, I'm going to look into doing this. I'll be looking for volunteers to help. Folks with military, police, fire, or EMS background are especially valuable, but it's not required. Myself, I'm just a regular shmoe who went through some training.

This would be a grass roots effort. Based locally, self-funded, nationally chartered, and hopefully with at least some sort of official buy-in from a local authority. I might hit up Stacy Head with the initial idea since she seems to be the one who gets things done in that town.

Who's with me?

Kate's thoughtful response to my initial gut reaction about kos and atrios pushing a Louisiana boycott got me thinking a little bit more about why the whole thing pisses me off so much.

The thing is, their whole mantra revolves around the "50 State Strategy". Don't concede any red states. Make the GOP fight for every district, every city, every county. Every single vote. States that have passed anti-gay legislation. States that are cracking down on immigration. States that are trying to repeal the Voting Rights Act. States that have been solidly Red for a generation. None are off-limits, none are a lost cause. Every state a battleground.

Except, it seems, for Louisiana. One bill signed into law is enough for kos and atrios to wash their hands of the whole state. Even though New Orleans, the crown jewel of American culture, has suffered a near death blow and needs every shred of help it can get. Even though Louisiana provides an ideal battleground because a vast portion of its electorate, both Republican and Democrat, has been enraged by the Bush administration. Even though New Orleans has been a solid Democratic stronghold in the south, much like Austin.

They'd rather cut and run. They'll toss out the "50 State Strategy" in favor of a "49 State plus one boycott" strategy, all to make a futile symbolic gesture against a law that is not even enforceable.

I can only imagine that they don't give a fuck about New Orleans or the victims of the humanitarian disaster wrought by the incompetence of the federal government. They got their photo ops making Bush look bad. They got their "GOP incompetence" talking point. They got what they needed out of New Orleans, and so they don't really actually need us or our problems any more. They can wash their hands of us, they can write us off as too Republican, too corrupt, too backwards to be worth fighting for.

And in doing so, the grand experiment that is the 50 State Strategy starts to look like a sham.

They do book tours, they pontificate from their lofty position, while we're still finding bodies.

We are not OK, and we are all alone.

Sinn Fein.

Other bloggers have talked about this, but tonight I finally got to see this most excellent special on the National Geographic channel, "Drowning New Orleans". It covers the flooding of New Orleans hour by hour, demonstrating how it was a man-made engineering disaster as opposed to a natural disaster.

Especially fascinating is the footage taken by firefighters showing the beginning of the 17th Street Canal breach early Monday morning.

It's on again tonight on the west coast at 7pm PDT, and then again next Wednesday. Catch it if you can, it's highly recommended.

In one swift move, kos and atrios alienate the entire liberal blogosphere of New Orleans. Boycotting is so much easier than staying and fighting, I guess.

Fuckers.

If the progressive wing of the Democratic party has abandoned New Orleans, then we really are all alone. And we've got plenty enough work to do down here that Connecticut and California and Montana and Virginia and those other "battleground" states can go fuck themselves.

Have fun with your Liebermans and your Bilbrays and your Webbs and your who-the-fuck-evers. I no longer give a shit about what goes on in that part of the world. I don't want to give you money any more, I don't want to read about you any more, and I sure as fuck don't want to see your sorry carbetbagger asses down here pimping for beads any more.

Oh, and we might keep your oil.

Sinn Fein, fuckers.

I was googling Pascal's Manale since it's going to be our local joint when we move, just a couple of blocks away from the house. I fat-fingered the name, though, and typed "pascales manale", and of course the first link I find is the one that has pictures of their mold remediation last November.

For comparison, this is what they're supposed to look like.

Word is they're now open. And I'm coming for you, my little Creole Italian darling. It will be soon.

Am I the only one who checks the NOAA page several times a day and tries to decipher the meteorological incantations?

The slightest bump makes me nervous.

CARIBBEAN SEA... THE MAIN WEATHER INTEREST IN THIS AREA IS A 1006 MB LOW IN THE NW CARIBBEAN CENTERED NEAR 17N86W. THIS LOW SITS ON A SLOW MOVING SFC TROUGH WHICH EXTENDS FROM W CUBA TO HONDURAS. SCATTERED MODERATE CONVECTION IS LOCATED FROM 15N-21N BETWEEN 78W-87W. SHOWERS AND TSTMS HAVE BEEN IN THIS REGION FOR MUCH OF THE WEEK...BUT TODAY THERE IS MORE ORGANIZATION TO THE ACTIVITY. THIS BROAD/ELONGATED AREA OF LOW PRES IS SHOWING SIGNS OF DEVELOPING WITH BUOY OBS REPORTING 15-20 KT WINDS AROUND THE LOW CENTER. IN ADDITION...COMPUTER MODELS HAVE BECOME IN FAIR AGREEMENT SLOWLY STRENGTHENING THIS SYSTEM OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS AS IT MIGRATES NWARD TOWARDS THE GULF OF MEXICO.

Another one of those signs that not only are parts of New Orleans society reverting to the wild west days, but much of the urban geography is turning back into wilderness for all intents and purposes.

Case in point: We now fight house fires as if they were forest fires. With helicopters dropping buckets of water on them.

Two thirds of New Orleans fire stations were destroyed in the flood. More than half of the city's water supply is lost every day due to as-yet undiscovered leaks as underground pipes broken in the storm spew water underground, causing massive sinkholes all over the city. So in many neighborhoods, the water pressure to fight fires simply isn't there.

And the pace of fires is rapidly outstripping the crime rate as the biggest fear of residents. Eight major structure fires in the past two days.

Hug a firefighter today. They're hot, they're exhausted, many of them are homeless, they're underpaid as fuck ($32,000 a year starting salary). They've suffered like the NYFD did, but nine months later they still haven't been allowed to clock out and go home.

Billy Preston, 59, dead of kidney failure.

I remember a little DJ gig I had at the Rat & the Raven in Noe Valley in the late 80's. The retro-70's funk thing was starting to come back with P-Funk and James Brown and all the De La Soul samples and stuff, but I swear I was the first person to get tattooed S.F. biker chicks reacquainted with shaking their butts to the Billy Preston records I'd recently found in the dollar bin.

"Will it go round in circles?
Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?"

Too much soul has left the building too fast.

I ran across searingblue's Flickr set of photos he took of the Uptown flooding in the first week of the storm, before the waters had receded. They're the only photos I've seen of that neighborhood with water still in it, and it's eerie, since I know that area better than most other parts of the city.

The flickr set is here.

This picture here shows damage comparable to what occurred where we'll be living in July. Similar flood heights, similar houses.

So I don't know shit about boats. Can I get me a pirogue with a tiny little outboard motor for cheap?

Not sure how much play this gets in the national media, but just in case you missed it, and in case you haven't heard the New Orleans blogging community ranting about this for months, the Army Corps of Engineers has finally admitted that the flood of New Orleans was not a natural disaster, it was an engineering disaster.

The hurricane protection system that supposedly shielded 1.3 million New Orleans area residents before Hurricane Katrina was “a system in name only,” incomplete and inconsistent in its levels of safety, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-sponsored panel concluded Thursday.

Nearing the end of an eight-month study, the corps’ Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force concluded that each of the many levee, floodwall and pumping failures that occurred during Katrina has its roots in the inadequate process that the United States uses to address flood control projects through the corps.

This is the greatest engineering disaster in the history of the United States. It was not a natural disaster. It didn't have to happen. The Federal government has mandated for almost a century that it has responsibility for flood control, and it fell down on the job.

This should be huge news where you are. I don't know why it isn't.

Imagine if the World Trade Center just collapsed one day of its own accord, in a heavy wind. Imagine if all the bridges of the Bay Area just one day fell into the bay, without an earthquake. Just failed under conditions that they were designed to handle.

That's what happened in New Orleans.

The federal government made promises, and failed, and people died, and people lost their homes and their businesses. And the federal government needs to make them whole again. 100% reparations. Full accountability.

It's called leadership, you GOP bitches, and it's about time you grew some.

So, Ray, things getting back to normal in New Orleans?

Here's a panoramic view of one middle-class neighborhood in Lakeview.

Taken nine months after the storm hit. Nine months.

Imagine 60 or 70 percent of your hometown looking like that. Like, say, San Francisco or L.A. or Seattle nine months after an earthquake. Miami or Houston or DC or Baltimore or New York nine months after a major hurricane. Chicago or Dallas nine months after a terrorist attack.

Homeland Security? Corps of Engineers? FEMA? The United States can kiss my ass. I'm moving home and I'm seceding. On holidays I will fly a Fleur de Lis flag.

Take your homeland security and your Congress and your White House and your flag bumper stickers and those little fishies on your SUV and shove them right up your fat, lazy American ass.

Yankees raus! Sinn Fein, motherfuckers. Orleans for the Orleanians.