[fgomes]

Apenas agora nos começamos a aperceber da gravidade da situação, parece que na cidade impera um completo caos, todos os serviçoes básicos simplesmente desapareceram! As autoridades e os cidadãos parecem ter sido completamente apanhados de surpresa perante a dimensão da catástrofe. Perante isto parece evidente que apenas as forças militares têm capacidade para enfrentar a situação.
E se acontecesse uma catástrofe destas dimensões em Portugal? Vendo o que se tem passado com os incêndios, é melhor nem pensar no assunto...

[komet]

Acho que existe alguma negligência quanto à organização dos salvamentos, mas pergunto-me até que ponto não será deliberado por se tratar de uma maioria de população, negra. Também receber helicópteros a tiro não ajuda...

[Dinivan]

Why the Levee Broke

By Will Bunch, Attytood. Posted September 1, 2005.

Washington knew exactly what needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans from disasters like Katrina. Yet federal funding for Louisiana flood control projects was diverted to pay for the war in Iraq.

Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters continued to rise in New Orleans on Wednesday. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming. ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

The 2004 hurricane season was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs. According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5:

The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else.

"We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach on Monday. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: "We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, "The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana's coast, only to be opposed by the White House. ... In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana's chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need."

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich. Now Bush has lost that gamble, big time.

The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home. Yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

[komet]

Não parece os USA... de certeza que Nova Orleães  não é um micro-país no meio de África? É que não vejo helicópteros a salvar gente, nem médicos nem enfermeiros, nem polícia, só exército. Vejo ruínas e pessoas a deambular com sacos... isto são os EUA? Onde quem devia estar a ser ajudado muitas vezes viola e mata (médicos, inocentes, quem lhes apareça à frente)... é isto a derradeira demonstração, de que não interessa onde país se vive, a educação que se tem, em casos extremos, somos todos a mesma m*rda.

PS: Por curiosidade oiçam o que tem a dizer o Mayor de New Orleans acerca de Bush.

[Luso]

Masques of Death
By George Neumayr
Published 9/2/2005 12:12:28 AM

New Orleans has one of the highest murder rates in the country. By mid-August of this year, 192 murders had been committed in New Orleans, "nearly 10 times the national average," reported the Associated Press. Gunfire is so common in New Orleans -- and criminals so fierce -- that when university researchers conducted an experiment last year in which they had cops fire 700 blank rounds in a neighborhood on a random afternoon "no one called to report the gunfire," reported AP.

New Orleans was ripe for collapse. Its dangerous geography, combined with a dangerous culture, made it susceptible to an unfolding catastrophe. Currents of chaos and lawlessness were running through the city long before this week, and they were bound to come to the surface under the pressure of natural disaster and explode in a scene of looting and mayhem.

Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.

Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.

Criminals dominate their neighborhoods to the point that people don't even call in crimes. The district attorney's office, tacitly admitting that the city's law-abiding citizens live in fear, has taken the "unusual" step of establishing a local witness protection program to encourage the reporting of crime, reports AP.

According to the New Orleans Police Foundation, most murderers get off -- only 1 in 4 are convicted -- and 42 percent of cases involving serious crimes since 2002 have been dropped by prosecutors.

Meanwhile, cops, when they can get away with it, have been living out of town. It is far too scary for them and their families. New Orleans Police officers are required to live in the city but many ignore this residency requirement, according to the Times-Picayune. The paper discovered that many top-ranking New Orleans cops lived in the suburbs and that most cops, both black and white, wanted the residency requirement rescinded.

For reasons of political correctness -- critics of law enforcement say lifting the residency requirement will mean more white cops eager to brutalize residents of the inner city and fewer black cops understanding of them -- the residency requirement remains, though cops breaking the rule told the Times-Picayune that it seriously hurts recruitment. It also -- this is particularly evident in Los Angeles where cops involved in the Ramparts scandal turned out to be ex-criminals -- distorts recruitment.

If the New Orleans Police Department has appeared feeble during the chaos -- and in some cases complicit in it -- policies like the residency requirement explain the breakdown. (Perhaps another factor that has rendered the NOPD feckless in the face of a rising murder rate is the criticism of its handling of a minority Mardi Gras.) Americans who have seen cops join in the looting ask: Why are police officers behaving like criminals? Well, because PC police departments like the NOPD hire them. Aggressive, let's-just-meet-the-quota-style affirmative action has become the door through which criminals enter the police academy.

More than the physical foundations of New Orleans will need to be rebuilt over the next few years. Its politically correct culture in which pathologies are allowed to fester in the name of "progress" forms much of the debris that must be cleared away if civilization is to return to New Orleans. A city which boasts as one of its businesses memorial "death t-shirts" -- clothing made popular by the frequency of gangland slayings in New Orleans that say things like, "Born a Pimp, Died a Playa" -- was headed for collapse even without a hurricane, and had become, as the exodus of cops illustrates, unlivable.

Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued into silence whenever they tell the truth about this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But they are the ones who must lead the city now, and the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing to help the black underclass should step aside. Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational collapse they have long tried to conceal.


George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

[Miguel]

França e Alemanha oferecerem ajuda aos EUA....

BUSH recusou essa ajuda

a França tem unidades operacionais nas antilhas Guadelupe e Martinique e Guyana, estão preparadas para actuar em zonas de calamidades etc..

enfim, como diz o Bush eles sao uma grande nação...

o Orgulho é portanto um Pecado Mortal!!! para um grande religioso como o Bush até fica mal.

[Jorge Pereira]

Portugal cede reservas de petróleo aos EUA

O Governo português anunciou esta sexta-feira que Portugal vai apoiar os Estados Unidos, visando minimizar as consequências do furacão Katrina. A primeira medida anunciada é a cedência de 2% das reservas nacionais de petróleo.

Num comunicado emitido pelo Ministério da Economia e da Inovação, o Executivo explica que, «face às consequências da passagem do furacão Katrina pelo Golfo do México, os Estados Unidos solicitaram, através da Agência Internacional de Energia, o apoio dos vários membros daquela instituição», da qual Portugal faz parte.
Desta forma, o nosso país «vai contribuir para esse esforço de solidariedade com 2% das suas reservas de produtos de petróleo», através de crude armazenado no norte da Alemanha.

O Governo garante que esta medida não terá impacto directo nos stocks de petróleo bruto existentes em Portugal.

«os nossos stocks manter-se-ão bastante acima dos níveis obrigatórios, não havendo, por isso, qualquer impacto negativo no fornecimento de combustíveis em Portugal», sublinha o Governo no documento.

[fgomes]

Como se não bastassem todos os problemas que Nova Orleans enfrenta, agora tem mais outro que são os fogos, com a agravante dos carros de bombeiros não poderem deslocar-se devido às inundações.
Entretanto começaram a chegar camiões com ajuda à cidade, mais parecendo que estão a "navegar".
Segundo a secretária de estado norte americana, os EUA não recusaram a ajuda de ninguém.
Se uma catástrofe destas dimensões acontecesse em Portugal como seria?

[Luso]

Como seria?
Pedinchice. Morte. Miséria

E o terramoto de Lisboa estará atrasado, segundo as previsões dos especialistas.

[komet]

Ao menos estes coitados já têm carros suficientes para abrir um stand.  

[NVF]

Como seria?
Pedinchice. Morte. Miséria

E o terramoto de Lisboa estará atrasado, segundo as previsões dos especialistas.

Depois do que se passou aqui em NO, pior nao nos haviamos de portar. Nao imaginam a idignacao destes tipos. Num periodo de 4 anos tiveram dois grandes acontecimentos catastroficos e constatam, mais uma vez, que a reaccao do governo peca por falha na previsao, tardia e ineficacia no socorro.

Quanto ao sismo em Lisboa, fala-se num periodo de retorno de cerca de 200 anos. Mas antencao, os 'especialistas' que normalmente falam na TV esquecem-se de mencionar que os grandes sismos que afectam a regiao de Lisboa, raramente tem origem nas mesmas falhas. Alem disso, no seculo passado, tivemos 2 sismos de magnitude consideravel: 1909 no Vale do Tejo, com magnitude entre 6 e 6, 7 Ritcher; e 1969 no Banco de Gorringe, a SW do Cabo de S. Vicente, com magnitude de 8 Ritcher.

[komet]

Não se preocupem que virá... Este país ainda terá que passar mais essa provação...  

[Miguel]

Este desastre mostra a verdeadeira visagem dos EUA

uma minoria rica que pode evacuar-se com seus proprios meios, e a maioria pobre que o estado abandona....

o melhor sistema economico é o Europeu :roll:

[Miguel]

Nos paises europeus existe sempre uma rede de minimos de protecção social para os mais desfavorecidos, coisa que do outro lado do atlantico nada existe

apenas o Dollar e rei

alias nos EUA e melhor ser Rico e Culpado ke Pobre e inocente

[dremanu]

nos paises europeus existe sempre uma rede de minimos de proteção social para os mais desfavorizados, coisa que do outro lado do atlantico nada existe

apenas o Dollar e rei

alias nos EUA e melhor ser Rico e Culpado ke Pobre e inocente

Miguel:

Isso não é verdade. A tua opinião deve vir diretamente da propaganda anti-Americana que tanto fazem por aí em França, porque os Americanos com certeza também têm um sistema social.

Existe na USA:

- Welfare. Não sei como se diz em Português, mas basicamente é dinheiro que tu podes receber do estado caso não tenhas nenhuma fonte de rendimento, ou quando se esgotou o teu subsídio de desemprego
- Medicaid. O sistema de saúde deles é pago diretamente pelo consumidor, mas se a pessoa não tiver dinheiro pode receber tratamento debaixo deste plano. (Eu não concordo com este sistema, mas existe)
- Unemployment benefits. Subsídio de desemprego, tal qual como é na Europa.
- Vacation pay. Subsídio de férias, que varia dependente de empresa para empresa. Algumas empresas pagam-te o salário normal mais um bónus para ir de férias, enquanto outras só pagam uma percentagem do total da salário horário/mensal que é descontado todos os meses, e outras não pagam nada.

A diferença entre o que os Americanos e os Europeus rebecem está na quantidade de benefícios que podes usufruir, e na duração do periodo durante o qual os recebes.

O tal capitalismo selvagem da América produz trabalho e mais trabalho, porque quem quer trabalhar na USA, na maioria dos casos, consegue encontrar trabalho. O mercado é muito mais flexível e dinámico. O sistema capitalista Americano é feito para beneficiar quem é empreendedor e quer trabalhar por conta própria, ou simplesmente para quem quer trabalhar independentemente do trabalho que for.

Mas para o trabalhador comum também existem muitas oportunidades, mas a pessoa tem que tomar mais responsabilidade pelos assuntos financeiros que afectam a sua vida individual. Não é como na Europa que toda a gente fica à espera que o governo decida por eles o dinheiro que devem receber. É uma generalização o que estou a dizer, mas é mais ou menos isto.