TELECOM Digest     Mon, 5 Sep 2005 02:01:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 404

Inside This Issue:                            Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Ex-Officials Say Weakened FEMA Botched Rescue  (Marcus Didius Falco)
    Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top (Washington Post) (Marcus Didius Falco)
    New Orleans Begins Counting its Dead (Alan Sayre)
    Washington Ignored Warnings; Failed to Fund Levee Repairs (Richard Serrano)
    New Orleans Times-Picayune Editorial on the Event (Staff Writers)
    Mobile Phones: Half Want the Extras, Half Don't (Marcus Didius Falco)

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----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:29:23 -0400
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Ex-Officials Say Weakened FEMA Botched Rescus


Please reply on list. This Email address has become such a spam trap
(so many viruses), that I check it very rarely.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509030220sep03,1,5525666 .story?ctrack=1&cset=true
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0509030220sep03,1,5947828


Ex-officials say weakened FEMA botched response

By Frank James and Andrew Martin
Washington Bureau

September 3, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Government disaster officials had an action plan if a
major hurricane hit New Orleans. They simply didn't execute it when
Hurricane Katrina struck.

Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal
officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the
regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a
very good exercise."

More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the table-top
scenario as 120 m.p.h. winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread
flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.

"It was very much an eye-opener," said Castleman, a Republican
appointee of President Bush who left FEMA in December for the private
sector. "A number of things were identified that we had to deal with,
not all of them were solved."

Still, Castleman found it hard to square the lessons he and others
learned from the exercise with the frustratingly slow response to the
disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Katrina. From the Louisiana
Superdome in New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama communities
along the Gulf Coast, hurricane survivors have decried the lack of
water, food and security and the slowness of the federal relief
efforts.

"It's hard for everyone to understand why buttons weren't pushed
earlier on," Castleman said of the federal response.

As the first National Guard truck caravans of water and food arrived
in New Orleans on Friday, former FEMA officials and other disaster
experts were at a loss to explain why the federal government's lead
agency for responding to major emergencies had failed to meet the
urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the most dire of
circumstances in a more timely fashion.

But many suspected that FEMA's apparent problems in getting
life-sustaining supplies to survivors and buses to evacuate them from
New Orleans -- delays even Bush called "not acceptable" -- stemmed
partly from changes at the agency during the Bush years. Experts have
long warned that the moves would weaken the agency's ability to
effectively respond to natural disasters.

Less clout, experience

FEMA's chief has been demoted from a near-Cabinet-level position;
political appointees with little, if any, emergency-management
experience have been placed in senior FEMA positions; and the small,
2,500-person agency was dropped into the midst of the 180,000-employee
Homeland Security Department, which is more oriented to combating
terrorism than natural disasters. All that has led to a brain drain as
experienced but demoralized employees have left the agency, former and
current FEMA staff members say.

The result is that an agency that got high marks during much of the
1990's for its effectiveness is being harshly criticized for seemingly
mismanaging the response to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The growing anger and frustration at FEMA's efforts sparked the
Republican-controlled Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee to announce Friday that it has scheduled a hearing
for Wednesday to try to uncover what went wrong.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) called on Bush to immediately appoint
a Cabinet-level official to direct the national response.

"There was a time when FEMA understood that the correct approach to a
crisis was to deploy to the affected area as many resources as
possible as fast as possible," Landrieu said. "Unfortunately, that no
longer seems to be their approach."

John Copenhaver, a former FEMA regional director during the Clinton
administration who led the response to Hurricane Floyd in 1999, said
he was bewildered by the agency's slow response this time.

It had been standard practice for FEMA to position supplies ahead of
time, and the agency did preposition drinking water and tarps to cover
damaged roofs near where they would be needed. In addition, FEMA has
coordinated its plans with state and local officials and let the
Defense Department know beforehand what type of military assistance
would be needed.

"I'm a little confused as to why it took so long to get the military
presence running convoys into downtown New Orleans," Copenhaver said.

And there isn't an experienced disaster-response expert at the top of
the agency as there was when James Lee Witt ran it during the
1990s. Before Michael Brown, the current head, joined the agency as
its legal counsel, he was with the International Arabian Horse
Association.

That loss of experienced personnel might explain in part why FEMA was
not able to secure buses sooner for the evacuation of New Orleans, a
step anticipated by the hurricane disaster simulation last year.

Peter Pantuso, president of the American Bus Association, said, "I
have a hard time believing there is any game plan in place when it
comes to coordinating or pulling together this volume of business,"
referring to FEMA's effort to obtain hundreds of buses to move tens of
thousands of evacuees from New Orleans. "And what happens in two or
three weeks down the road when all of these people are moved again?"

When FEMA became part of the Homeland Security Department, it was
stripped of some functions, such as some of its ability to make
preparedness grants to states, former officials said. Those functions
were placed elsewhere in the larger agency.

FEMA capability `marginalized'.

"After Sept. 11 they got so focused on terrorism they effectively
marginalized the capability of FEMA," said George Haddow, a former
FEMA official during the Clinton administration. "It's no surprise
that they're not capable of managing the federal government's response
to this kind of disaster."

Pleasant Mann, former head of the union for FEMA employees who has
been with the agency since 1988, said a change made by agency
higher-ups last year added a bureaucratic layer that likely delayed
FEMA's response to Katrina.

Before the change, a FEMA employee at the site of a disaster could
request that an experienced employee he knew had the right skills be
dispatched to help him. But now that requested worker is first made to
travel to a location hundreds of miles from the disaster site to be
"processed," placed in a pool from which he is dispatched, sometimes
to a place different from where he thought he was headed.

Pleasant said he knew of a case in which a worker from Washington
state was made to travel first to Orlando before he could go to
Louisiana, losing at least a day. What's more, that worker was told he
might be sent to Alabama, not Louisiana, after all.

fjames@tribune.com
ajmartin@tribune.com

Copyright 2005, Chicago Tribune

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
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------------------------------

Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:07:34 -0400
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top (Washington Post)


This story doesn't say much about telecommunications issues. However,
there was a complete collapse of the telecommunications infrastructure
on the Gulf coast. Landline service is gone. Cellular service was very
spotty.  Most towers were down, and backup power (battery and
generator) at those towers that had it lasted about 14 hours.

Moreover, scattered reports seem to indicate that there were problems
with police and fire communications. Again, this may have been because
of problems with towers or backup power: I have not, as yet, seen or
heard any analysis.

I have even heard there were problems with satellite phones. I suppose the
problem would have been overloading of circuits on the satellites that are
in range at any time. I don't know whether the problem was only with
Inmarsat (which is used by news organizations because it has the bandwidth
for television), or whether it also included Iridium and Globalstar.
(Thuraya does not cover the western hemisphere.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301653.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301653_pf.html

washingtonpost.com

Storm Exposed Disarray at the Top

By Susan B. Glasser and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 4, 2005; A01

The killer hurricane and flood that devastated the Gulf Coast last
week exposed fatal weaknesses in a federal disaster response system
retooled after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to handle
just such a cataclysmic event.

Despite four years and tens of billions of dollars spent preparing for
the worst, the federal government was not ready when it came at
daybreak on Monday, according to interviews with more than a dozen
current and former senior officials and outside experts.

Among the flaws they cited: Failure to take the storm seriously before
it hit and trigger the government's highest level of
response. Rebuffed offers of aid from the military, states and
cities. An unfinished new plan meant to guide disaster response. And a
slow bureaucracy that waited until late Tuesday to declare the
catastrophe "an incident of national significance," the new federal
term meant to set off the broadest possible relief effort.

Born out of the confused and uncertain response to 9/11, the massive
new Department of Homeland Security was charged with being ready the
next time, whether the disaster was wrought by nature or
terrorists. The department commanded huge resources as it prepared for
deadly scenarios from an airborne anthrax attack to a biological
attack with plague to a chlorine-tank explosion.

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said yesterday that
his department had failed to find an adequate model for addressing the
"ultra-catastrophe" that resulted when Hurricane Katrina's floodwater
breached New Orleans's levees and drowned the city, "as if an atomic
bomb had been dropped."

If Hurricane Katrina represented a real-life rehearsal of sorts, the
response suggested to many that the nation is not ready to handle a
terrorist attack of similar dimensions. "This is what the department
was supposed to be all about," said Clark Kent Ervin, DHS's former
inspector general. "Instead, it obviously raises very serious,
troubling questions about whether the government would be prepared if
this were a terrorist attack. It's a devastating indictment of this
department's performance four years after 9/11."

"We've had our first test, and we've failed miserably," said former
representative Timothy J. Roemer (D-Ind.), a member of the commission
that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. "We have spent billions of
dollars in revenues to try to make our country safe, and we have not
made nearly enough progress." With Katrina, he noted that "we had some
time to prepare.  When it's a nuclear, chemical or biological attack,"
there will be no warning.

Indeed, the warnings about New Orleans's vulnerability to
post-hurricane flooding repeatedly circulated at the upper levels of
the new bureaucracy, which had absorbed the old lead agency for
disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, among its two
dozen fiefdoms. "Beyond terrorism, this was the one event I was most
concerned with always," said Joe M. Allbaugh, the former Bush campaign
manager who served as his first FEMA head.

But several current and former senior officials charged that those
worries were never accorded top priority -- either by FEMA's
management or their superiors in DHS. Even when officials held a
practice run, as they did in an exercise dubbed "Hurricane Pam" last
year, they did not test for the worst-case scenario, rehearsing only
what they would do if a Category 3 storm hit New Orleans, not the
Category 4 power of Katrina. And after Pam, the planned follow-up
study was never completed, according to a FEMA=20 official involved.

"The whole department was stood up, it was started because of 9/11 and
that's the bottom line," said C. Suzanne Mencer, a former senior
homeland security official whose office took on some of the
preparedness functions that had once been FEMA's. "We didn't have an
appropriate response to 9/11, and that is why it was stood up and
where the funding has been directed.  The message was ... we need to
be better prepared against terrorism."

The roots of last week's failures will be examined for weeks and
months to come, but early assessments point to a troubled Department
of Homeland Security that is still in the midst of a bureaucratic
transition, a "work in progress," as Mencer put it. Some current and
former officials argued that as it worked to focus on counterterrorism,
the department has diminished the government's ability to respond in a
nuts-and-bolts way to disasters in general, and failed to focus enough
on threats posed by hurricanes and other natural disasters in
particular. From an independent Cabinet-level agency, FEMA has become
an underfunded, isolated piece of the vast DHS, yet it is still
charged with leading the government's response to disaster.

"It's such an irony I hate to say it, but we have less capability
today than we did on September 11," said a veteran FEMA official
involved in the hurricane response. "We are so much less than what we
were in 2000," added another senior FEMA official. "We've lost a lot
of what we were able to do then."

The DHS experiment is so far-flung that the department's leadership
has focused much of its attention simply on the massive complications
that resulted from creating one entity out of agencies as varied as
the U.S.  Coast Guard, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and
the Transportation Security Administration. When Chertoff took office
earlier this year, he made his top priority an entirely new
bureaucratic reorganization less than two years after the department's
creation, dubbed the "second-stage review." The review, still pending,
recommends taking away a key remaining function, preparedness
planning, from FEMA and giving it to "a strengthened department
preparedness directorate."

The procedures for what to do when the inevitable disaster hit were
also subjected to a bureaucratic overhaul, still unfinished, by the
department.  Indeed, just last Tuesday, as New Orleans was drowning
and DHS officials were still hours away from invoking the department's
highest crisis status for the catastrophe, some department contractors
found an important e-mail in their inboxes.

Attached were two documents -- one more than 400 pages long -- that
spelled out in numbing, acronym-filled detail the planned "national
preparedness goal." The checklist, called a Universal Task List,
appeared to cover every eventuality in a disaster, from the need to
handle evacuations to speedy urban search and rescue to circulating
"prompt, accurate and useful" emergency information. Even animal
health and "fatality management" were= covered.

But the documents were not a menu for action in the devastated Gulf
Coast.  They were drafts, not slated for approval and release until
October, more than four years after 9/11.

"Basically, this is the rules of engagement for national emergency
events, whether natural or manmade. It covers every element of what
you would have expected to already have been in place," said the
contractor who provided the e-mail to The Washington Post on the
condition of anonymity because he feared jeopardizing his firm's
work. "This is the federal government template to engage, and this is
being discussed in draft form."  

FEMA Lost in the Shuffle.

Until 1979, the federal government had no one agency responsible for
dealing with disaster.

But that year, President Jimmy Carter created FEMA out of a patchwork
of smaller agencies. Born at the tail end of the Cold War, FEMA had a
mission largely defined as nuclear fallout shelters and other civil
defense measures, though in reality it dealt with "hurricane after
hurricane," as Jane Bullock, a 22-year agency veteran who was FEMA
chief of staff in President Bill Clinton's administration, noted.

After Hurricane Hugo hit in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992, federal
response was panned, and FEMA was due for an overhaul. It got it in
1993, when Clinton brought in James Lee Witt, a veteran emergency
manager and political ally, to take over, granted the agency
Cabinet-level status and gave it a highly visible role it had not
previously had. Its response to crises such as the 1995 Oklahoma City
bombing received high marks, though some Republicans complained that
it was used as a pot of money doled out to bolster Clinton's political
standing.

But after 9/11, FEMA lost out in the massive bureaucratic shuffle.

Not only did its Cabinet status disappear, but it became one of 22
government agencies to be consolidated into Homeland Security. For a
time, recalled Ervin, even its name was slated to vanish and become
simply the directorate of emergency preparedness and response until
then-DHS Secretary Tom Ridge relented.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers from hurricane-prone states fought a
rear-guard action against FEMA's absorption. "What we were afraid of,
and what is coming to pass, is that FEMA has basically been destroyed
as a coherent, fast-on-its-feet, independent agency," said Rep. David
E. Price (D-N.C.).  In creating DHS, "people were thinking about the
possibility of terrorism," said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the
Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. "They
weren't thinking about the reality of a hurricane."

Hurricanes were not totally absent from the calculations about the new
department, according to several former Bush administration
officials. Bush tapped his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., to
supervise DHS's creation; a decade earlier, Card had been personally
deputized by Bush's father to go to Florida and take charge of the
much-criticized response to Hurricane Andrew.

"We definitely did worry about it," recalled Richard A. Falkenrath,
who served as a White House homeland security adviser at the time DHS
was being formed. "We knew we should do no harm to the disaster
management side. The leadership of the White House knows the political
significance of disasters."

 From the day it came into existence on March 1, 2003, the department
of 180,000 employees and a nearly $40 billion annual budget was tasked
by a presidential directive with developing a comprehensive new plan
for disasters. The National Response Plan was supposed to supersede
the confusing overlay of federal, state and local disaster plans, and
to designate a "principal officer in the event of an incident of
national significance." An accompanying new National Incident
Management System would integrate all the cascades of information.

"The problem was, who was in charge on 9/11? Who the hell knew? They
kept asking and asking. You needed some clarity," Falkenrath
recalled. "It was supposed to pull it all together. . . . But FEMA was
grousing about that; they thought it was taking things away from
them."

Focus on Terrorism

In creating the department, President Bush made one of its central
missions "all-hazards preparedness," operating on the philosophy -- as
the government has for at least the past two decades -- that most
disaster preparation is the same, whether the crisis is natural or
manmade.

Yet DHS in reality emphasized terrorism at the expense of other
threats, said several current and former senior department officials
and experts who have closely monitored its creation, cutting funding
for natural disaster programs and downgrading the responsibilities and
capabilities of the previously well-regarded FEMA. In theory, spending
resources on response to terrorism should result in improved response
to any disaster, but FEMA's supporters argue that the money was being
spent outside the framework of the agency actually equipped to
respond.

"The federal system that was perfected in the '90s has been
deconstructed," said Bullock. Citing a study that found that the
United States now spends $180 million a year to fend off natural
hazards vs. $20 billion annually against terrorism, Bullock said,
"FEMA has been marginalized. ... There is one focus and the focus is
on terrorism."

The White House's Homeland Security Council developed 15 scenarios for
the department to concern itself about -- everything from a terrorist
dirty-bomb attack to a Baghdad-style improvised explosive device. Only
three were not terrorism scenarios: a pandemic flu, a major earthquake
and a major hurricane.

By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to
DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on
terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July
report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security
preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6
billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the
budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for
the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down
to $444 million from $664 million.

New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster
focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the
post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a
lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh
brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. 
"Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a
pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was
being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because
we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."

"I'm guilty of saying, 'you don't get it,' " Allbaugh said. 
"Absolutely."  The former FEMA chief said he had encountered
bureaucratic resistance to thinking about a "monumental" disaster,
such as Katrina or 9/11, rather than the more standard diet of
"tornadoes and rising waters."

But experts in emergency response inside and outside the government
sounded warnings about the changes at FEMA. Peacock said FEMA's
traditional emphasis on emergency response "all went up in smoke"
after 9/11, creating a "blind spot" as a result of a "police-action,
militaristic view" of homeland security. When it came to natural
disasters, "It was not only forgetting about it, it was not funding
it."

Jack Harrald, director of the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk
Management at George Washington University, said FEMA's natural
disaster focus was nearly liquidated. "We ended up spending a lot of
money on infrastructure protection and not the resiliency of the
actual infrastructure," Harrald said. "The people who came in from the
military and terrorist world thought we had the natural disaster thing
fixed."

Rebuffed Offers of Aid.

On the Friday before Katrina hit, when it was already a Category 2
hurricane rapidly gathering force in the Gulf, a veteran FEMA employee
arrived at the newly activated Washington headquarters for the storm.
Inside, there was surprisingly little action. "It was like nobody's
turning the key to start the engine," the official recalled.

Brown, the agency's director, told reporters Saturday in Louisiana that he
did not have a sense of what was coming last weekend.

"I was here on Saturday and Sunday, it was my belief, I'm trying to
think of a better word than typical -- that minimizes, any hurricane
is bad -- but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we
could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of
response-recovery effort," he said. "Then the levees broke, and the
levees went, you've seen it by the television coverage. That hampered
our ability, made it even more complex."

But other officials said they warned well before Monday about what
could happen. For years, said another senior FEMA official, he had sat
at meetings where plans were discussed to send evacuees to the
Superdome. "We used to stare at each other and say, 'This is the plan?
Are you really using the Superdome?' People used to say, what if there
is water around it?  They didn't have an alternative," he recalled.

In the run-up to the current crisis, Allbaugh said he knew "for a
fact" that officials at FEMA and other federal agencies had requested
that New Orleans issue a mandatory evacuation order earlier than
Sunday morning.

But DHS did not ask the U.S. military to assist in pre-hurricane
evacuation efforts, despite well-known estimates that a major
hurricane would cause levees in New Orleans to fail. In an interview,
the general charged with operations for the military's Northern
Command said such a request to help with the evacuation "did not come
our way."

"At the point that we were all watching the evacuation and the clogged
Interstate 10 going to the west on Sunday, we were watching the storm very
carefully," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe said. "At that time, it was a Category 5
storm and we knew that it would be among the worst storms to ever hit the
United States. ... I knew there was an excellent chance of flooding."

Others who went out of their way to offer help were turned down, such
as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told reporters his city had
offered emergency, medical and technical help as early as last Sunday
to FEMA but was turned down. Only a single tank truck was requested,
Daley said. Red tape kept the American Ambulance Association from
sending 300 emergency vehicles from Florida to the flood zone,
according to former senator John Breaux (D-La.) They were told to get
permission from the General Services Administration. "GSA said they
had to have FEMA ask for it," Breaux told CNN. "As a result they
weren't sent."

Federal authorities say there is blame enough to go around. In a news
conference yesterday, Chertoff cautioned against "finger-pointing" and
said no one had been equipped to handle what amounted to two
simultaneous disasters -- the hurricane and subsequent levee break.

Other federal and state officials pointed to Louisiana's failure to
measure up to national disaster response standards, noting that the
federal plan advises state and local emergency managers not to expect
federal aid for 72 to 96 hours, and base their own preparedness
efforts on the need to be self-sufficient for at least that
period. "Fundamentally the first breakdown occurred at the local
level," said one state official who works with FEMA. "Did the city
have the situational awareness of what was going on within its
borders? The answer was no."

But many outraged politicians in both parties have concluded that the
federal government failed to meet the commitments it made after
Sept. 11, 2001. Rep. Bennie Thompson (Miss.), the ranking Democrat on
the House Homeland Security Committee, said DHS had failed. "We've
been told time and time again that we are prepared for any emergency
that comes, that we're ready," he said. "We're obviously not."

Thompson said, for example, that oil pipelines in the Southeast have
been identified by DHS as critical national infrastructure to be
protected against terrorist attack. In the wake of the hurricane, they
have been= crippled by floods." We have to review all our systems,"
Thompson said. "If a byproduct of what happened in New Orleans is we
have this gas crisis all over the country, it doesn't matter whether a
terrorist hits it or a hurricane hits it. You have the same effect."

Staff writers Peter Baker, Bradley Graham, Spencer S. Hsu, Dafna Linzer and
Michael Powell and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without
profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the
understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic
issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I
believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S.  Copyright Law. If you wish
to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
owner, in this instance, Washington Post Company.

For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

------------------------------

From: Alan Sayre <ap@telecom-digest.org> 
Subject: New Orleans Begins Counting its Dead
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 16:32:34 -0500


By ALAN SAYRE, Associated Press Writer

New Orleans turned much of its attention Sunday to gathering up and
counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps
thousands of corpses.  "It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as
I think you can imagine," the nation's homeland security chief warned.

Air and boat crews also searched flooded neighborhoods for survivors,
and federal officials urged those still left in New Orleans to leave
for their own safety.

To expedite the rescues, the Coast Guard requested through the media
that anyone stranded hang out brightly colored or white linens or
something else to draw attention. But with the electricity out though
much of the city, it was not known if the message was being received.

With large-scale evacuations completed at the Superdome and Convention
Center, the death toll was not known. But bodies were everywhere:
floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and
medians and hidden in attics.

"I think it's evident it's in the thousands," Health and Human
Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Sunday on CNN, echoing
predictions by city and state officials last week. The U.S. Public
Health Service said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison,
expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.

In the first official count in the New Orleans area, Louisiana
emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had
verified 59 deaths - 10 of them at the Superdome.

"We need to prepare the country for what's coming," Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff said on "Fox News Sunday." "We are going to
uncover people who died, maybe hiding in houses, got caught by the
flood.  ... It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you
can imagine."

Chertoff said rescuers have encountered a number of people who said
they did not want to evacuate.

"That is not a reasonable alternative," he said. "We are not going to
be able to have people sitting in houses in the city of New Orleans
for weeks and months while we de-water and clean this city. ... The
flooded places, when they're de-watered, are not going to be
sanitary."

In addition to civilian deaths, New Orleans' police department has had
to deal with suicides in its ranks. Two officers took their lives,
including the department spokesman, Paul Accardo, who died Saturday,
according to W.J.  Riley, police superintendent. Both shot themselves
in the head, Riley said.

"I've got some firefighters and police officers that have been pretty
much traumatized," Mayor Ray Nagin said. "And we've already had a
couple of suicides, so I am cycling them out as we speak. ... They
need physical and psychological evaluations."

The strain was apparent in other ways. Aaron Broussard, president of
Jefferson Parish, dropped his head and cried on NBC's "Meet the
Press."

"The guy who runs this building I'm in, emergency management, he's
responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard
nursing home, and every day she called him and said, "Are you coming,
son? Is somebody coming?" And he said, "And yeah, Momma, somebody's
coming to get you. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's
coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you
Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday" - and she drowned
Friday night. She drowned on Friday night," Broussard said.

"Nobody's coming to get her, nobody's coming to get her. The
secretary's promise, everybody's promise. They've had press
conferences -- I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sakes,
shut up and send us somebody."

Hundreds of thousands of people already have been evacuated, seeking
safety in Texas, Tennessee and other states. The first group of
refugees who will take shelter in Arizona arrived Sunday in
Phoenix. With more than 230,000 already in Texas, Gov. Rick Perry
ordered emergency officials to begin preparations to airlift some of
them to other states that have offered help.

What will happen to the refugees in the long term was not known.

Back in New Orleans, walk-up stragglers at the Convention Center were
checked by Navy medics before they were evacuated. Lt. Andy Steczo
said he treated people for bullet wounds, knife wounds, infections,
dehydration and chronic problems such as diabetes.

"We're cleaning them up the best we can and then shipping them out,"
Steczo said.

One person he treated was 56-year-old Pedro Martinez, who had a gash
on his ankle and cuts on his knuckle and forearm. Martinez said he was
injured while helping people onto rescue boats. "I don't have any
medication and it hurts. I'm glad to get out of here," he said.

In a devastated section on the edge of the French Quarter, people went
into a store, whose windows were already shattered, and took out
bottles of soda and juice.

A corpse of an elderly man lay wrapped in a child's bedsheet decorated
with the cartoon characters Batman, Robin and the Riddler. The body
was in a wooden cart on Rampart Street, one shoe on, one shoe off.

Rene Gibson, 42, driving a truck while hunting for water and ice, said
people are not going to leave willingly. "People been all their
life. They don't know nothing else," he said.

Amid the tragedy, about two dozen people gathered in the French
Quarter for the Decadence Parade, an annual Labor Day celebration,
normally attended by thousands of GLBT people nationwide. Matt Menold,
23, a street musician wearing a sombrero and a guitar slung over his
back, said: "It's New Orleans, man. We're going to celebrate."

In New Orleans' Garden District, a woman's body lay at the corner of
Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street -- a business area with antique
shops on the edge of blighted housing. The body had been there since
at least Wednesday. As days passed, people covered the corpse with
blankets or plastic.

By Sunday, a short wall of bricks had been built around the body,
holding down a plastic tarpaulin. On it, someone had spray-painted a
cross and the words, "Here lies Vera. God help us."

Associated Press reporters Dan Sewell and Robert Tanner contributed to this
report.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

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daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
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http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/AP.html

------------------------------

From: Serrano & Gaouette <latimes@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 16:35:08 -0500


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-levee4sep04,0,6360838,full.story

By Richard A. Serrano and Nicole Gaouette LA Times Writers
KATRINA'S AFTERMATH

Despite Warnings, Washington Failed to Fund Levee Projects. To cut
spending, officials gambled that the worst-case scenario would not
come to be.


September 4, 2005

WASHINGTON - For years, Washington had been warned that doom lurked
just beyond the levees. And for years, the White House and Congress
had dickered over how much money to put into shoring up century-old
dikes and carrying out newer flood control projects to protect the
city of New Orleans.

As recently as three months ago, the alarms were sounding -- and being
brushed aside.

In late May, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers
formally notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock
out two of the big pumping stations that must operate night and day
even under normal conditions to keep the city dry.

Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need
to be raised. And it reminded Washington that an ambitious
flood-control study proposed four years before remained just that -- a
written proposal never put into action for lack of funding.

What a powerful hurricane could do to New Orleans and the area's
critical transportation, energy and petrochemical facilities had been
well understood. So now, nearly a week into the devastation caused by
Hurricane Katrina, hard questions are being raised about Washington
officials who crossed their fingers and counted on luck once too
often. The reasons the city's defenses were not strengthened enough to
handle such a storm are deeply rooted in the politics and bureaucracy
of Washington.

With the advantage of hindsight, the miscues seem even broader. 

Construction proposals were often underfunded or not completed. Washing-
ton officials could never agree on how much money would be needed to
protect New Orleans.  And there hung in the air a false sense of
security that a storm like Katrina was a long shot nyway.

As a result, when the immediate crisis eases and inquiries into what
went wrong begin, there is likely to be responsibility and blame
enough for almost every institution in Washington, including the White
House, Congress, the Army Corps of Engineers and a host of other
federal agencies.

For example, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps commander, conceded
Friday that the government had known the New Orleans levees could
never withstand a hurricane higher than a Category 3. Corps officials
shuddered, he said, when they realized that Katrina was barreling down
on the Gulf Coast with the vastly greater destructive force of a
Category 5 -- the strongest type of hurricane.

Washington, he said, had rolled the dice.

Rather than come up with the extra millions of dollars needed to make
the city safer, officials believed that such a devastating storm was a
small probability and that, with the level of protection that had been
funded, "99.5% of the time this would work."

Unfortunately, Strock said, "we did not address the 0.5%."

Corps officials said the floodwaters breached at two spots: the 17th
Street Canal Levee and the London Avenue Canal Levee. Connie Gillette,
a Corps spokeswoman, said Saturday there never had been any plans or
funds allocated to shore up those spots -- another sign the government
expected them to hold.

Nevertheless, the Corps hardly was alone in failing to address what it
meant to have a major metropolitan area situated mostly below sea
level, sitting squarely in the middle of the Gulf Coast's Hurricane
Alley.

Many federal, state and local flood improvement officials kept asking
for more dollars for more ambitious protection projects. But the White
House kept scaling down those requests. And each time, although
congressional leaders were more generous with funding than the White
House, the House and Senate never got anywhere near to approving the
amounts that experts had said was needed.

What happened this year was typical: Local levee and flood prevention
officials, along with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), asked for $78
million in project funds. President Bush offered them less than half
that -- $30 million. Congress ended up authorizing $36.5 million.

Since Bush took office in 2001, local experts and Landrieu have asked
for just short of $500 million. Altogether, Bush in his yearly budgets
asked for $166 million, and Congress approved about $250 million.

These budget decisions reflect a reality in Washington: to act with an
eye toward short-term political rewards instead of making long-term
investments to deal with problems.

Vincent Gawronski, an assistant professor at Birmingham Southern
College in Alabama who studies the political impact of natural
disasters, said the lost chances to shore up the levees were a classic
example of government leaders who, although meaning well, clashed over
priorities.

"Elected politicians are in office for a limited amount of time and
with a limited amount of money, and they don't really have a long-term
vision for spending it," he said.

"So you spend your pot of money where you feel you're going to get the
most political support so you can get reelected. It's very difficult
to think long-term. If you invest in these levees, is that going to
show an immediate return or does it take away from anything else?"

Gawronski said flood control projects do not have the appeal of other
endeavors, such as cancer research and police protection. At the same
time, Congress habitually approves billions of dollars for highways
and bridges and other infrastructure that politically benefits
individual congressmen.

Gawronski called it inexcusable for the United States to have been
"gambling so long" that the old levee system in New Orleans would
hold.

"Disasters are often low probability, high consequence events, so
there's a gamble there," he said. "It's not going to happen on my
watch, there's the potential it might, but I'll bet it won't."

In the case of New Orleans and flood control, another factor was at
work: the reputation of the Corps of Engineers. Over the years, many
in Washington had come to regard the Corps as an out-of-control agency
that championed huge projects and sometimes exaggerated need and
benefits.

The Corps began as a tiny regiment during the Revolutionary War era;
it now employs about 35,000 people to build dams, deepen harbors, dig
ditches and erect seawalls, among other things. But critics say some
projects are make-work boondoggles.

In 2000, Corps leaders were found to have manipulated an economic
study to justify a Mississippi River project that would have cost
billions. The agency also launched a secret growth initiative to boost
its budget by 50%.  And the Pentagon found in 2000 that the Corps'
cost-benefit analyses were systematically skewed to warrant
large-scale construction projects.

As a result, said a senior staffer with the Senate Appropriations
Committee who spoke on condition of anonymity, requests by the Corps
for flood control money were especially vulnerable to budget
cutting. "A lot of people just look at it as pork," said the staffer.

The Bush administration's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, was
known as an aggressive advocate for Corps reform who cast a skeptical
eye on its budget requests.

"The Army Corps of Engineers has a very large budget, and it has grown
a lot over recent years," Daniels, now the governor of Indiana,
said. "To the extent there's been any limitation of [the Corps']
budget, it has to do with previous tendencies to build marinas and
things that don't have much to do with preparing us for disaster."

The Bush White House maintains it never ignored the security needs of
the Gulf Coast. "Flood control has been a priority of this
administration from Day One," said White House Press Secretary Scott
McClellan.

He said hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the New Orleans
area in recent years for flood prevention, and he said the failure of
the levees was not a matter of money so much as a problem with drawing
the right plans for the dike work and other improvements.

"It's been more of a design issue with the levees," he said.

Other administration officials said there were not enough construction
companies and equipment to handle all the work that had been proposed.

John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army for Civil
Works, who has responsibility for the Corps of Engineers, said: "It's
true, we cannot accomplish all of our projects at full funding all the
time. I think that's true of any agency, particularly any public works
agency, but we had a lot of work underway in New Orleans, and I was
personally supportive of it.

"As a native of Louisiana," Woodley said, "I understand the problems
associated with flooding in New Orleans. I don't think there's any
lack of support for flood control projects in New Orleans,
particularly within the context of other projects around the country."

On Capitol Hill in recent years, several Democrats warned that more
money should be marked for the protection of New Orleans. For
instance, in September 2004, Landrieu said she was tired of hearing
there was no money to do more work on levees.

"We're told, can't do it this year. Don't have enough money. It's not
a high enough priority," she said in a Senate speech. "Well, I know
when it's going to get to be a high enough priority."

She then told of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected
several thousand body bags in the event of a major flood. "Let's hope
that never happens," she said.

But in May 2004, then Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he
had visited the levees as a guest of Landrieu and believed them
adequate.

He praised the ancient water pumps for keeping the waters from
cascading into the city, proclaiming them "these old, old pumps that
hadn't been changed since before the turn of the century, that still
keep New Orleans dry."

"It was as clean as a restaurant," he added. "These big old pumps
work."

Today, eight of those 22 pumps are underwater and inoperable.

Over the years, several projects either were short-changed or never
got started. The Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project was
authorized by Congress after a rainstorm killed six people in May
1995. It was to be finished in 10 years, but funding reductions
prevented its completion before Katrina struck.

The Army Corps of Engineers did spend $430 million to renovate pumping
stations and shore up the levees. But experts said the project fell
behind schedule after funding was reduced in 2003 and 2004.

The Lake Pontchartrain Project was a $750-million Corps operation for
new levees and beefed-up pumping stations. Because of funding cuts, it
was only 80% complete when the hurricane hit.

The project that never was started was an examination of storm surges
from large hurricanes. Congress approved the study but did not
allocate the funds for it.

In May, Al Naomi, the Corps' senior project manager for the New
Orleans district, reminded political and business leaders and
emergency management officials that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane was
always possible. After that meeting, Walter Brooks, the regional
planning commission director, came away shaking his head.

"We've learned that we're not as safe as we thought we were," he told
the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune.

Last week, Corps commander Strock defended past work, saying, it was
his "personal and professional assessment" that work in New Orleans
was never underfunded. What he meant by that, he explained, was that
no one expected such a large disaster before all the renovations and
other improvements could be completed.

"That was as good as it was going to get," he said. " We knew that it
would protect from a Category 3 hurricane. In fact, it has been
through a number of Category 3 hurricanes."

But, he said, Katrina's intensity "simply exceeded the design capacity
of the levee."

Asked whether in hindsight he wished more had been done, Strock said:
"I really don't express surprise in my business. We don't sit around
and say 'Gee whiz.' "


Times staff writer Mary Curtius contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times 

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily.

------------------------------

From: New Orleans Times-Picayune Editorial 
Subject: An Open Letter to President Bush
Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 16:40:12 -0500


      Orleans Breaking News


      Sunday, September 04, 2005

      OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
      Dear Mr. President:

      We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our
devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working,
we're going to make it right."

      Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before
believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

      Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main
reason: It' s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and
Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

      How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are
interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges,
buses and diesel-powered trucks.

      Despite the city's multiple points of entry, our nation's
bureaucrats spent days after last week's hurricane wringing their
hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city's
stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

      Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for
The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City
Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13
Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and
supplies to a dying city.

      Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New
Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and
his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

      Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose
job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have
been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was
impossible to reach.

      We're angry, Mr. President, and we'll be angry long after our
beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people
deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That's to the
government's sham e.

      Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those
with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the
Louisiana Superdome. We still don't know what the death toll is, but
one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city's
death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been
exponentially higher.

      It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people
inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been
clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren't they evacuated
out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when
Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn't suitable as a
long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think
would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air
conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water
and other essentials?

      State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city
didn't have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at
the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director
Michael Brown especially.

      In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his
agency hadn't known until that day that thousands of storm victims
were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave
another nationally televised interview the next morning and said,
"We've provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that
they've gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

      Lies don't get more bald-faced than that, GeeDubya.

      Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him,
"You're doing a heck of a job."

      That's unbelievable.

      There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because
the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had
reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten
there, too.

      We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those
who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We're no
less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or
Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

      No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been
voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New
Orleans couldn't be reached.

      Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to
make our beloved communities work right once again.

      When you do, we will be the first to applaud.


      Copyright 2003 NOLA.com. All Rights Reserved.

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 23:36:18 -0400
From: Marcus Didius Falco <falco_marcus_didius@yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Mobile Phones: Half Want the Extras; Half Don't 


Please reply on list. I'm not checking this email very often.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/mobile-phones-half-want-the-extras-half-=
dont/2005/08/31/1125302629053.html

Welcome to Sydney Morning Herald Online.
Mobile phones: half want the extras, half don't

By Julian Lee Marketing Reporter
September 1, 2005

Women buy more ring tones for their mobile phones than men, are more likely
to get Samsung handsets and regularly dial up for astrology. Men use
their
mobiles for news, sport, comedy and porn.

As for married couples, the latest movie reviews are the most popular
landing spot.

These are among the findings of a study by the Australian Interactive Media
Industry Association of Australia's 18 million mobile phone users.

"This comprehensively tells us what people are doing with their phones
and it gives us something to go on in determining why," said Oliver
Weidlich, an Ideal Interfaces "usability" expert and co-author of the
Report on the Australian Mobile Content Customer.

One-third of respondents said they liked the services on mobile phones
and found them useful and those who were already using 3G networks
bought "significantly" more than users of other networks.

One-third had bought a ring tone in the last year, one-quarter an accessory
for their phone.

Those who had bought a wallpaper, logo or screensaver for their
handset had done so an average of seven times a year.

But perhaps the most sobering finding was the number of people who did
not want any content on their phone. Fifty-one per cent of respondents
said: "I don't care; I just want to use it for phone calls."

Almost everyone used SMS; women more than men. Just one-fifth used picture
messaging. A mere 6 per cent used their phones for email.

When it came to services they would like to see in future, nearly half said=
maps and more ring tones, and 44 per cent wanted timetables for trains and
buses. Two-thirds wanted email and more than half instant messaging
services.

But Mr Weidlich said marketers needed to realise mobile phone services had
not always lived up to expectations.

Claudia Sagripanti, convenor of the Australian Interactive Media
Industry Association's mobile content group, said: "This survey shows
that people have come back and purchased repeatedly so the experience
has got better since things like WAP [wireless application protocol],
which was a few years ago, and the industry is very careful about
overpromising."

The study surveyed 2486 people, 80 per cent of them under 35, in April.


- Optus has 33% of subscribers, Telstra 31%, Vodafone 17%

- Of owners, 60% have Nokia phones, 10% Sony Ericsson, 10% Motorola, 8%
Samsung, 6% LG

- News services draw 17% of users, sport 13%, weather 13%, astrology 12%


Copyright 2005. The Sydney Morning Herald.

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