The Washingon Post yesterday noted a potential standoff between the feds and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin over the Mayor’s overtures about allowing evacuees back into New Orleans and its environs immediately—a standoff that has for the time being been avoided in the wake of Nagin’s Monday afternoon press conference (just now completed).
Citing worries over tropical storm Rita, Nagin announced the suspension of re-entry into New Orleans and called for the evacuation of Algiers by Wednesday. Among the specific concerns the Mayor outlined were that New Orleans pumping stations are not yet at full capacity, and that 9” of rain or a 3’ storm surge would likely cause significant new flooding, creating all kinds of new problems in an area already struggling to reconstruct the majority of its infrastructure.
Nagin did, however, defend his earlier suggestion that parts of the city were ready for re-entry save for the threat of Rita. The Mayor cited EPA reports concluding there were no significant health risks and noted the readiness of many local resources.
Bottom line: Nagin ate a little bit of crow, but in the end, he made the right decision, at least for the time being.
****
related?
I’ve noticed a pattern with Colorado winter weather forcasting: At some point each winter a storm which is predicted to drop several inches (a small storm) will instead unleash a foot or two, catching everyone by surprise and embarrassing the forecasters.
Then for the next month or more, every storm that comes near Colorado will be hailed as a major snowfall producer (!!) yet these storms will typically produce only an inch or two.
I’m wondering if the same will now hold true for hurricanes: that massive (and potentially unnecessary) evacuations will be made for even the smallest, just in case.
Potential standoff between the Feds and the locals? Gawd, that’s not exactly Kosher is it? During a National Emergency anyway.
But who am I to point fingers? We Canadians have a bigger can of worms then You, my firendly American friend.
There’s a list as long as my LEG of multi-million dollar rip-offs by our current Libscammer government. The latest *Biggie* is not added yet.
http://BendGovt.blog.ca
This is not humour, my friend. Sadly this is painfully serious.
If the present secrecy clampdown on government munchkins in 12 government departments is allowed to take place, I may well be advised to move back to my old apartment in Corpus Christi Texas. I love the folks there.
Well, Boys and Girls.. to cheer us all up, you can download an excellent Book/Thesis [145P] on the BlogWorld and it’s really FREE!
Here is an Excellent book on blogging for you.
James has very generously placed his thesis for download [free], when he may have easily earned $39.95 a copy had it gone retail.
It is free. There are no strings or mystery cookies to worry about. My browser set-up warns of any cookie attempt, so I know for sure. Usually, freebies elswhere place cookies… thus very little is really free.
Please leave a comment at a new site, we all live for comments eh? Then link to AThesis Download there.
http://Anchorpin.Redpin.com
No obligation to, but please.. a comment or two for a new site.. OK? 73s TonyGuitar
Must take notice of the sweet young lady in the blue bathing suit. Is she a delight or waht?
Nubile, comes to mind. I gotta look that up. I think it means flowering out all over or something.
That conservative gal we see who models the white Conservative Logo Tee shirt ia a sweetheart too .. eh? She’s the best reason to move to the right I ever saw! 73s TonyGuitar
BLT, your illustration strongly emphasizes some key difficulties when trying forecast: (1) your model is only as good as your assumptions and (2) what is your risk threshold. Being a guy who makes his living building forecasting tools, let me try to expand on your thought.
In the last 20 years, with the proliferation of multifaceted and relational databases, we’ve been able to expand the quantity of assumptions that a given model can operate under. Despite this monumental improvement, the human decision of deciding what information is relevant or not is still the crux of the problem.
For instance, if I want to forecast GE’s ability to pay off its creditors, the 3 year incremental increase/decrease in borrowing combined with sales pipeline data would be relevant, where-as the ratio of executives wearing brown versus black shoes would not be relevant. Bits of information in my example here are easy to assume, but fringe pieces that can influence final results are more difficult to predict. Plus, the ability to understand and account for all the variables involved is a Herculean task.
Naturally, this leads to the next point, if I am unable to account for all variables, choosing to ignore outliers, how much risk am I willing to tolerate that one of these variables can, pardon the pun, put me under water?
The aggregate risk tolerance of a population tends to move in a herd from too much to too little. This manifests itself in the various market bubbles and their subsequent explosion (or really implosion). In the Dot.com bubble, everyone saw people making money off of small companies with aspirations of being the next “Netscape.” It was irrational to think that 30 companies a week were capable of producing a product that was as revolutionary (hindsight shows us that even Netscape was unable to sustain itself), however folks threw caution to the wind and most were left holding nothing but their asses after these companies imploded. Their irrational behavior that once caused them to completely ignore risk (i.e. hearing quotes like “This market is different”
, now causes them to knee-jerk in the opposite direction. Some folks that were trading penny stocks in 2000 are now afraid to move money into anything other than CDs in 2005.
With total consistency, whether you are talking about markets, hurricane preparations or snow storms, the fundamental character of humans never change. They get greedy as hell, they ignore risk and lose it, then instead of looking back critically, they try to shift blame on someone or something else. The breadth of the pendulum swing caused by these knee jerk reactions is the only unknown, and it is dependant on willingness of the outliers to listen to those in the middle who are able convince the extremists on either end of the fallacious assumptions their arguments are based on.
With Katrina, Jeff has done a great job at showing how much the media spectacle has sensationalized events to the point where very few people have been able to understand any truth that happened there. It is utterly repulsive to see it revealed, and all the media has accomplished, by scaring the living bejesus out of people, is the assurance that next time, people will be so unwilling to take risks that they will go to silly extremes to protect from the next “Big One.†Mayor Nagin will likely order an evacuation (school buses and all), and if the storm misses or loses steam at the 12th hour and produces a little afternoon shower, you can bet the house that the media will be standing downtown with their cameras, passive-aggressively mocking the overreaction. These spineless vultures did it with NASA in Challenger and Columbia disasters, and there is no reason to assume they won’t do it again here.
Note: I’m venturing close to building a strawman argument with my examples in market behavior above, as they mostly reflect some extreme outliers; however I do think that the behavior is consistent with actual results that history has proven correct.
Ultimately, this comment is a forecast, and we’ll see if I’m wrong. The perfidy and shamelessness of the media has yet to disappoint me in my lifetime.
Fox News is reporting that the Nork’s are saying they’ll go back on the deal unless they get a civlian nuke reactor first.
Oh, crap! Wrong thread.
Mayor Nagin: “If we are off, I’d rather err on the side of conservatism to make sure we have everyone out”
Likely the first side of conservatism displayed in New Orlans in centuries…
Forecasts:
1)In a week or two we’ll begin to see media complaints that the septic tank NO has become is not being sanitized quickly enough. 2)The impatient children will demand we spend billions without questioning whether rebuilding is the wisest alternative. 3)Proven incompetent, Blanco and Nagin will of course be left in charge of reconstruction efforts. 4)The grifter politicians of NO and LA, not content to feed merely from the trough of their own citizens, will now pilfer national taxes to try and turn this sow’s ear back into the silk purse it always aspired to be. 5)And yea, verily, this too shall come to pass (much like a kidney stone): Bush will be blamed for reconstruction failures. And this time, he’ll deserve it.
A sane state would impeach, then prosecute both Nagin and Blanco for criminal negligence, involuntary manslaughter and dereliction of duty. But LA? Punish Democrats? Not a chance.
Maybe the rest of us could take a good hard look at what makes economic sense before rebuilding. I’m having a hard time finding in even the emanations of the penumbras of the Constitution any “right” to live below sea level at your fellow citizen’s expense, even if you provide jambalaya. Ditto for cleaning up your yard when your septic system overflows.
On its current track, the eye of Rita (a great band name, that) will pass a few miles to the south and west of my apartment. The bad side, in other words.
Which sucks. I’m far enough inland and far away from creeks and bayous and such that storm surge is not remotely an issue.
Galveston’s mayor has called for a voluntary evac beginning tomorrow, a mandatory beginning Wednesday if the storm continues on its track. This is good, because there’s one major road (I-45, which uses a causeway to go over the bay to Houston) and the Bolivar Ferry, which would close down sometime early Wednesday.
And yes, she has buses lined up. One fun fact: the University of Texas-Medical Branch has one of the few biological research labs in the country. We’re talking the worst of the worst, Ebola, Dengue, West Nile, Marburg, etc. It’s on a barrier island for a reason.
I did a Wal-Mart run today; a slight buzz was in the air, and we’re 50 miles away from the coast.
Oh, and yes, I am armed. Texas is, generally speaking, a little less tolerant of looters than apparently NOLA was/is.
If it heads our way, I’ll be happy to keep you guys posted for as long as I can. I’m sure Laurence Simon will as well.
If it does major damage, those of you in the North need to stock up on blankets. Natural gas will be in short supply.
I still say that the right solution to rebuilding New Orleans is to turn the site over to IESI (once known as Waste Management Corp.) Rules: no rotting organics, lifts not higher than five feet, maximum compaction. After two or three years you’d have the entire place level with the tops of the Cat3 levees, thirty feet above sea level. Then start building houses, etc.
Maximum out-of-pocket expenditure would be to reinforce the highways leading in, so the trucks used to transport the :ahem: material wouldn’t beat them to death. Oh, and a box of 30-06 shells; when the amount of crap strewn from improperly secured loads gets intolerable, shoot the incumbent President of IESI and his comptroller, and go on with the program.
Win-win for everybody, no?
Regards,
Ric
Apparently Bloomberg is trying to take one for the team and draw some heat off Nagin as the biggest idiot to lead a major city:
A speech to a teeming throng of 150 in the big apple wasn’t gonna get much ink until the gestapo showed up, huh? Apparently they had forgot to get a permit for the PA.
Dereliction of duty, maybe. But criminal negligence and involuntary manslaughter… Let’s put a stop to such talk right now. In the face of a natural disaster, one should only be responsible for oneself, and one’s dependents.
Why aren’t people (Media?) paying more attention to the fact that Michael Brown had trouble with Ray Nagin and now Thad Allen is having trouble with Ray Nagin.
Also President Bush had to force Nagin to call for a mandatory evacuation before Katrina(which was never enforced) and now Presdient Bush had to force Nagin to stop this insane plan to bring folks back.
There is a pattern here!
I’d like to find the transcript, but I just saw Nagin at a press conference saying that because of the threat of Rita he was accepting the Admiral’s recommendation that people being stopped returning to the city.
The remarkable thing was that the mayor made a remark that he felt there was one person who should be responsible for the citizens of New Orleans returning, and it ought to be him and only him.
Funny thing, he didn’t seem to want this sole responsibility regarding the citizens of New Orleans evacuating.
Steve in Houston, we had just moved into an apartment complex right off of I-45 between Edgebrook and Almeda Mall when Alicia hit in 1983. Having never experienced a hurricane before (category 2 or 3?), I do have to say it was kind of exciting seeing it rain horizontally, trees fly through the air, having our windows bow out (not breaking) and the parking lot fill up almost knee-high with water. We were on the 2nd floor and had an apartment behind us, so we didn’t suffer any damage other than a few drips of water and no power for about a day.
Hope you keep high and dry if Rita decides to come your way.
tw: friends. Isn’t that what Tejas means or some variation thereof?
Yes, let’s. God forbid we should hold those in responsible positions, y’know, responsible. Better to just shovel money at them, and hope they don’t get anyone killed the next time they fuck up.
So let’s recap: I’m the mayor of a large city, and my incompetent bungling got 500 or so of my citizens killed. My governor, who’s even more inept than I am doesn’t dare charge me with anything for fear of facing the same tribunal for her own culpability. Instead of prosecution, the feds will dump a bounty of $100 – 200 billion in my lap that I can skim from. The only downside is getting those buses working in time to get our people to the election polls in November so they can vote me back in.
Turing word should, as in You’re damn right I should have used those buses, but it just didn’t pay as well …
And add into the mix the fact that Nagin just can’t stop blaming and attacking other people to divert from his own idiocy.
Cripes, Nagin. Of course the guy is going to step ‘outside his lane’ and ask people to think twice about coming back into the city when he sees the mayor being a complete dipshit.
Why does Algiers have to evacuate? Is France going to invade again?
Ba dum bump. tish.
Steve in Houston,
I’m ready with my water, gun, and food.
If they do evacute Galveston, it will be a nightmare. I-45N is clogged on a good day.