Hurricane Gustav is headed in a straight line for New Orleans and I can tell you first-hand that the hydraulic pumps don't work. Who manufactured the defective pumps? Moving Waters Industry (MWI), which is owned by J. David Eller, who was once a business partner of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. (From 1989 to 1993 the two operated the company Bush-El, which marketed MWI pumps.)
A brave and brilliant woman from the Army Corps of Engineers, Maria Garzino, complained to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) about the failure of the hydraulic pumps manufactured by Moving Waters Industry (MWI) and installed in New Orleans.
She should know. She was the team leader of pumping system installations. The OSC required the Department of Defense Secretary to conduct an investigation into her disclosures. The Department of Defense Inspector General substantiated more than half of her allegations, but ultimately concluded that . . . the deficiencies [were] performance related short-comings that did not rise to the level of a serious violation of law or regulation, abuse of authority or gross mismanagement.
So with that being said, what should one think about this? It's so difficult to read things like this.Although it is not certain that Hurricane Gustav will strike New Orleans, but for a city below sea-level its better to be prepared then not to be!
Thee years after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the New Orleans area, there is indisputable evidence of recovery.
Houses are being repaired or built. New and long-established restaurants are seeing busier days. Health care institutions are reopening. Music is pouring out of crowded clubs lining Frenchmen Street. Streetcars are clattering once again along the entire St. Charles Avenue line.
And sales of cafe au lait and beignets at Cafe du Monde's legendary French Quarter stand have climbed back to about 80 percent of what they were before the storm struck on Aug. 29, 2005, said Jay Roman, vice president of the business.
But Xavier University President Norman Francis has a warning for the overly cheerful: Don't be deceived.
For Francis, whose home near the London Avenue Canal was wrecked by floodwaters, Katrina has left a lingering presence that he likens to a garish dye stain in a rug.
"The deeper you go, you see more," he said. "You keep rubbing and say, 'I think I've got it.' No, we don't have it all."
The signs of Katrina's legacy are both visible and subtle. Although a smattering of homes are rising in the Lower 9th Ward, much of that working-class neighborhood -- and swaths of Gentilly, eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish -- remain virtually untouched.
Thousands of people who fled Katrina's wrath are still struggling to come back home from what they had envisioned as temporary havens across the country. And the storm left its psychological impact on just about everyone, even if it amounts to little more than tensing up when storm clouds form.
"I think that, since Katrina, everyone reacts in a much more hypervigilant way than we did before," said Joy Osofsky, head of the pediatric mental-health division at LSU Health Sciences Center.
Although she said tests have shown that the number of people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression has dropped by about 30 percent since the storm, Osofsky, a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry, said the symptoms are more acute among some people with those conditions.
"The recovery has been slow," she said. "There are neighborhoods still with just a couple of houses on the street. Families are still separated."
Even in neighborhoods that have bounced back, stubborn reminders of the hurricane linger in the form of blighted properties. A report released last week showed the percentage of vacant homes in New Orleans outranks any other American city by a huge margin, with New Orleans' rate, 34 percent, nearly doubling that of Detroit.
FOR MORE OF THIS ARTICLE by John Pope and Andrew Vanacore,go to Times Picayune.com
Yeye
7 months ago
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