Live from the Nuke Free Zone

A couple of weeks ago, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, apparently known locally for his free-market philosophies, acknowledged reality and proposed a plan for New Orleans redevelopment: a federal agency, similar to the savings & loan bailout, would buy up damaged parcels from homeowners at decent prices, oversee cleanup, and either resell them or, if […]

Well, that was anticlimactic. There is still some flooding expected, but as natural disasters go, anticlimactic is good, so I’m not complaining.
Since there will be little in the way of recovery, the main Katrina comparison Rita will afford is evacuation. We tried to evacuate a significant region of a metropolis, starting about as […]

Rita downgraded to Cat 4, projected to possibly be Cat 3 (a la Alicia) by the time it makes landfall. Turned a bit steeper north, so it will now hit east of Houston/Galveston and hopefully spare them the stronger sea-to-land winds.
There are scattered indications — anecdotal, but present — that despite advance activity, a […]

I don’t mean to make this a Texas blog, really. But the home state has been hopping recently. Rita, now a Cat 5, is forecast to have her eye make landfall within spitting distance of my parents’ house in Houston (and reader, she will be spitting).
Now, Galveston is no stranger to evacuations, having […]

In eerie analogy to the invasion of Iraq after 9/11 despite its irrelevancy to the motivating incident, the Administration is now laying out a game plan for the post-Katrina presidency that ignores any inconvenient self-reflection. The strategy flogs tragedy as an excuse for forging ahead with what the organizers wanted to do anyway, but […]

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs…
David Brooks, on planning the new New Orleans. As someone interested in urban planning, and a great believer in the power of cities to provide opportunities and resources not found elsewhere, the idea struck a powerful chord in me.
Power is […]

A fair proportion of the Zone’s readership, I suspect, watches and enjoys The Daily Show. As a quick comment, tonight’s interview with Samuel L. Jackson contained the suggestion that direct giving to hurricane victims was preferable to giving money to the Red Cross, causing some of it to be spent on administration.
If you have […]

The episode illustrates that when the normal day-to-day activity of society disintegrates, the collapse of civilization is only a few paces behind. We all walk on the edge of the abyss.
-Saudi Gazette
So.
Let’s talk about refugees.
In the past couple of days, there has understandably been a lot of attention focused on that delightfully apocalyptic situation on […]

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw […]

Life is not so easy these days in the French Quarter, the area of all-night bars, historic homes and voodoo traditions that is the oldest, rowdiest and, these days, driest part of storm-battered New Orleans.
Outside, the quarter’s elegant 150-year-old buildings look relatively unruffled, except for some loosened bricks, having been spared the worst of Hurricane […]