Aamused in Austin, TX

The nation of Qatar plans to announce today roughly $60 million in grants to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, including $17.5 million to Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic university in the United States.

Other beneficiaries are Tulane University, Children's Hospital in New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity, Louisiana State University and the March of Dimes.

Nasser Bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa, Qatar's ambassador to the United States, said the remainder of the $100 million his country had pledged would be assigned in the coming months.

02-12) 15:45 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

Unheeded warnings, poor planning and apathy in recognizing the scope of Hurricane Katrina's destruction led to the slow emergency response from the White House down to local parishes, a House investigation concludes.

The 600-page report by a special Republican-dominated House inquiry into one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history concluded that late state and local evacuation orders exacerbated an untrained and inexperienced force of federal emergency responders.

It also said President Bush received poor and incomplete counsel about the crisis unfolding in the Gulf Coast.

Overall, the House report said, the federal government's response to Katrina was marked by "fecklessness, flailing and organizational paralysis."

With its marble front desk counter and waterfront location, Oakland's Jack London Inn typically caters to corporate visitors.

For the past month, however, the 105-room Jack London has housed more survivors of Hurricane Katrina -- at least 40 families -- than any other Bay Area hotel. It has become so good at connecting those who want to give with those in need that American Red Cross officials, who are struggling to assist 1,700 Katrina families in the region, will go there this week to reach out.

"They've taken a lot of extra steps there to make it a community," said Kevin Kellenberger, director of disaster services for the Bay Area chapter of the Red Cross.

The motivation for the extra effort at the Jack London is personal: The 1991 Oakland hills fire destroyed the Hiller Highlands home that general manager Bill Harris' family rented. His family lived with friends in the East Bay for several weeks.

"I just try to remember what we needed then, what we could have used," Harris said. "When you're in that situation, everything you do is so much more difficult. It's overwhelming."

That's why there's a room at the Jack London devoted to afternoon day care for children and another to stock donated items. Harris writes a weekly newsletter for Katrina survivors to point out available services. Hot lunches are brought in three times a week, courtesy of St. Vincent de Paul, and Harris has arranged for visits from officials from the Oakland Housing Authority and the Oakland Unified School District.

He's distributed movie passes to the 20 children staying there ("It was kind of a self-preservation thing," he jokes) and bus passes to their parents looking for work.

Still, it's a challenge connecting the good intentions of the community to his guests, many of whom are shell-shocked at the horror they escaped.

When he coordinated a shopping trip at an Oakland church donation drop-off site for his guests, only a few showed up. So he hounded them to make wish lists. Within a few days, he received 20 such lists, like this from a woman named Talia:

"Catching the bus with four children, one in a stroller, is very frustrating especially when you can't afford the high fare. So if there's a willing soul to provide my children and I with reliable transportation, it will be a blessing and really appreciated."

A note from the Stevens family started by thanking "you all for your support and kindness."

"We are in need of a few items, like a refrigerator so I can keep my babies' milk and juice cold, also their fruit fresh," the note said. "We all need jackets because it's much cooler."

The Red Cross shares Harris' worry that the evacuees aren't connecting with the help that's available to them. So this morning, Harris is offering guests a new hook: A local radio station is giving $200 cash to the hotel's Katrina survivors, and officials with the Red Cross and government agencies will be standing by afterward to talk to guests about their other needs.

The Jack London Inn's largesse has cost it financially, even though the Red Cross reimburses the room rates of the Gulf Coast guests. Last month, Harris turned aside 20 conventioneers with reservations. He paid for their stay at a nearby hotel.

"Not only was he there right from the beginning, but he has gone the extra mile, always asking what he could do," said Sacha Kawaichi, a Red Cross volunteer who has helped coordinate housing for Gulf Coast residents at 65 Bay Area motels and hotels. "It isn't that the other hotels weren't always helpful, but Bill was exceptional.

"There are some hotels that you are a little more hesitant to contact because of, well, you know, the snooty factor," Kawaichi said.

Some of the survivors are frustrated all the same, complaining that they're allowed to browse among donated items at the Jack London only once a week and that another room, designated as a kitchen with two donated microwave ovens, is often closed.

"It's like looking at a refrigerator that's locked," said Nolan Watson, a cook in New Orleans who is part of an extended family of five adults and 11 children staying at the hotel.

Several guests say they don't receive the weekly newsletters. Others don't hear until too late that newly donated items have arrived, some of which come without warning to the hotel.

As the hotel's reputation has grown among community groups and churches, it has attracted donors such as Elena Cunha, who drove from Redwood City on Monday and dropped off four garbage bags full of diapers and never-worn men's clothing. "I heard there's a lot of people staying here, so I figured they'd need these things," said the dental assistant.

Richard Miles, a mechanic who lived just outside New Orleans, said that if a fellow Gulf Coaster hadn't knocked on his door Sunday afternoon, he wouldn't have heard about still-in-the-box shoes and pants that were available for survivors.

"I got some for my kids," said Miles, "but after a while, when people weren't coming, the lady (who donated the items) packed up her stuff and left."

Harris said the hotel's staff doesn't have the time to monitor the donation room constantly. When he allowed guests to go through items unsupervised, "it took eight hours of staff time to clean up the room," he said.

"In a community this big," he said, "there are always going to be some people who don't get the message or who have different views about what's going on."

Other guests have nothing but praise for the hotel.

"The staff has been great help, been tremendously caring," said Jimmie Spears, who was a freight hauler at the Port of New Orleans before Katrina sent him and four family members to Northern California.

Like many survivors, Spears is tired of stuffing his family's possessions into four drawers at a hotel in a strange city, and wants nothing more than to get a job.

"This situation sucks, but it's not on the people here," Spears said. "It's just that we've been here almost a month now, packed into these rooms. It's hard."

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.

Concrete flood walls that were supposed to protect New Orleans were not overwhelmed by high waters during Hurricane Katrina as federal officials have claimed, but ruptured because they were structurally flawed, according to Louisiana scientists.

From the mud splattered on buildings still standing near to the flood walls and the results of a computer simulation of the storm - known as a “hindcast” - a team from the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge claims it has pieced together how the walls, mounted on small earthen levees, must have broken.

“Either there was a design problem or a construction problem,” says Paul Kemp, an oceanographer at the centre. “They were not supposed to break.”

September 21, 2005
Message: I Can't
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas.

Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day.

There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."

"We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job," he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to "think bold," while they still need to think mold.

Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.

The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill.

Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post.

Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses.

Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier.

As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of "Casino Jack" Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence.

Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response.

Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin.

When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving.

Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months.

The more the president echoes his dad's "Message: I care," the more the world hears "Message: I can't."

Of Utah's 2.3 million population, just 0.8% classified themselves as African-American in the 2003 census. In Salt Lake City, that figure rises to nearly 2%.

Almost all of the evacuees who arrived in Utah were African-American. Mr Smiley, a Caucasian, was one of the very few exceptions milling around the camp. Like many refugees around the world, the evacuees from New Orleans will be highly visible in their new home. But unlike most refugees, they have remained inside their own country.

Add to that New Orleans's reputation as an easy living, hard drinking, party town and contrast it with Salt Lake City's fame as the home of Mormon morals, the town where drunkenness is illegal, and you have the recipe for at best confusion, and at worst, discord.

While Utah may be an unlikely destination for the homeless residents of New Orleans, for most of them it was also an unintentional destination.

"When we got on the plane they said, 'Welcome aboard, we are now flying to Lake Salt City'," said James Jernigan, an evacuee sitting in the sunshine at the camp. "I said, 'What? We're going the wrong way. I want to get off.' They said, 'No, you can't get off.'"

(09-12) 12:04 PDT NEW ORLEANS, (AP) --

President Bush denied Monday there was any racial component to people being left behind after Hurricane Katrina, despite suggestions from some critics that the response would have been quicker if so many of the victims hadn't been poor and black.

"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. "The rescue efforts were comprehensive. The recovery will be comprehensive."

(09-09) 15:55 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

The federal government's relief agency said Friday it will discontinue its program to distribute debit cards worth up to $2,000 to hurricane victims, two days after hastily announcing the novel plan to provide quick relief.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it will scrap the program once officials finish distributing cards this weekend at shelters in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, where many of the evacuees were moved. No cards will be issued to victims in other states.

Hurricane victims at other locations will have to apply for expedited aid through the agency's traditional route — filling out information on FEMA's Web site to receive direct bank deposits, FEMA spokeswoman Natalie Rule said.

"We tried it as an innovative way to get aid to evacuee populations in Texas. We decided it would be more expeditious with direct deposits," she said, citing the large staffing operation that would be required to replicate the Texas operation in other states.

Under fire for its initial response to the hurricane, FEMA Director Michael Brown had announced the debit card program as a way to quickly get up to $2,000 to the neediest families and empower them "to make their own decisions about what do they need to have to start rebuilding their lives."

He did not describe the program as applying only to Texas, which has accepted the largest number of evacuees and is the home state of President Bush.

From the outset, there was confusion about how to get the cards and who would be eligible.

On Thursday, thousands of people lined up at the Astrodome in Houston following reports that the first FEMA cards would be distributed that day. Red Cross cards were distributed, but those seeking the government cards were told they would have to return the next day.

On Friday, Ed Conley, a FEMA spokesman in Houston, said evacuees were receiving the cards at a rate of about 500 an hour, many of whom had filled out the proper documentation and applications through FEMA's Web site.

Applicants were being asked to provide Social Security numbers as well as the address of their damaged homes, for verification against aerial photographs of devastated areas.

A FEMA spokeswoman had said Friday there were enough cards to cover the families of the estimated 7,000 people registered at three shelters in the Astrodome complex.

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Shameless Award I
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Wednesday, September 7, 2005

IT'S NO secret that Hurricane Katrina has upended Washington politics, rightfully making relief efforts the top priority. So re-labeling old ideas as a part of disaster recovery is the new political game.

The first, though not last, Shameless Award in putting the hurricane to other uses goes to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. He's tapping the oil refineries shut down by Katrina and higher pump prices to advocate for drilling in Alaska's Arctic edge.

Never mind that these supplies are seven to 10 years away. Never mind that the reserves may amount to only 4 percent of this nation's energy needs. Never mind that conservation and higher highway fuel economy are better answers to oil dependence than invading a wildlife refuge.

Katrina's wind and waves did shut down refineries and drilling platforms, though this gas supply line is slowly coming back. The answer to this country's fragile energy infrastructure isn't opening up the pristine backcountry to derricks and pipes.

Frist's argument, daft as it is, is designed to repackage and sell a bad idea. Unfortunately, the Arctic drilling plan has advanced further than it should. It's jammed in a federal spending bill that, under parliamentary ground rules, can't be taken out or filibustered as can other Senate bills.

Washington's new atmosphere should lead Congress to rethink spending priorities in the wake of Katrina. If that happens, drilling in the Arctic should be tossed out.