Troops begin combat operations in New Orleans

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NEW ORLEANS — Combat operations are underway on the streets “to take this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Jones said the military first needs to establish security throughout the city. Military and police officials have said there are several large areas of the city are in a full state of anarchy.

Dozens of military trucks and up-armored Humvees left the staging area just after 11 a.m. Friday, while hundreds more troops arrived at the same staging area in the city via Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters.

“We’re here to do whatever they need us to do,” Sgt. 1st Class Ron Dixon, of the Oklahoma National Guard’s 1345th Transportation Company. “We packed to stay as long as it takes.”

While some fight the insurgency in the city, other carry on with rescue and evacuation operations. Helicopters are still pulling hundreds of stranded people from rooftops of flooded homes.

Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and police helicopters filled the city sky Friday morning. Most had armed soldiers manning the doors. According to Petty Officer 3rd Class Jeremy Grishamn, a spokesman for the amphibious assault ship Bataan, the vessel kept its helicopters at sea Thursday night after several military helicopters reported being shot at from the ground.

Numerous soldiers also told Army Times that they have been shot at by armed civilians in New Orleans. Spokesmen for the Joint Task Force Headquarters at the Superdome were unaware of any servicemen being wounded in the streets, although one soldier is recovering from a gunshot wound sustained during a struggle with a civilian in the dome Wednesday night.

“I never thought that as a National Guardsman I would be shot at by other Americans,” said Spc. Philip Baccus of the 527th Engineer Battalion. “And I never thought I’d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission. This is a disgrace.”

Spc. Cliff Ferguson of the 527th Engineer Battalion pointed out that he knows there are plenty of decent people in New Orleans, but he said it is hard to stay motivated considering the circumstances.

“This is making a lot of us think about not reenlisting.” Ferguson said. “You have to think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will turn around and shoot at you. We didn’t come here to fight a war. We came here to help.”

NEW ORLEANS, La., Sept 5 (Reuters) - To New Orleans Police Sgt. Justin Crespo, the sign hanging over the garage entrance to the 1st District station near the French Quarter a week after Hurricane Katrina struck says it all -- "Fort Apache."

"The first night after, we started taking fire out of Treme...," Crespo said on Monday, pointing to a low income housing development that rose up from behind the jazz city's famed and eerie mausoleum-filled St. Louis cemetery.

"They were shooting at us, they were shooting at military helicopters. So one of the guys said this is just like Fort Apache in the Bronx, and the name stuck," Crespo said referring to the 1981 movie, starring Paul Newman, of a police station that was more like a fort in hostile territory.

"They were shooting at the helicopters that were bringing them food," added another officer. He said there was no obvious explanation why the gunmen should do this.

For a couple days, around 80 New Orleans police officers were trapped in the station -- pinned down on one side by sniping from gangs in the barrio, and on the other by rapidly rising floodwaters from the Mississippi River.

Returning fire but armed only with the bullets they had in their firearms, they took cover in a neighboring building that was two stories higher. The police took a sledge hammer with them, in case they needed to break through a wall to reach the roof to escape the flood.

The New Orleans police force has come under severe criticism for failing to protect the people of its city from the hurricane, and then from gangs of looters, rapists and murderers that ran amok in the chaos that followed. Many officers deserted.

New Orleans Police Department Deputy Chief Warren Riley said only about 1,000 of the force's 1,641 officers were accounted for.

"Some left for various reasons, some of which we understand. Some of their homes were totally destroyed. Others were looking for missing spouses and family members. Others who didn't stay, that's a subject for a different day," he told reporters.

Crespo and other officers said they were having a tough time looking after themselves. Most had no idea where their families were during the storm and at least two have since committed suicide, he said.

Officers in the 1st District felt so besieged they barricaded the street around their station to ward off attacks.

They hunkered down, trying to protect their feet against infections from sewage-fouled waters outside, and using a filing cabinet as a television antenna.

"Nine days. I got a shower today," Crespo said. "We were on baby wipes and alcohol."

Trapped like everyone else in a city under water, the police resorted to looting for shoes, dry socks and food.

"We didn't take anything that's not essential," Crespo said, showing off brand new white sneakers.

The U.S. government, also under fire for its response to one of the worst natural disasters the country has ever seen, poured troops, police, special forces and emergency management teams into the devastated city by Monday.

Dozens of helicopters thundered overhead as Crespo and other officers in the 1st District prepared to begin patrolling their neighborhoods again. Police, FBI, Army and National Guard SUVs, lorries and Humvees roared through ghostly abandoned streets while air boats and other vessels plied flooded neighborhoods.

"It was scary but we had each other so we kept our sense of humor," said Shani White, three months pregnant, after she and her husband Kenny were plucked from a flooded out office building by Sheriff Marlin Gusman in a boat.

"My baby is going to be called Marlin," she said. And if it's a girl? "Marlina." (Additional reporting by Mark Babineck)

Troubles Travel Upstream
Farmers in the Heartland Aren't Sure Their Crops Will Make It Through for Export

By Caroline E. Mayer and Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 5, 2005; A23

ELWOOD, Ill. -- Frank Walsh bends over to examine his soybean crop. He shouldn't have to; in good years, the beans would be up to his chest, about 42 inches high. This year, as the result of a drought, they are just at his knees.

Drought may be the least of the Walsh family's worries these days, as farmers start to feel the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Just two weeks before harvest begins, Illinois farmers who rely on the Mississippi River to carry their soybeans and corn down river for export cannot be sure their crops can get through and whether higher transportation prices will drive down earnings. On Friday, the price for corn at the river grain elevator that the Walsh family uses was more than 20 percent lower than it was 10 days earlier.

"The river is saying, 'We don't want your corn,' " said Pat Dumoulin, who runs a 700-acre farm with her husband and two sons in Hampshire, Ill., about 50 miles north of Elwood.

The Mississippi is a river of commerce, an artery through which about 500 million tons of cargo each year, including tons of coal, timber, iron, steel and chemicals. About 60 percent of the nation's grain exports move down the river. The ports in Louisiana make up the largest port complex in the nation and are major terminals for oil and other petroleum products.

The extent of the damage upriver will depend on how soon and how completely the Mississippi and shipping facilities return to service.

On Saturday, the river was reopened to traffic, but only to ships that extend no more than 35 feet below the waterline. Typically, ships are allowed to reach 45 feet below the water's surface. Areas that were hardest hit, like the Port of New Orleans, were turned into one-way channels, where ships have to wait for another to pass before they can go. They also have to run through one at a time at a dangerous turn at Algiers Point, in the heart of New Orleans.

From 30 to 40 percent of vessels are expected to be rerouted away from the Mississippi, said Michael Titone, president of the Mississippi River Maritime Association. While some are finding their ways to ports upriver that escaped Katrina's wrath, river buoys are gone and the channels are not clear, making it even more difficult to navigate.

Seven vessels were making their way out of the Mississippi yesterday, while 15 were making their way in. Despite traffic returning to nearly normal levels yesterday, some cargo-handling facilities are still in disarray, longshoremen may need backups as more ships are routed to cleared ports, and debris still rests below the surface.

Late Saturday, Tim Osborn, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's manager of regional operations, received an urgent call at his home in Lafayette, La. The pilots of a tanker full of about 100,000 tons of crude oil, or about 600,000 barrels, were blocked from entering Shell Oil Co.'s Motiva Enterprises LLC refinery dock on the Mississippi River at the town of Convent because of obstructions that might be lurking under the water.

The pilots and the Coast Guard needed the NOAA to navigate the waters and make sure the area was clear of obstruction. Meanwhile, the crude sat at anchor.

Osborn and others have spent the past few days on watercraft, mapping what underwater perils might exist for ships like the 850-foot-long tanker. Hurricane-deposited silt could cause a tanker to run aground. A collision with a sunk barge could do even more damage.

"Hundreds and hundreds of barges disappeared," said Edward W. Peterson, executive director of the Louisiana River Pilots Association. The barges carry an average of 1,600 tons of cargo, he said. "Nobody knows where they are."

Until they do, vessels sit, keeping shipments of crude at bay. Tankers will get priority to move down the river when they are ready.

The river pilots steer the vessels through the waters and have been gathering to figure out ways to keep their river running. They are staying in temporary quarters on the water on the Boax, a crane barge docked up from the mouth of the river. Pilottown in Plaquemines Parish, where they used to live, was demolished. Ten pilots are stationed for two weeks a time on the barge. Others are flying in and out on helicopters.

In the Port of Greater Baton Rouge yesterday, a 25,000-ton cargo vessel half filled with a rubber shipment sat at the dock being unloaded. Towering 45-ton cranes lifted pallets onto forklifts that carried them into a warehouse.

Baton Rouge was Plan B. When Katrina hit, the Pac Alkaid had unloaded half of its shipment at New Orleans, and the ship and its crew had to wait out the storm.

Soon after the Mississippi waterways reopened Saturday, the ship took off for the Baton Rouge port, which survived with little damage and is expected to be the port for many ships that would have been headed to New Orleans.

"We didn't want to waste any time," said Terry Gros, manager of P&O Ports, a company that loads and unloads ships at Baton Rouge. The ship traveled 130 miles, making the trip from New Orleans in about 10 hours.

The ship that brought the rubber came from Phuket, Thailand, the scene of last year's tsunami.

Perched several stories above the rubber being unloaded, ship captain Manuel Furio pointed to a red digital recorder on a bank of controls. On it, he had recorded the wind gusts as he rode out Katrina, and he proudly showed it to a visitor: 110 knots. That's 126 mph.

The river "is the most important pipeline for grain exports we have in this country," said Dale Durchholz, senior market analyst for the Illinois Farm Bureau. "From a transportation standpoint, it's the most developed and also the cheapest way for us to get grain from the interior of the country to the Gulf." To carry one barge worth of grain would take 15 rail cars and about 60 trucks.

"It takes a long time for water to run down the river, but price signals to farmers conducted up the river are made almost instantly," said Dennis Vercler, spokesman for the Illinois Farm Bureau. That is particularly troublesome this year because the Illinois farmers who rely most heavily on the river were also the hardest hit by this summer's drought.

The Walsh family and others acknowledged that they are far from desperate, especially compared with the homeless victims of the hurricane. They remain optimistic that the Mississippi will be cleared when the harvest rolls around in two weeks and will return to near-normal levels by the time they need it, driving crop prices back up. In the meantime, they worry about the impact of the hurricane on the cost of fuel and fertilizer.

The hurricane happened "at a pretty bad time for the grain market," said Kevin McNew, president of Cash Grain Bids Inc., a commodity intelligence firm. Last year, McNew said, was a record for corn and soybeans, which drove per-bushel prices down; many farmers held on to a large portion of their crop, hoping prices would rally. As a result, many farmers and grain elevators find themselves with last year's crop still sitting in their bins. Now they need to sell to make room for this year's harvest.

"It's a logistic nightmare," said Patrick Mino, grain division manager for Access Ag Inc., which has five grain elevators in northern Illinois. Mino said he had to make room in his elevator last week by shipping out two trainloads of corn, or 840,000 bushels. "It was a fire sale," Mino said, because he would have gotten about 10 cents more a bushel, or $84,000 total, if he had been able to use barges.

Each week, about 35 million bushels of corn are exported from the United States, most from the Gulf of Mexico, said Darrel L. Good, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Grain is going to have to start moving through that export facility really soon or there will be a big problem."

Putting downward pressure on price are higher barge costs. Freight prices have climbed to a record $25 a ton from $15.20 a ton two weeks ago, according to a barge company executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his company's policy. About 400 barges have been damaged or stranded or remain unaccounted for, the executive said. Others are in use, waiting to be loaded or unloaded at facilities that are not open.

Farming is always a gamble, and the Walsh family knows that well. Last year, Frank, his two brothers and father harvested record crops and received an average $2.25 per bushel for the corn they sold. They still have about 30,000 bushels, or 20 percent of the crop, in storage. In July, the family sold some of it for about $2.40 a bushel but held a lot back, betting prices would rise as the drought worsened. But even before Katrina, prices had dropped to $2 a bushel. "We wish we sold in July," brother Matthew Walsh said, grimly and softly.

His demeanor quickly changed, however, when he talked about the business bet the family made on diesel fuel for this harvest. Last February, they signed a contract for diesel fuel at $1.73 per gallon. At 10 cents above diesel's selling price at the time, that was considered a bold move. But today, with diesel selling for about $2.90 per gallon, it was the right one, he said, his face breaking into a wide smile.

"We know first hand that Mother Nature is our partner and there's nothing we can do that can change what she gives us," said Walsh's father, Larry. "For the last two years, she's been an excellent partner. This year, she's dealt us a challenging hand. We have to work the best we can with it."

SINGAPORE (AFX) - Oil prices at 100 usd a barrel are no longer an unthinkable prospect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Asian demand is part of the reason, analysts said.

Predictions by US investment bank Goldman Sachs in March that oil prices could rise to 105 usd a barrel were widely ridiculed, but the damage unleashed by the US storm has made others now consider it a possibility.

Skeptics say oil prices are becoming a bubble just waiting to burst after striking a record high of 70.85 usd a barrel last week as Katrina hit oil-producing and refining areas in the southern United States, and there appears to be relief in the short term.

World oil prices retreated from 70-usd territory on Friday when the US government led a drive by major industrial powers to release emergency supplies of crude. New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in October, fell 1.90 usd to close at 67.57 usd a barrel.

Asian Development Bank president Haruhiko Kuroda said in Singapore on Friday that 'I don't think 70 usd will be maintained, but how much and when prices start to decline no one knows.'

'There's a great uncertainty that exists,' he said.

Travel expert John Koldowski, managing director of the Strategic Intelligence Centre at the Pacific Asia Travel Association in Bangkok, said the industry is taking 'a long hard look' at what is going on in the oil sector.

Analysts had dismissed speculation of 100-usd oil a few months back but 'we're really now starting to take it seriously,' he said.

'It's a whole new ballgame for us. We're now talking about prolonged levels of relatively high oil prices,' Koldowski said.

Some analysts say that with refineries in the US Gulf Coast hammered by Katrina, all that is needed to push prices up to 100 usd is a terrorist attack or labor strike in one of the major oil-producing nations.

'If we have supply disruptions in Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Venezuela or Nigeria, then it could be even worse,' said Tony Nunan, manager for energy risk management with Mitsubishi Corp's international petroleum business in Tokyo.

'We could easily have a bigger problem if this sort of thing (labor strike) or terrorist attack occurs in a major oil producing country now ... prices will shoot up to three-digit figures,' he said.

Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude producer which holds the largest proven oil reserves of 261.2 bln barrels or more than a quarter of the global total, has been rocked by a spate of bloody attacks attributed to Al-Qaeda militants in the past two years.

Analysts have consistently warned any disruption to Saudi Arabia's production facilities would send shockwaves as it is the only oil-producing country believed to have the spare capacity to raise output.

'The geopolitical situation in oil producing countries like Nigeria and Iraq is certainly less stable than we would like,' said Deborah White, a senior energy analyst with Societe Generale in Paris.

'It keeps nervousness and prices high,' she said.

Oil prices have risen by more than 50 pct since the end of 2004 when they were trading at around 43 usd a barrel.

The sharp spike in oil prices is attributed mainly to growing demand for oil globally, with the Chinese economy and strong US consumer demand singled out as the major demand drivers.

A pressing worry now is how much damage has been inflicted on US refineries in the Gulf of Mexico region, which accounts for a quarter of the country's total oil output.

As of yesterday, more than 88 pct of daily Gulf crude production was shut down and nearly 79 pct of natural gas output halted. That was an improvement on Thursday's 91 pct for crude and 83 pct for gas.

The Department of Energy said yesterday that one refinery in Louisiana was restarting but eight others in the area remained shut down as a result of the hurricane.

Combined, the nine refineries' production capacity is 1.83 mln barrels of oil a day -- about 10 pct of total US output.

'We have yet to find out how much damage Katrina has caused,' said White from Societe Generale in Paris.

'At the moment, we are at the mercy of the weather ... the worst is that the hurricane season is not over,' she said.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to November and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had warned last month that seven to nine more hurricanes could form this year, mainly threatening Caribbean islands and the US southern coast.

'The season is still another three months ... we still have a long way to go,' said Nunan from Mitsubishi Corp. 'If we have another hurricane in the same area, it will be a total panic for the oil market.'

While the prospect of oil prices touching the three-figure zone cannot be ruled out, analysts doubt a price at that level could be sustained as it would deal a psychological blow to consumers everywhere.

A three-digit crude oil price would be 'enough to get everybody, politicians, economists and the average person on the street jumping up and down and cutting back on spending and driving,' said Nunan.

bh-rc/it/swp

Katrina's growing economic impact
Gas prices only tip of the iceberg, as deadly storm will affect real estate, trade, heating costs.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The human toll of Hurricane Katrina is already far too evident to anyone watching news reports this week, and the economic impact is evident to anyone who's pulled up to a gasoline pump.

But experts say that higher gasoline prices aren't the only economic fallout from the devastating storm.

Real estate and home construction, trade, agriculture and livestock -- even the purchasing power of the dollar -- are all likely to be impacted by the storm in the coming months.

And energy price increases will be felt by U.S. consumers, businesses and the broader economy, even beyond the sudden spike in gasoline prices.

Gasoline has seen a spike to a record national average of $2.86 a gallon on Friday, and $3 a gallon gas is now common in many markets around the country. Many speculate that $4 a gallon gas could be seen in some markets soon.

Crude oil prices retreated somewhat on Friday, but higher crude prices could be ahead, perhaps above $80 a barrel by some estimates, by year-end.

"If we look at Hurricane Ivan (which hit the Gulf in 2004), oil prices continued to go up for more than a month," said A. F. Alhajji, associate professor at Ohio Northern University. "Companies continued to work on their facilities but there were always delays restoring production."

As colder weather comes, heating oil and natural gas price hikes could replace concerns about prices at the gas pump for some consumers.

Natural gas prices, which were already expected to rise 15 to 25 percent from last winter even before Katrina, saw futures prices jump about 20 percent during the last week. Home heating oil is essentially the same product as diesel fuel, which has soared nearly 50 percent in the last year and more than 15 percent in the last month alone.

Real estate and home building have been major drivers of the U.S. economy in recent years. The impact of Katrina on those important sectors are difficult to gauge, economists say.

On the one hand, the sharp fall in interest rates in the wake of the storm could keep mortgage rates low and continue to support home prices and building around the country.

But the demand for goods for rebuilding could cause shortages and price spikes for some goods, according to economists in the sector. The problem could be worsened by the fact that many imported building materials enter the country through the now closed Gulf ports

"I think the impact is going to be nationwide for construction," said Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America, the trade group for non-residential builders.

Dave Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said he's not as concerned about labor shortages as he is about price increases for lumber and other building materials, which he estimates could mean $10,000 or more in higher costs for a new home.

The gap between U.S. imports and exports, already headed to a new record in 2005, is likely to grow even faster due to Katrina, according to experts.

The American Farm Bureau Federation estimates that there could be a $500 million export loss for U.S. producers who normally export through the Gulf ports. That loss could be longer term if international buyers to look to other sources, such as China for corn, or South America for soybeans.

"My expectation was the trade deficit would increase anyway into the low 60 (billion dollar a month) range," said international economist Jay Bryson of Wachovia Securities. "A $70 billion (monthly trade gap) sounds like a stretch, but we could be looking at the mid to high 60s now."

A growing trade deficit, coupled with any increase in the federal budget deficit due to emergency spending, would put downward pressure on the value of the dollar, which in turn could raise the price of imports for Americans.

The prospect that the U.S. economy will significantly slow is one reason many investors and analysts now believe the Federal Reserve may not raise rates at its Sept. 20 meeting, which would be the first time since May 2004 it left rates unchanged.

But there are growing concerns that the combination of higher energy prices and some transportation disruptions, coupled with lower economic activity in the Gulf region itself, could be enough to plunge the economy into an actual recession.

Higher energy costs are likely to be felt by businesses across the board, but probably first and foremost by industrial companies and the already struggling airline industry, which could see several new bankruptcies due to soaring jet fuel prices. Northwest Airlines (Research) cited the increased jet fuel prices Friday when it warned of increasing losses that could force it into bankrupcy.

While energy is not as important to the U.S. economy as it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s, it still can take a big bite out of consumer spending, which fuels more than two-thirds of economic activity.

"I don't think it's too soon to talk about a recession, even if I still think there's less than a 50-50 chance," said Doug Porter, deputy chief economist of BMO Nesbitt Burns. "Every other recent recession has been preceded by an energy shock. Certainly at the least there is a risk that growth will be curtailed."

With efforts focused on helping survivors, corpses lie scattered around the city. Trucks will serve as roaming morgues.

NEW ORLEANS — No one knew much about him. He was a black man with close-cropped hair who looked to be in his 40s. He had a high school class ring. He had been at the convention center for four days, no different from thousands of others.

Friday night, he lost it. While others tried to sleep on the sweltering sidewalk around him, he began to mumble to himself, kicking aside piles of trash. He yelled something about his missing wife. Just before midnight, a police car screamed down Convention Center Drive, and from there, the stories diverge.

Some said he just ended it — ran out in front of the car. Some said he was trying to flag it down for help when it clipped him. Some said he had a gun and was either shot or run over.

In some fashion, he died in the street, his blood draining toward the curb and congealing under a pile of crushed orange juice cartons and dirty diapers. He was still there Saturday afternoon, and chances are he is still there today.

"Right where he fell. Like roadkill," said Larry Martin, 35, another evacuee.

Until now, the nation has focused on the survivors. But at some point in coming days, as New Orleans continues to depopulate, the city will reach a tipping point. There may be more dead people here than living as the human exodus continues. And no one knows what will be done with the bodies.

Paramedics walked Saturday in front of the convention center pushing a gurney, but did not pause at the man's body. They were trying to rescue an elderly woman who was bleeding from her right leg and had not gotten out of her chair in three days.

Twin-blade helicopters thundered overhead, and they were trying to get her to a hospital in Lafayette.

"I know it's a tragic situation," said Miles Watts, a city paramedic. "But we need to save people who are alive first. We're going to have to deal with the dead ones later."

Officials are devising a plan to cope with the dead, but it is still in its infancy.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who predicted that the death toll could reach into the thousands, said Saturday that officials were assembling refrigerated 18-wheelers that would serve as roaming morgues.

Nagin said it might be impossible to find enough room to bury the bodies; they might all be cremated.

Unburied corpses present little, if any, risk of infectious diseases, experts agree. For one thing, people in the Katrina disaster did not die from infectious disease and thus do not likely harbor infectious agents to spread. Moreover, infectious agents in corpses do not survive long, said epidemiologist Oliver Morgan of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

"After these big events, where there are large numbers of fatalities, there is a rush to dispose of the dead and a lot of scare stories about imminent epidemics," Morgan said. "But the risk of disease transmission is really coming from the surviving population."

No one is sure when recovery of those killed by Katrina — whether in the floodwaters the hurricane left behind or the violence that erupted in its wake — will begin. It is unclear how those without wallets or papers on their bodies might be identified. And, of course, it is unclear how many there will be.

"I don't think we're quite ready for all of that," Nagin said.

Until they are, the bodies continue to surface: on the steps of the Superdome; in the besieged 9th Ward; at an elementary school where a man's body washed up on the steps inside a basement classroom; under a freeway ramp next to a submerged SUV.

Teams searching for survivors in attics and on rooftops have been given instructions to tie bodies that they encounter to street poles so they can be collected later.

The dilemma is not restricted to the civilian population. Watts said a distraught New Orleans police officer shot and killed himself at a staging area in Algiers, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, on Friday night.

"We didn't even have a body bag to put him in," Watts said.

But perhaps the greatest disappointment stands at the breached 17th Street levee. Touring this critical site yesterday with the President, I saw what I believed to be a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe. Flying over this critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later, it became apparent that yesterday we witnessed a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The good and decent people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast - black and white, rich and poor, young annd old - deserve far better from their national governmeent.

New Orleans a 'ghost town' for 9 months

By Geoffrey Lean and Andrew Gumbel
Published: 04 September 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310186.ece

New Orleans will have to be abandoned for at least nine months, and many of its people will remain homeless for up to two years, the US government believes.

The bleak assessment will deepen the biggest crisis faced by President George Bush, who last week called the devastation of Hurricane Katrina a " temporary disruption".

As the relief effort finally got under way yesterday for the tens of thousands of people left without food, water, medicines or the rule of law for five days, the federal official in charge of disaster recovery told foreign diplomats that reconstruction cannot begin until next summer.

The President is now facing a political hurricane of his own, with gathering criticism, even from inside his own party, for failing to heed warnings of the city's vulnerability, cutting spending on its defences to pay for the wars on terror and in Iraq, and responding sluggishly to the worst natural catastrophe ever to hit his country.

Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, said that every day of delay has caused hundreds of deaths. Louisiana's junior Senator, Republican David Vitter, gave the Bush administration "an F grade" for its handling of the crisis. Senator Chuck Hagel, a leading contender for his party's nomination to succeed Mr Bush, said, "There must be some accountability."

The criticism is all the sharper because the President did nothing to alter his holiday schedule for 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains on holiday in Wyoming. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, returned to Washington after being seen shopping for $7,000 shoes in Manhattan as New Orleans went under.

Dan Craig, the director of recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told the diplomats that it could take up to six months to drain the flood waters out of New Orleans, and another three to allow the city to dry out. Even then, he added, debris and other hazardous material would need to be cleared away before rebuilding could begin. Evacuees could have to be housed by the government for two years.

Officials said that the job of recovering, let alone counting, the dead may not start for weeks. The death toll is likely to far exceed the numbers killed in the 11 September attacks almost exactly four years ago. Sergeant Nicholas Stahl of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness said that rescuers are focusing on finding an estimated 50,000 people still stranded by the flood waters and admitted "there is no system to collect and store bodies".

Even when the bodies are recovered, experts say it will be far harder to identify them than at the World Trade Center, because they are decomposing rapidly in the heat.

New Orleans mayor fears CIA to take him out

Nagin says he has been yelling at governor, president

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he's feeling better about his city, he feels confident he has gotten the attention of Gov. Kathleen Blanco and President Bush, but he said he fears the Central Intelligence Agency may take him out because he's been yelling at these officials.

Last night he told a reporter for the Associated Press: "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened."

Today he told interviewers for CNN on a live broadcast he feared the "CIA might take me out."

Nagin resorted to vulgarity and profanity yesterday in his pleas for help. But he was actually calmer today, despite the hyperbole.

Nagin said Bush gave him a "hearty" greeting and did not seem at all offended by Nagin's earlier outburst.

"I do think the pleas for help basically got the nation's attention, and the nation's attention got everybody to stop and re-evaluate what was going on, including the president. ... He basically said, 'Look, our response was not what it should have been and we're going to fix it right now.'"

09/01/05 "ICH" -- It should no longer be assumed that the “Long Emergency”, as James Howard Kunstler has beautifully named it, will be long. Unfolding before our eyes in the last 72 hours has been the catastrophic manifestation of the consequences of Peak Oil and global warming in tandem. Progressives rail at conservatives for dismissing the reality of global warming, and skeptics across the political spectrum accuse proponents of the Peak Oil theory of being duped by the oil industry. Tragically, nature herself has proven the absurdity of our wrangling and has demonstrated unequivocally that we no longer have the luxury of posturing ourselves against either issue like puerile members of a well-heeled, high-school debating society. In this article, I will set out to “prove” neither the reality of Peak Oil nor global warming. Nature is doing that job quite nicely.

In fact, we have now reached a watershed moment in human history in which all issues other than the survival of humanity and the ecosystems are rapidly paling by comparison. While every conscious crusader against empire, from Cindy Sheehan to Hugo Chavez, must take a stand in the way he/she feels compelled, all must be willing to face the reality that empires do not suddenly cease conquering other nations, that presidents do not run nations, and that even if they did, clean elections no longer exist in the United States. The inmates are in charge of the asylum, and they are hellbent on conquest of the last remaining drops of oil on the planet—hellbent on maintaining their power and that of the corporations who gave it to them, and they will do whatever is required to dominate the earth, including annihilating it. Name any issue except nuclear holocaust, and then measure it against the convergence of global warming and Peak Oil. All of humankind’s ills, at this moment in history, ultimately intersect with the tragic juxtaposition of those two realities.

Psychotics are now running the world. For four decades, they have ignored the truth about world oil supply, and thanks to their intransigent greed, we have passed the point of avoiding a global energy crisis. No combination of technology or materials can be constructed, tested, and implemented in time to avoid it. Even in the face of irrevocable energy meltdown, madmen like Schwarzenegger veto solar energy power measures for the most populated state in America. But then psychotics are often suicidal—or sometimes they have a plan for eliminating everyone in the asylum who isn’t mad. Nothing is too bizarre or savage for them to consider.

In fact, the Katrina catastrophe may have been a creation of the Pentagon’s High-Frequency Active Aural Research Program (HAARP), a weapon of mass destruction that is capable of de-stablizing the weather and ecology of entire regions of the earth. (http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/haarp.html). If the devastation in the Gulf Coast were such a creation, what a convenient way to spike gas prices overnight! A notion the anti-Peak Oil proponents may be entertaining at this moment while arguing that there is plenty of oil left on the planet, and that skyrocketing energy prices have nothing to do with Peak Oil but rather the abject greed of the oil industry.

I have been researching Peak Oil for some time, particularly the findings of petroleum geologists who have no connection with the industry. But three decades before we saw the term “Peak Oil” in print, the reality of catastrophic oil depletion as a result of the consumption and population patterns of the United States and China, were impending and irrefutable certainties for which the bills are now coming due. Are the oil companies sucking every dime possible from oil depletion? Most certainly they are, AND (not “but”), that does not invalidate the fact that no nation can maintain what the United States has been maintaining since the end of World War II on current oil supplies which have become less abundant and more costly to acquire during the past five decades. Add to this the volatility of global warming and resultant climate change, and only an energy cataclysm can result.

But the larger picture, obviously, is what Peak Oil is putting on our plates—or taking off them, as the effects ripple through the economy. At the moment, it does not appear that the ripples will move slowly. Hurricane Katrina may have triggered a chain reaction that could result in an economic 9-11, and most certainly, the beginning of the end of the American empire. Catherine Austin Fitts (www.solari.com) has conjectured that the demise of the empire might occur gradually as a “slow burn” or suddenly in the form of one domino after another toppling, producing virulent economic reverberations throughout the nation and the world. One such strategic domino which is about to topple is the housing market, the bubble of which may burst at any moment. Subsequently, a long, cold winter with soaring natural gas home heating prices, may well produce an avalanche of falling dominoes. However it plays out, it behooves us to relinquish our teddy bear notions about American regime change and recognize the madness that is now driving national and world events.

For me, this means getting my personal and political priorities in order. Economic collapse and the devastation of Peak Oil require me to prepare my own household and my community in every way possible to navigate our formidable future. For some, it may mean co-housing, intentional communities, or other options for shared housing arrangements, but in every case, it means “Powering Down” (see Power Down, by Richard Heinberg (www.museletter.com ) and learning to live with much less. For specifics on preparing for the ramifications of Peak Oil, see Matt Savinar’s website www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and click on “Preparations”. Also instructive is Dimitri Orlov’s three-part article series on surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/060105_soviet_lessons.shtml.

By all means, feel free to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scream loudly that they are nothing more than petro-pillaging adventures based on scandalous lies. None of us could have been prepared for September 11, 2001, but just as the “map” of world events forever changed on that day, future historians will note that the United States entered the post-carbon era during the final week of August, 2005. As Mike Ruppert wrote earlier this week at his website, www.fromthewilderness.com :

Katrina's landfall on August 29, 2005 may well be remembered as the beginning of the collapse of the American Empire. It could also be remembered by future generations as the day that Mother Earth declared full-scale war on the human race.

[With the rubber band of global supply elasticity virtually snapped by Katrina, developments like this could make a horrible situation worse. Some have suggested that US covert operatives might be connected to events like what we see below. The question is why? And especially, why now? Events like these in Iran would only accelerate the global energy meltdown already underway. Any disruption of Iranian supply at this point threatens the economies of Asia, Western Europe, India, and Japan. I cannot even begin to answer the question of who would benefit from this. – MCR]

Iranian oil-ministry officials on Saturday were assessing how much crude-oil flow had been affected after five of the country's oil wells were shut down following blasts early Thursday.

"Things are still being assessed. It is not exactly clear as to how much oil has been affected or for how long," one Iranian oil official said.

Other people familiar with the situation estimate anywhere between 50,000 to 60,000 barrels a day of crude oil has been shut-in following the explosions in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, one of the country's major oil hubs. Iran is second largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries with crude output of around 4.2 million barrels a day.

Earlier Saturday, an official at the Khuzestan province governor's office told Dow Jones Newswires that the explosions were "terrorist operations" against Iranian oil interests. Gholam-Reza Shariati, deputy governor-general in charge of security affairs, said a number of people have been taken into custody in relation to the explosions.

According to reports, three handmade bombs exploded before dawn Thursday, leading to the shutdown of crude oil from five wells around Ahwaz, the capital of Khuzestan. Reports also suggest the blasts are linked to Arabic ethnic unrest in Khuzestan in June, in which eight people were killed and 36 injured in Ahwaz by explosions that targeted government buildings and officials.

Sept. 1 (Bloomberg) -- As Hurricane Katrina slammed through the Gulf of Mexico, energy companies evacuated offshore workers and shut about 91 percent of the region's oil production, or 1.37 million barrels daily.

``There isn't the global spare capacity out there to replace this loss if it continues for a prolonged period,'' says Bart Melek, a senior economist at BMO Nesbitt Burns in Toronto. ``Already the market is tight as a drum, and if anything else happens, say instability in the Middle East, I wouldn't preclude $100 oil at all.''

Katrina ripped drilling rigs from moorings, damaged production platforms and curtailed pipeline shipments, idling 11 percent of U.S. refining capacity and leaving oil supplies vulnerable to another crisis. A shortage of aircraft and workers is hobbling efforts by energy companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP Plc to assess damage to the 819 staffed production platforms and 137 drilling rigs off Louisiana and Texas.

``This hurricane caused catastrophic devastation,'' the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement on its Web site. Five oil rigs from the West Delta Platform are missing, one submersible rig is grounded, two mobile offshore drilling units are adrift, two semi- submersibles are listing, and the Mars platform owned by Royal Dutch Shell Plc is severely damaged, the statement said, without providing further details.

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman emphasized the shortage of spare global supply, now less than 2 million barrels of crude oil a day, by saying the government would release oil from the nation's 700 million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve to make up for the lost offshore production.

Crude oil traded at $69.52 a barrel in after-hours trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 6:01 p.m. Tokyo time, up 0.8 percent from yesterday's close of $68.94. Prices reached a record $70.85 on Aug. 30.

West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices in the U.S. would have to reach $96 a barrel to match the April 1980 high in inflation-adjusted terms. Prices may exceed that level in the event of another major disruption, says Peter Linder, an energy analyst and senior adviser to Calgary-based mutual fund company DeltaOne Capital Partners.

``If something goes wrong in Venezuela or Nigeria we could see prices above $100,'' Linder says. ``Otherwise, we may see prices around the low 70s again.''

At least eight oil refineries in Louisiana and Mississippi closed because of the storm. That pushed gasoline futures prices to a record $2.92 a gallon in New York yesterday and indicated that pump prices nationwide would be in excess of $3 a gallon.

Natural gas prices rose to records above $12 per million British thermal units in New York because the production cutoff came as U.S. utilities were building inventories for use in the coldest months. Gas prices closed at $11.472 yesterday.

``We could have a catastrophic failure of the oil and gas infrastructure going into the winter,'' said James Glickenhaus, who helps manage $1.2 billion at Glickenhaus & Co. in New York. Natural gas last winter cost $6.786 per million British thermal units. ``Now it's almost double that.''

In a White House speech, President George W. Bush outlined some of the steps already announced by his Cabinet secretaries, including deployment of military ships and planes, waiving rules on fuel blends to ease gasoline shortages and releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

``Our citizens must understand this storm has disrupted the capacity to make gasoline and distribute gasoline,'' Bush said after flying over the storm-ravaged area aboard Air Force One.

At Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil's Chalmette, Louisiana, refinery, blackouts are just one obstacle to returning to work. Employees needed to run the facility are under mandatory evacuation orders, the company says.

``We can't do much without power or people,'' said Mary Rose Brown, a spokeswoman for San Antonio-based Valero Energy Corp., whose refinery in St. Charles, Louisiana, remained closed. ``We can't do anything until folks are allowed to return to the area and we get power to the refinery.''

Drilling rigs were adrift following the storm. Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc. found its Ocean Warwick rig 66 miles off site, grounded on Alabama's Dauphin Island. Another Diamond rig drifted 9 miles from its pre-storm location. Houston-based Rowan Cos. said one of its 22 Gulf rigs may have sunk.

As rigs drift through oil and gas fields, they risk colliding with other structures or dragging anchors across sub- sea pipelines, accidents that could cause spills and threaten the environment.

``There's the potential for some environmental impact,'' U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Rob Wyman said from St. Louis. ``We are trying to keep tabs on them.''

Hurricane Ivan last year caused a leak of about 200,000 barrels of oil from an underwater pipeline.

Shell, Europe's second-largest oil company, said its Mars oil-production platform was ``significantly damaged,'' while flights and onsite visits confirmed damage to the Cognac platforms and the West Delta-143 pumping station in the central Gulf of Mexico area.

Companies are trying to cope with a shortage of equipment, aircraft and workers. Replacing lost rigs won't be easy because of demand, said Les Van Dyke, a spokesman for Houston-based Diamond.

``The availability of rigs prior to the storm was very limited,'' he said. ``So operators and drilling contractors aren't going to be able to shuffle these units at will.''

Oil companies were lining up aircraft to fly over their rigs to do inspections, as restrictions on flight time limited available pilots. Lafayette, Louisiana-based Offshore Logistics Inc. was ``flat out'' of helicopters after leaving 15 aircraft at a Venice, Louisiana, base that was flooded, Chief Executive William Chiles said.

``We're transporting personnel over onto facilities in the central Gulf and expect only light damage,'' Brian Engel, a spokesman at Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy Corp. said by phone. ``Aerial inspections are being undertaken on the eastern Gulf, which is expected to be the hardest hit.''

Even after companies can find available employees, getting them to work sites is a challenge.

``The real struggle here and the tragedy isn't the equipment, but the people who work on these rigs who were on shore and had their homes impacted and their families,'' said Van Dyke of Diamond.

Some ports were reopening. Port Fourchon, Louisiana, base for three-quarters of support services to the Gulf's deepwater oil and gas facilities, resumed operations Aug. 30, Port Director Ted Falgout said. The port is using generators for electricity until local power lines are repaired. Large vessels blocked roads in the port after flooding caused by the storm, he said.

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which normally handles about 11 percent of U.S. oil imports, was trying to unload a tanker late yesterday at its platform about 20 miles off the Louisiana coast. The port, which was shut because of the storm, resumed shipping oil to an Exxon Mobil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, port spokesman Mark Bugg said.

Katrina's damage extended to pipelines needed to get oil and gas from the Gulf to customers across the U.S. Shell-operated pipelines from Gulf of Mexico offshore platforms remain shut and are being assessed for damage.

Shell's Capline crude oil pipeline resumed operations at a reduced rate after being shut because of power failures caused by the hurricane. The pipeline transports as much as 1.2 million barrels a day of crude oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico or imported from overseas to Patoka, Illinois, more than 650 miles away from its base at St. James, Louisiana.

Four Shell pipelines carrying refined oil products between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are still shut, the statement said. The system isn't operating because of power outages and a lack of supply from refineries closed by the hurricane, it said.

Four El Paso Corp. compressor stations south of New Orleans need repairs, spokesman Joe Hollier said.

``We definitely have some damaged facilities,'' Hollier said. Observations from aircraft revealed ``some debris and flooding'' at the Toca, Olga, Leeville and Point Sulfur stations in Louisiana, which gather and pump gas at intervals along the Southern Natural Gas and Tennessee Gas pipelines.

The damage reduced gas shipments on El Paso's 8,000-mile Southern system stretching from Texas to South Carolina by 19 percent, and by 15 percent on its Tennessee Gas Pipeline.

Williams Cos., the largest U.S. natural-gas pipeline owner, has yet to assess its underwater pipelines. The company lost power at its Mobile Bay, Alabama, natural gas processing plant. Otherwise, inspections haven't shown significant damage at facilities, the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based company said.

Colonial Pipeline Co., which runs the world's biggest network of petroleum-product pipelines, shut two fuel pipelines after Hurricane Katrina cut power in Mississippi and Louisiana. The lines haul fuel from Houston to North Carolina. Alpharetta, Georgia-based Colonial said it plans to restore the pipelines this weekend using diesel generators.

Refiners and wholesalers are restricting the amount of fuel that retailers east of the Rocky Mountains can buy, a form of rationing known in the trade as allocation, said Dan Gilligan, president of the Arlington, Virginia-based Petroleum Marketers Association of America.

``This reflects significant concern on the part of suppliers about how bad the damage was from the hurricane,'' said James Smith, president of the Florida Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Operators Association. ``We're all walking on egg shells.''

After Hurricane Ivan struck the Alabama coast last September, energy companies labored five months to restore most of the production, and pipeline operator El Paso still was repairing damage in recent months, Hollier said.

``This will be much more protracted for the industry than Ivan,'' said Doug Hohertz, who helps manage $395 million at the Mitchell Group in Houston and also says another disruption would push oil to $80 a barrel. ``All the people who lived there and worked in the oil industry have been completely displaced. Their industry is going to have to figure out how to bring them back.''

Natural-gas production in the Gulf is vital because the North American market has little ability to tap government reserves or overseas supplies, options available to oil companies.

``Typically this time of year, we seek to build inventories,'' said Jason Schenker, an economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte. ``This is going to put us behind the eight ball going into the winter.''

Power outages will hamper the energy market by shutting down refineries and pipeline compressors. New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which had 80 percent of its Louisiana customers lose power, said it may take weeks to restore supplies within the state.

Producers, refiners, pipeline companies and utilities are still at risk. September typically is the most active month in the June-through-November Atlantic Basin hurricane season. That means energy prices may have another round of increases, said Stephen Pope, head of equities at Cantor Fitzgerald in London.

Shell's Mars facility has a production capacity of about 220,000 barrels of oil a day and 220 million cubic feet of natural gas, according to Shell. The West Delta-143 facility handles production from the Mars and Ursa platforms, capable of pumping as much as 450,000 barrels of oil and 700 million cubic feet of gas a day, Shell's Web site said.

Cognac was producing 72,000 barrels of oil and 100 million cubic feet of gas a day by the end of 1982, the latest production figures available on the Shell Web site. Bianca Ruakere, a spokeswoman for Shell in London, couldn't confirm the amount of oil and gas the affected units were producing.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Jim Kennett in Houston at jkennett@bloomberg.net;
Hector Forster in Tokyo at hforster@bloomberg.net.

At Least 58 Oil Platforms, Drilling Rigs in Gulf of Mexico Damaged by Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina damaged or displaced an estimated 58 Gulf of Mexico oil platforms and drilling rigs, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Among those, 30 rigs and platforms have been reported lost. No company breakdown was available, said Tim Sampson, an API spokesman.

One of the more significant reported losses of platforms or rigs came from Houston-based Apache Corp. On Thursday, Apache said it lost eight platforms that produce 7,158 barrels of oil and 12.1 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.

That's about 10 percent of the lost oil production and 2 percent of the shut in gas reported earlier this week, said company spokesman Bill Mintz.

Earlier in the week, Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc.'s Ocean Warwick was found about 60 miles from its original position near Dauphin Island off the coast of Alabama. A photo of the displaced rig found its way on Internet sites and newspapers worldwide, creating one of many indelible images of Katrina's strength.

Diamond also had another rig, Ocean Voyager, break from its moorings, but tug boats were bringing it to shipyards for further assessment, said company CFO Gary Krenek.

"We've boarded the rest of the rigs," Krenek said. "There is some minor damage, but nothing near the extent as the Voyager or the Warwick."

Also, earlier in the week, Shell Oil Co. reported heavy topside flooding to its Mars platform.

Sampson said even with these reports, it's still too early to gauge damage in the Gulf.

"It could still be the end of next week before we get pipeline damage," he said. "You still have to do things like pressure-test the lines."

Right before the worst moments, a window of time opens just wide enough to let hindsight and regret rush in.

$3.09, to be precise, at a BP station on Connecticut Avenue in Montgomery County. You could watch the prices surge by the hour yesterday on http://washingtondcgasprices.com , a Web site that tracks the level of pain at local stations. As late as Tuesday evening, regular was $2.49 at a BP in Manassas. But by yesterday afternoon, even the usual cheap spots in Prince William County were leaping past $2.70. By the weekend, that will seem downright cheap.

News masochists -- folks like me who find perverse pleasure in looking back at stories that told us what was coming even though we were too dim to listen -- read reams of reporting on how New Orleans was destined to end up underwater, gas prices were certain to push toward $4 a gallon and the depletion of the planet's oil supply portends the end of suburbia.

In this information-saturated society, someone has made the case for any imaginable doomsday scenario. Some are nut jobs; some are seers.

James Jordan is one of those thinkers who tends to be annoyingly right. Jordan, a career Navy engineer, now runs an energy company in Oakton that develops ways to produce hydrogen fuel from coal. He also works on maglev technology, which uses magnets and electricity to propel trains at more than 300 mph.

Jordan, 68, has spent his working life watching politicians avoid the reality that we are too dependent on oil. It's so much easier to win votes by promising to lower taxes, ignoring aging infrastructure and leaving the mess for the next generation.

U.S. engineers and scientists haven't helped prepare for an era of declining oil because "we're so focused on health and national security," Jordan says. "We've neglected getting young people involved in how to keep our sewage plants and water supply going and fix our transportation system. Put out bids for subway cars, and all the bids come from Europe. I know -- my wife tells me this is boring stuff. But it's essential."

The hysterics say that as gas prices soar, American society will collapse. You can see a movie that pushes this line, "The End of Suburbia," tomorrow at the Old Town Theater in Alexandria. But history tells us that Americans drive no matter what the price at the pump. Still, public unhappiness over $3 gas will become visible. Voters may not have the answers, but they know how to throw the bums out.

Jordan believes that only such anger can pressure politicians to do what must be done: Use existing technology and push for new ways to boost energy efficiency. Pump money into renewable energy sources. And harden our infrastructure against weather and terrorism.

"We have the knowledge and materials to protect our water, power and sewage treatment facilities," Jordan says. "It's not going to be cheap, but it would produce enormous numbers of jobs. But it will only happen if the American public conveys that we want to be taxed for this priority."

Ha! The day Americans seek higher taxes, there'll be gators swimming in the streets of the French Quarter. Oh. Right.

Pieces of the solution are already floating around us. Plans to remake Tysons Corner into a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood show that we do not face a binary choice between endless sprawl and a forced return to 19th-century city living. Hybrid engines point toward enormous efficiencies.

The trendy scare story of the moment is peak oil, the growing consensus that we have used up about half the Earth's oil. The downside of the supply slope won't be pretty.

Environmentalist radicals see doom ahead. But even the suits of Big Oil agree on the underlying facts: "Simply put, the era of easy access to energy is over," David O'Reilly, chairman of Chevron, said this year. "We are experiencing the convergence of geological difficulty with geopolitical instability. . . . The time when we could count on cheap oil and even cheaper natural gas is clearly ending."

New Orleans a 'ghost town' for 9 months

By Geoffrey Lean and Andrew Gumbel Published: 04 September 2005 http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310186.ece

By Geoffrey Lean and Andrew Gumbel
Published: 04 September 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310186.ece