Two Vacancies Give Bush a Chance to Solidify Court's Right
By Charles Lane and Fred Barbash
If the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor opened a gap at the ideological center of the Supreme Court, the death of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist removed the anchor of its right wing.
Yet in what is suddenly a much more complex process of replacing not only O'Connor but also Rehnquist, President Bush has an opportunity to shore up the court's conservative bloc and entrench it.
Rehnquist's replacement will probably serve for many years to come; if the new justice's views remain conservative over that time, it will mean the effective perpetuation of a Rehnquist-like vote on the court long after Bush is gone.
"Even if you appoint someone who is identical to Rehnquist in every respect, you're talking about someone who is about 50 rather than 80," said Richard Lazarus, who directs the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.
Bush must also be sensitive to the fact that replacing a chief justice is not quite the same as replacing an associate. The titular head of the federal judiciary needs to be temperamentally suited to organizing the strong-minded jurists who sit with him on the Supreme Court and on lower courts.
"The next chief justice, whether chosen from within or outside the court, has a very high mark to follow," said A.E. Dick Howard, a professor of law at the University of Virginia. "Ideology aside, it's going to be difficult to run the court any better than he did," referring to Rehnquist. "We will look back on the Rehnquist court as one of the smoothest in the court's history."
And the president must fill the void quickly to minimize the disruptions to the judicial process that can occur when the Supreme Court is short-handed.
Unlike the departure of O'Connor, who often voted with Rehnquist and other conservatives on the court but who defected on social issues, the death of Rehnquist means the loss of an unequivocally conservative vote -- and voice -- on the court.
Of the justices remaining, only two, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, can be called sure votes to overturn Roe v. Wade , should a direct challenge to that abortion rights ruling come before the court. Only Scalia, Thomas and Anthony M. Kennedy are firmly opposed to affirmative action.
Almost all of those mentioned as likely successors to Rehnquist would probably vote as he has.
The one exception could be Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. His record suggests he could be slightly to Rehnquist's left on issues such as affirmative action, which he has supported in public statements, and Roe , which he cited as valid precedent while a justice of the Texas Supreme Court.
He could be to the right of Rehnquist on issues relating to anti-terrorism efforts; Rehnquist voted against the Bush administration's policy of denying court hearings to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which Gonzales supported.
An analysis of recent voting patterns at the court for the last five terms (not counting the last 12 cases decided this term) by attorney Kevin Russell of the law firm Goldstein & Howe shows that Rehnquist has cast a deciding vote in only 14 percent of 361 cases decided during that period.
These included such high-profile cases as Bush v. Gore , which ended the 2000 election, and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris , in 2002, which permitted the use of publicly funded school tuition aid for private religious education. But most of them were relatively minor.
Also, Russell's study showed that there is relatively little room to Rehnquist's right on the court. He cast a deciding vote against Scalia and Thomas only five times.
If Rehnquist had been replaced by "an ideological twin" of Scalia during the court's most recent term, Russell noted, only two of his votes would have been different. But in one of those, plugging in a Scalia clone would have favored a criminal defendant's claim, and in one of them it would have favored prosecutors.
Some academic observers thought that Rehnquist's leadership skills and his human touch would be harder to replace than his ideology.
Certainly it was personal qualities that his colleagues on the court emphasized in their public statements yesterday, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a formulation echoed by other justices, praising him as "a plain speaker without airs or affectations." Ginsburg said that Rehnquist "fostered a spirit of collegiality among the nine of us perhaps unparalleled in the Court's history."
At the moment, the court is down to eight members, as O'Connor's retirement takes effect upon the confirmation of a successor.
The last time the court functioned with only eight members for an extended period was in 1987, after Justice Lewis F. Powell retired on June 26 of that year. After the defeat of Robert Bork as a replacement, followed by the withdrawal of a second nominee, Douglas Ginsburg, a successor, Anthony M. Kennedy, was not confirmed until Feb. 3, 1988.
The court had only eight members for 363 days between the resignation of Justice Abe Fortas on May 14, 1969, and the confirmation of his successor, Harry A. Blackmun, on May 12, 1970.
Each time, a short-handed court labored to avoid 4 to 4 tie votes, which automatically affirm a lower court's ruling but create no binding legal precedent.
In an oral history recorded in 1995, Blackmun recalled how he was greeted with a pile of 47 petitions for certiorari that had been held to see whether he would supply a fourth vote needed to hear the cases.
The court now has similar options to prevent tie votes and other anomalies; for example, it can postpone hearing certain close cases until it is back at full strength.
"If [the White House] wants the court not to suffer the way it has in past cases, they've got to get moving," said Dennis J. Hutchinson, a professor of law at the University of Chicago. "On the other hand, if they say, 'We're talking about a 20-, 25-year cycle,' that's more important than the court being stalled in the water for a few months."
By law, Rehnquist's position will be filled on an interim basis by Justice John Paul Stevens, 85, the senior associate justice.
It is the first time an associate justice has filled in for a chief justice who died in office since Justice Hugo Black replaced Harlan Fiske Stone for 63 days in 1946.
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Common Ground Common Sense > National & International News > Daily National and International News > National News Archive
Troubles Travel Upstream
By Caroline E. Mayer and Amy Joyce
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 outside was calm now.
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."
Mayer reported from Illinois. Joyce reported from Baton Rouge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle
By Caroline E. Mayer and Amy Joyce
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 outside was calm now.
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."
Mayer reported from Illinois. Joyce reported from Baton Rouge.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle
http://iht.com/articles/2005/09/04/news/bush.php
Challenges to Bush leadership mount as poll numbers slide
Challenges to Bush leadership mount as poll numbers slide
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Official Death Toll Starts to Mount
--------------------
Thousands of Bodies Are Expected in a Recovery Process That May Last Months
By Scott Gold, Richard A. Serrano and Peter H. King
Times Staff Writers
September 5 2005
NEW ORLEANS; The nation's senior health official bluntly predicted Sunday that Hurricane Katrina's death toll would rise into the thousands as Louisiana medical authorities tallied the first sobering evidence — 59 dead in makeshift morgues and another 100 corpses lined on docks east of the flood-swept city.
The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
Official Death Toll Starts to Mount
--------------------
Thousands of Bodies Are Expected in a Recovery Process That May Last Months
By Scott Gold, Richard A. Serrano and Peter H. King
Times Staff Writers
September 5 2005
NEW ORLEANS; The nation's senior health official bluntly predicted Sunday that Hurricane Katrina's death toll would rise into the thousands as Louisiana medical authorities tallied the first sobering evidence — 59 dead in makeshift morgues and another 100 corpses lined on docks east of the flood-swept city.
The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
--------------------
Why FEMA Was Missing in Action
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Most of the agency's preparedness budget and focus are related to terrorism, not disasters.
By Peter G. Gosselin and Alan C. Miller
Times Staff Writers
September 5 2005
WASHINGTON; While the federal government has spent much of the last quarter-century trimming the safety nets it provides Americans, it has dramatically expanded its promise of protection in one area — disaster.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
Why FEMA Was Missing in Action
--------------------
Most of the agency's preparedness budget and focus are related to terrorism, not disasters.
By Peter G. Gosselin and Alan C. Miller
Times Staff Writers
September 5 2005
WASHINGTON; While the federal government has spent much of the last quarter-century trimming the safety nets it provides Americans, it has dramatically expanded its promise of protection in one area — disaster.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines
Perry orders prep to fly refugees from Texas to other statesWith Texas shelters reaching their limit of refugees from Hurricane Katrina, Gov. Rick Perry launched plans to fly some of them to other states that have offered help.
The full article will be available on the Web for a limited time:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/12562704.htm
© 2005 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
The full article will be available on the Web for a limited time:
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/12562704.htm
© 2005 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1125842...ats%5Fnews%5Fus
Hurricane Raises Potential
For a Global Energy Crisis
Lengthy Production Snags
Could Hit U.S. Economy,
Then Extend World-Wide
By RUSSELL GOLD in Austin, Texas, and THADDEUS HERRICK in Houston
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 5, 2005 1:28 a.m.
Nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina cut through a main artery of the U.S. energy industry, a large amount of crucial infrastructure remains offline, leaving the world's largest economy and the rest of the globe on the brink of a potential energy crisis.
The Gulf of Mexico coastal region ravaged by Katrina is home to one-fourth of America's oil production, multibillion-dollar floating platforms that were situated far out at sea, refinery complexes that turn crude into gasoline, and a thicket of pipelines that connect them all. A focused picture of the damage to the region's infrastructure remains elusive amid the post-storm chaos, but in broad strokes, it is becoming clear the industry faces a two-pronged problem.
Its ability to turn crude oil into gasoline is under extraordinary pressure. The storm cut off about two million barrels a day of crude-oil refining capacity, resulting in the loss of one million barrels a day of gasoline production -- or 10% of U.S. demand. Four refineries that together represent about 5% of U.S. oil-refining capacity will be out of commission for at least a month, while another 5% of refinery capacity knocked out by Katrina appears likely to restart in coming days and weeks.
• Updated photos | Graphics: Hotspots
• U.S. Moves to Ease Strain on Gasoline Market
• Congress Looks to Fill Energy Gaps
• See complete coverage.
At the same time, offshore facilities that pump crude oil and natural gas from prolific underground reservoirs and carry the fuel ashore suffered widespread damage. Production is returning slowly, and it isn't clear whether it will takes weeks or months to return to anything near normal output levels.
The federal government's decision to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is helping some crude-choked refineries resume normal operations. But ultimately restoring sufficient gasoline production appears to rely most heavily on repairing the refineries, not adding more crude oil to the market.
An economy-walloping energy shock in the U.S., which consumes a quarter of the world's oil and whose demand for foreign goods is underpinning world-wide growth, would be felt around the globe.
Economic forecasters surveyed by Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, a St. Louis forecasting firm, estimate that the effects of Hurricane Katrina will reduce the growth rate of gross domestic product, on average, between 0.5 and 0.7 percentage point in the third and fourth quarters of this year. (See related article.) Before the hurricane, the forecasters surveyed by the firm were anticipating that the U.S. economy, which the government estimates grew at a 3.3% annual rate in the second quarter, would expand 4.3% in the third quarter and 3.6% in the fourth.
"Higher prices for energy have already eroded real income, and will, temporarily at least, reduce aggregate demand," the firm wrote.
Price Pressure
Whether the looming energy crisis spreads and persists long enough to hammer the economy depends on a variety of factors, among them whether Europe and other countries can supply adequate imports. But with the world facing a refinery-capacity crunch, and U.S. refiners running their plants at full capacity to meet soaring demand for gasoline and diesel, even the slightest sustained outage will likely put considerable pressure on prices.
The blow to Gulf of Mexico crude-oil output also puts a big strain on the entire global market, leaving the world vulnerable to outright shortages of crude should another shock of Katrina's scale hit an oil-producing nation.
On Friday, consumers, who have seen gasoline prices skyrocket at the pump since the hurricane, got some good news. The International Energy Agency agreed to release two million barrels a day of crude oil, gasoline and other fuels on to the world market from their strategic stockpiles over the ensuing 30 days. That is equal to about 2.4% of the world's daily fuel consumption.
In response, gasoline futures fell nearly 23 cents in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange to settle at $2.18 a gallon, or 57 cents a liter, after the IEA news. Crude oil, the raw material from which fuels are refined, also fell in Nymex trading, settling at $67.57 a barrel on Friday, down $1.90.
But the IEA's bold move is a reminder that the world has now started running on its reserve fuel tanks -- oil and refined products stockpiled over the past two decades for use only in true emergencies. Western oil companies are already pumping at full capacity. Russia, the world's No. 2 producer, is producing all it can. Even Saudi Arabia, the top exporter, and its fellow members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries can do little to alleviate the emerging crisis. OPEC has spare capacity of some 1.5 million barrels a day -- which is just about equivalent to the production lost last week in the Gulf of Mexico because of Hurricane Katrina.
The huge blow to the Gulf of Mexico has led to long lines at filling stations in much of the U.S., and outright shortages in some places. Panic buying of gasoline was reported as far away as the Czech Republic. On Saturday, Czech news agency CTK said drivers lined up at filling stations around the country after prices jumped by the equivalent of 14 cents per liter overnight, Reuters reported.
The extent of the price shock will depend in part on whether Americans conserve fuel amid the supply outages. Traffic over the Labor Day holiday weekend was noticeably lighter from Georgia to Colorado, the Associated Press reported. It also said 10% of West Virginia stations ran out of at least one grade of gas.
People were discouraged from driving by uncertain availability of gasoline and by the spiking cost of fuel. Gasoline was well above $3 a gallon at many stations across the country; in mid-August, the average national retail price was about $2.50. Americans also appeared to be heeding the calls of leaders, President Bush among them, who are encouraging conservation for the next few weeks.
But in the driving-addicted nation, the gasoline crunch is rapidly becoming a political controversy. Mr. Bush and others are warning against price gouging, state attorneys general are mounting investigations and Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, is urging the Federal Trade Commission to monitor the oil industry for price manipulation.
For the industry, the immediate concern is the vast effort to get the Gulf energy system back on its feet.
A Chevron Corp. official said Chevron's largest U.S. refinery, located on an inland channel in Pascagoula, Mississippi, would be shut for a considerable amount of time and unavailable to turn crude into much-needed gasoline to ease the fuel crunch. Crews would only begin assessing the extensive damage in Pascagoula later this week.
"We don't know when we will be expecting crude shipments," said Michael Barrett, a Chevron spokesman, although the terminal is open to accept tankers carrying gasoline and other products.
Mr. Barrett wouldn't provide an estimate of how long it would take to restart. But officials with the Mexican national oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, which is a large supplier of crude to the refinery, said they were told by Chevron to cease shipments for at least a month. Chevron declined to comment on discussions with individual suppliers.
Three additional refineries -- all located southeast of New Orleans -- still don't have electricity and are believed to have sustained major damage from flooding, according to the federal Energy Department, and could also take at least a month to restart. These refineries are owned and operated by ConocoPhillips Co.; a joint venture of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the Venezuelan state oil company; and Murphy Oil Corp. Together with Chevron's Pascagoula refinery, the four hobbled industrial complexes represent about 5% of U.S. refining capacity, a significant blow to the country's ability to produce enough gasoline and heating fuel.
Valero Energy Corp, America's largest refiner, was working to restart its St. Charles, Louisiana, plant, but spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown said, "We're still in the middle of a relief effort for our own employees." Ms. Brown said the company has heard from 260 of 570 plant workers and that 150 employees have reported to work. She said the company may be forced to bring in workers from its other refineries.
Other refineries, however, appear to be on the mend. Marathon Oil Corp. said over the weekend that its Garyville, Louisiana, refinery should be running at full capacity by today.
Offshore, assessment and repair of gulf platforms after a slow start has begun in earnest. The U.S. Coast Guard reports that 21 platforms are believed to have sunk. And on another 20, the pumps, generators and control rooms are either missing or damaged.
The key -- and so far unanswered -- question is how many of these battered platforms are giant deep-water floaters responsible for about half of gulf production. At least one giant deep-water platform, Royal Dutch Shell PLC's Mars platform, sustained significant damage. By itself, this facility produces about 10% of the daily oil and gas output from the gulf.
'State of Near Paralysis'
Many platforms that survived with just dents and dings remain idled because the status of pipelines needed to move the fuel to shore was uncertain. On Saturday, nearly 68% of combined oil and gas operations in the gulf remained offline, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.
There are growing signs the industry itself realizes it could take more than a month to return to anything even resembling normal operations. On the spot markets for Louisiana crude, trading volumes were unusually thin for barrels to be delivered next month -- a sign of the fundamental uncertainty permeating the region.
The markets are in "a state of near paralysis," says Tim Mingee, a Houston-based editor of the daily Americas Crude report, published by Argus Media Ltd. "Producers don't know what volumes they will be able to sell and on the refining side, they don't know what they will be able to buy," he says. Daily trading volume of a common variety of Louisiana crude fell 73% last week from the period immediately before Katrina's landfall.
Still, energy observers were upset by the lack of information. "It's too early to draw any accurate conclusions because of a frustrating lack of information," says Rodney Mitchell, president of Mitchell Group Inc., a Houston investment management firm focused on energy.
There was some positive news from the storm-battered Gulf energy complex: Exxon said its large Baton Rouge refinery is increasing its production level and should be able to ramp up further as oil supplies increase.
The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, a key import terminal that receives one million barrels of crude a day from overseas tankers, received its first vessel on Friday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. But the facility still isn't functioning normally, as one onshore terminal is without power. Two key pipelines that deliver gasoline and other refined products from the Gulf Coast to the southeast and eastern U.S. were back to near-normal operating conditions.
By helicopter and boat, repairs crews are returning to the several thousand offshore platforms to find many operable, some missing and others badly in need of repairs. Resumption of anything even close to normal operations in the Gulf has been moving at a snail's pace.
Six days after Katrina's landfall, the industry had restarted 243,000 barrels a day of oil and 90 million cubic meters of daily gas production shut down before the storm. By comparison, six days after Hurricane Ivan last year, the industry had restarted 831,000 barrels a day of oil and 123 million cubic meters of gas.
A large reason for the slow-moving recovery is that the companies along the Louisiana coast that provide transportation and equipment for damage assessment and repair are themselves overwhelmed, say people in contact with these operators. Many employees are homeless and scattered all over the region. Some roads and waterways are still impassable.
This has generated a surprising lack of details on the status of offshore producing platforms -- and, more vitally, underwater pipelines. Last year, when Ivan, a less powerful storm, touched the eastern edge of the energy-producing region, its waves triggered underwater mudslides that wreaked havoc on pipelines. Similar damage is believed to have occurred this time. Several offshore natural-gas pipelines had standing orders for customers on several pipeline branches not to pump any gas into the system.
--Bhushan Bahree in New York, David Luhnow in Mexico City and David Wessel in Washington contributed to this article.
Hurricane Raises Potential
For a Global Energy Crisis
Lengthy Production Snags
Could Hit U.S. Economy,
Then Extend World-Wide
By RUSSELL GOLD in Austin, Texas, and THADDEUS HERRICK in Houston
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 5, 2005 1:28 a.m.
Nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina cut through a main artery of the U.S. energy industry, a large amount of crucial infrastructure remains offline, leaving the world's largest economy and the rest of the globe on the brink of a potential energy crisis.
The Gulf of Mexico coastal region ravaged by Katrina is home to one-fourth of America's oil production, multibillion-dollar floating platforms that were situated far out at sea, refinery complexes that turn crude into gasoline, and a thicket of pipelines that connect them all. A focused picture of the damage to the region's infrastructure remains elusive amid the post-storm chaos, but in broad strokes, it is becoming clear the industry faces a two-pronged problem.
Its ability to turn crude oil into gasoline is under extraordinary pressure. The storm cut off about two million barrels a day of crude-oil refining capacity, resulting in the loss of one million barrels a day of gasoline production -- or 10% of U.S. demand. Four refineries that together represent about 5% of U.S. oil-refining capacity will be out of commission for at least a month, while another 5% of refinery capacity knocked out by Katrina appears likely to restart in coming days and weeks.
• Updated photos | Graphics: Hotspots
• U.S. Moves to Ease Strain on Gasoline Market
• Congress Looks to Fill Energy Gaps
• See complete coverage.
At the same time, offshore facilities that pump crude oil and natural gas from prolific underground reservoirs and carry the fuel ashore suffered widespread damage. Production is returning slowly, and it isn't clear whether it will takes weeks or months to return to anything near normal output levels.
The federal government's decision to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is helping some crude-choked refineries resume normal operations. But ultimately restoring sufficient gasoline production appears to rely most heavily on repairing the refineries, not adding more crude oil to the market.
An economy-walloping energy shock in the U.S., which consumes a quarter of the world's oil and whose demand for foreign goods is underpinning world-wide growth, would be felt around the globe.
Economic forecasters surveyed by Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, a St. Louis forecasting firm, estimate that the effects of Hurricane Katrina will reduce the growth rate of gross domestic product, on average, between 0.5 and 0.7 percentage point in the third and fourth quarters of this year. (See related article.) Before the hurricane, the forecasters surveyed by the firm were anticipating that the U.S. economy, which the government estimates grew at a 3.3% annual rate in the second quarter, would expand 4.3% in the third quarter and 3.6% in the fourth.
"Higher prices for energy have already eroded real income, and will, temporarily at least, reduce aggregate demand," the firm wrote.
Price Pressure
Whether the looming energy crisis spreads and persists long enough to hammer the economy depends on a variety of factors, among them whether Europe and other countries can supply adequate imports. But with the world facing a refinery-capacity crunch, and U.S. refiners running their plants at full capacity to meet soaring demand for gasoline and diesel, even the slightest sustained outage will likely put considerable pressure on prices.
The blow to Gulf of Mexico crude-oil output also puts a big strain on the entire global market, leaving the world vulnerable to outright shortages of crude should another shock of Katrina's scale hit an oil-producing nation.
On Friday, consumers, who have seen gasoline prices skyrocket at the pump since the hurricane, got some good news. The International Energy Agency agreed to release two million barrels a day of crude oil, gasoline and other fuels on to the world market from their strategic stockpiles over the ensuing 30 days. That is equal to about 2.4% of the world's daily fuel consumption.
In response, gasoline futures fell nearly 23 cents in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange to settle at $2.18 a gallon, or 57 cents a liter, after the IEA news. Crude oil, the raw material from which fuels are refined, also fell in Nymex trading, settling at $67.57 a barrel on Friday, down $1.90.
But the IEA's bold move is a reminder that the world has now started running on its reserve fuel tanks -- oil and refined products stockpiled over the past two decades for use only in true emergencies. Western oil companies are already pumping at full capacity. Russia, the world's No. 2 producer, is producing all it can. Even Saudi Arabia, the top exporter, and its fellow members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries can do little to alleviate the emerging crisis. OPEC has spare capacity of some 1.5 million barrels a day -- which is just about equivalent to the production lost last week in the Gulf of Mexico because of Hurricane Katrina.
The huge blow to the Gulf of Mexico has led to long lines at filling stations in much of the U.S., and outright shortages in some places. Panic buying of gasoline was reported as far away as the Czech Republic. On Saturday, Czech news agency CTK said drivers lined up at filling stations around the country after prices jumped by the equivalent of 14 cents per liter overnight, Reuters reported.
The extent of the price shock will depend in part on whether Americans conserve fuel amid the supply outages. Traffic over the Labor Day holiday weekend was noticeably lighter from Georgia to Colorado, the Associated Press reported. It also said 10% of West Virginia stations ran out of at least one grade of gas.
People were discouraged from driving by uncertain availability of gasoline and by the spiking cost of fuel. Gasoline was well above $3 a gallon at many stations across the country; in mid-August, the average national retail price was about $2.50. Americans also appeared to be heeding the calls of leaders, President Bush among them, who are encouraging conservation for the next few weeks.
But in the driving-addicted nation, the gasoline crunch is rapidly becoming a political controversy. Mr. Bush and others are warning against price gouging, state attorneys general are mounting investigations and Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, is urging the Federal Trade Commission to monitor the oil industry for price manipulation.
For the industry, the immediate concern is the vast effort to get the Gulf energy system back on its feet.
A Chevron Corp. official said Chevron's largest U.S. refinery, located on an inland channel in Pascagoula, Mississippi, would be shut for a considerable amount of time and unavailable to turn crude into much-needed gasoline to ease the fuel crunch. Crews would only begin assessing the extensive damage in Pascagoula later this week.
"We don't know when we will be expecting crude shipments," said Michael Barrett, a Chevron spokesman, although the terminal is open to accept tankers carrying gasoline and other products.
Mr. Barrett wouldn't provide an estimate of how long it would take to restart. But officials with the Mexican national oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, which is a large supplier of crude to the refinery, said they were told by Chevron to cease shipments for at least a month. Chevron declined to comment on discussions with individual suppliers.
Three additional refineries -- all located southeast of New Orleans -- still don't have electricity and are believed to have sustained major damage from flooding, according to the federal Energy Department, and could also take at least a month to restart. These refineries are owned and operated by ConocoPhillips Co.; a joint venture of Exxon Mobil Corp. and Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the Venezuelan state oil company; and Murphy Oil Corp. Together with Chevron's Pascagoula refinery, the four hobbled industrial complexes represent about 5% of U.S. refining capacity, a significant blow to the country's ability to produce enough gasoline and heating fuel.
Valero Energy Corp, America's largest refiner, was working to restart its St. Charles, Louisiana, plant, but spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown said, "We're still in the middle of a relief effort for our own employees." Ms. Brown said the company has heard from 260 of 570 plant workers and that 150 employees have reported to work. She said the company may be forced to bring in workers from its other refineries.
Other refineries, however, appear to be on the mend. Marathon Oil Corp. said over the weekend that its Garyville, Louisiana, refinery should be running at full capacity by today.
Offshore, assessment and repair of gulf platforms after a slow start has begun in earnest. The U.S. Coast Guard reports that 21 platforms are believed to have sunk. And on another 20, the pumps, generators and control rooms are either missing or damaged.
The key -- and so far unanswered -- question is how many of these battered platforms are giant deep-water floaters responsible for about half of gulf production. At least one giant deep-water platform, Royal Dutch Shell PLC's Mars platform, sustained significant damage. By itself, this facility produces about 10% of the daily oil and gas output from the gulf.
'State of Near Paralysis'
Many platforms that survived with just dents and dings remain idled because the status of pipelines needed to move the fuel to shore was uncertain. On Saturday, nearly 68% of combined oil and gas operations in the gulf remained offline, according to the federal Minerals Management Service.
There are growing signs the industry itself realizes it could take more than a month to return to anything even resembling normal operations. On the spot markets for Louisiana crude, trading volumes were unusually thin for barrels to be delivered next month -- a sign of the fundamental uncertainty permeating the region.
The markets are in "a state of near paralysis," says Tim Mingee, a Houston-based editor of the daily Americas Crude report, published by Argus Media Ltd. "Producers don't know what volumes they will be able to sell and on the refining side, they don't know what they will be able to buy," he says. Daily trading volume of a common variety of Louisiana crude fell 73% last week from the period immediately before Katrina's landfall.
Still, energy observers were upset by the lack of information. "It's too early to draw any accurate conclusions because of a frustrating lack of information," says Rodney Mitchell, president of Mitchell Group Inc., a Houston investment management firm focused on energy.
There was some positive news from the storm-battered Gulf energy complex: Exxon said its large Baton Rouge refinery is increasing its production level and should be able to ramp up further as oil supplies increase.
The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, a key import terminal that receives one million barrels of crude a day from overseas tankers, received its first vessel on Friday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. But the facility still isn't functioning normally, as one onshore terminal is without power. Two key pipelines that deliver gasoline and other refined products from the Gulf Coast to the southeast and eastern U.S. were back to near-normal operating conditions.
By helicopter and boat, repairs crews are returning to the several thousand offshore platforms to find many operable, some missing and others badly in need of repairs. Resumption of anything even close to normal operations in the Gulf has been moving at a snail's pace.
Six days after Katrina's landfall, the industry had restarted 243,000 barrels a day of oil and 90 million cubic meters of daily gas production shut down before the storm. By comparison, six days after Hurricane Ivan last year, the industry had restarted 831,000 barrels a day of oil and 123 million cubic meters of gas.
A large reason for the slow-moving recovery is that the companies along the Louisiana coast that provide transportation and equipment for damage assessment and repair are themselves overwhelmed, say people in contact with these operators. Many employees are homeless and scattered all over the region. Some roads and waterways are still impassable.
This has generated a surprising lack of details on the status of offshore producing platforms -- and, more vitally, underwater pipelines. Last year, when Ivan, a less powerful storm, touched the eastern edge of the energy-producing region, its waves triggered underwater mudslides that wreaked havoc on pipelines. Similar damage is believed to have occurred this time. Several offshore natural-gas pipelines had standing orders for customers on several pipeline branches not to pump any gas into the system.
--Bhushan Bahree in New York, David Luhnow in Mexico City and David Wessel in Washington contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1125578...page%5Fone%5Fus
Damage to Oil and Gas Facilities
Pushes U.S. Closer to Energy Crisis
By RUSSELL GOLD and THADDEUS HERRICK
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 2, 2005; Page A1
Hurricane Katrina's continuing disruption of a substantial portion of the Gulf Coast's vast network of refineries and pipelines is pushing the U.S. closer to a 1970s-style energy crisis, straining the oil industry's ability to deliver gasoline from Florida to Colorado, sending prices into uncharted territory and triggering panic among drivers in some areas.
Long gas lines were reported in Denver, Indianapolis, Hartford, Conn., Atlanta and Orlando, Fla., among other cities. In Charlotte, N.C., between 13% and 15% of stations had no gasoline and prices have soared as much as 70 cents a gallon in those stations that still have fuel to peddle, said Tom Crosby, a local AAA official there.
BACK TO THE '80S
See a timeline of gas prices since the 1980s.
President Bush took the unusual step yesterday of urging Americans not to buy gasoline if they don't have to. "Americans should be prudent in their use of energy," he said in brief Oval Office remarks. "Don't buy gas if you don't need it."
The president also made it easier for tankers to bring in gasoline from Europe, which has excess capacity for the fuel as motorists there increasingly buy diesel-powered cars. Wednesday, Mr. Bush temporarily lowered U.S. environmental standards that also eased the way for European gasoline.
The core of the unfolding situation is that four days after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, eight major refineries are still shut down and several could require a month or more to restart. In addition, there are early rumblings in the industry of significant, unreported damage to offshore pipelines, energy-gathering hubs and producing platforms that could take months to repair.
Neither Exxon Mobil Corp. nor Chevron Corp. released more than the briefest details about their offshore facilities. Royal Dutch Shell PLC reported damage to three key facilities: offshore producing platforms Mars and Cognac and a hub facility that gathers oil and gas from large deep-water platforms.
Shell reported yesterday that its Convent, La., refinery could initiate a restart in "about a week." Chevron said its large Pascagoula, Miss., refinery had been saved by a dike built in 1998 that "prevented catastrophic damage." Exxon said its giant Baton Rouge refinery was having pipeline and transportation issues and running at "reduced rates until normal feedstock supply and product movement is restored."
Last year, Hurricane Ivan, a less-powerful storm, hurt oil production for months, pushing up energy prices world-wide after it upended pipeline networks in the Gulf of Mexico. The price of crude rose from $44 to above $50 for two months.
• Updated photos | Graphics: Hotspots | New Orleans Map
• Prioritizing: If you had to flee your home, what would you take? Join the discussion.
• Question of the Day: How would you grade the federal government's handling of the hurricane so far?
• Katrina Wire: Latest Updates
• Katrina Reveals U.S. Energy Vulnerability
• Status of Energy Facilities | Pain at the Pump
• See complete coverage.
There was some good news. Valero Energy Corp. said power was restored to its St. Charles, La., refinery and Marathon Oil Co. said its Garyville, La., refinery could be producing gasoline by early next week. Two idled pipelines that had hampered fuel deliveries to the East Coast are now being brought back on line. Colonial Pipeline Co., knocked out of action by Katrina, said it was operating at 40% of capacity, with about 61% of capacity expected by day's end. Plantation Pipe Line Co., which is majority-owned by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP, said it resumed limited service Wednesday. Plantation said it had been able to restore about 150,000 barrels of capacity per day, or nearly 25% of its average daily throughput.
Whether a true energy crisis emerges -- with persistent fuel shortages, soaring gas prices and a wallop to the economy -- will depend on how quickly the onshore and offshore infrastructure gets back up and running, how deftly the industry and government handle fuel distribution in the meantime and, critically, whether large numbers of consumers panic.
A rush to fill gasoline tanks in large parts of the country would quickly drain stockpiles, leading to shortages, hoarding, long lines and even sharper price spikes. If every driver in the U.S. fleet of 220 million vehicles topped off his tank with 10 gallons, that would be an additional 2.2 billion gallons of demand for gasoline and diesel inventories that stood on Aug. 19 at 8.19 billion gallons and 3.23 billion gallons, respectively.
"In terms of the scale and impact on the American market, this is comparable to the oil embargo" of 1973 and 1974, said Jay E. Fakes, head of the federal Energy Information Administration from 1993 to 2000. The only answer, he says, is immediate conservation. His call for drivers to cut back was echoed by such oil-industry heavyweights as the American Petroleum Institute and the Petroleum Marketers Association of America.
The industry's ability to snuff out the gasoline-price spike is critical because if the crunch persists, it has the potential to significantly slow the U.S. and global economies or even trigger a recession. American consumers kept spending strongly through this summer even as crude-oil prices soared, largely because other factors -- low interest rates, rising home values and cheap imports -- offset the sting of higher prices at the pump. Their spending has been a linchpin of world-wide economic growth.
But signs of stress are emerging. Home values may be peaking. The government reported yesterday that the personal-saving rate dipped into negative territory for just the first time since the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, suggesting consumers are going into debt to support their spending habits. A sustained gasoline-price shock, many economists warn, could help tip the economy into a recession.
Gasoline stations in some parts of the country say supplies are drying up. Worst hit are the unbranded retailers -- stations that aren't affiliated with a major oil company such as Exxon or Chevron but still account for about one-third of U.S. gasoline sales. Jenny Love, a spokeswoman for Love's, an Oklahoma City-based chain of 160 interstate and highway locations, said some of the company's outlets were out of both gasoline and diesel fuel. "The unbranded retailer is at the bottom of the totem pole," she said. "There's nothing we can do about it."
Some service stations in gas-crimped areas like Atlanta were charging in excess of $5 a gallon for gas, before a gubernatorial state of emergency forced them to lower the price. The White House warned that federal officials would have "zero tolerance for price-gouging."
Cary Gavant, a 58-year-old Atlanta broker, says he conserved fuel last night by driving more slowly than usual on the 50 miles north on I-75 toward his suburban home from Atlanta and noticed that many other drivers were doing so, too. "The thought of not having gasoline was terrifying," he said.
While the triggering event for the country's energy squeeze was the destruction Katrina unleashed on the vital gasoline-producing region of Louisiana and Mississippi, the scene was set for this catastrophe by both drivers and the energy industry. U.S. drivers pump 11% of the world's crude oil into their tanks in the form of gasoline, and increasingly over the past couple of decades they have been buying gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks.
WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson discusses why fuel rules were waived in order to increase capacity out of the Gulf Coast region. Plus, WSJ's Gerald Seib discusses the Bush administration's plan to release oil from government stockpiles. And AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson talks about how Katrina may affect the auto industry.
At the same time, the oil industry has been reluctant to invest in new refinery capacity because of historically low returns, even while refiners have pared back inventories to beef up margins. This reluctance has shrunk U.S. and international spare refining capacity, creating a world-wide gasoline-delivery system hard-pressed to cope with a major disruption such as the one wrought by Katrina.
Even though these twin trends were well-known, the scope of the disruption has caught even long-time oil-refining veterans by surprise. "In my 30 years, I do not remember a time like this," says Tom O'Malley, former chairman of Premcor Inc., a major U.S. refiner acquired this year by Valero. "It is absolutely clear that a significant amount of refining capacity that is currently down will take time to come up. And I don't think it's a matter of days. For some refineries, it could be a matter of months. There is certainly going to be a domestic product shortfall."
Still, Mr. O'Malley doesn't believe the U.S. is headed for an energy crisis. The rocketing wholesale and retail gasoline prices should fall back soon, as tankers full of gasoline from Europe begin arriving. "I think the industry, you will find, will do an amazing job of coming up with supply. It's a question of weeks, but this is no long-term problem."
Industry experts said they expect the refineries hardest hit by the hurricane to be out of service for more than a month since flooding can ruin the electric pumps that send crude oil through a refinery's complex system of pipes. "It looks quite serious," said Bob Funk, who recently retired as head of planning from Citgo Petroleum Corp., a U.S. refiner and subsidiary of Venezuela's national oil company. Mr. Funk expressed particular concern for a plant run by Exxon Mobil and Petroleos de Venezuela in Chalmette, La., which is on the Mississippi River near downtown New Orleans. Exxon Mobil said it couldn't provide any information on potential damage at the Chalmette refinery.
The extent of the probable damage to the plants struck by the storm, he says, is likely to be more than the Gulf Coast work force can repair, meaning refiners will have to bring workers in from other parts of the country. That and the extensive flooding are likely to slow refinery repair efforts. Even when the refineries are up and running it is unclear whether they will have adequate staffing, given the flood damage in surrounding communities and neighborhoods where workers live.
And while European traders reported as many as 20 bookings in the past two days for tankers to carry gasoline across the Atlantic, the shipments won't provide immediate relief. The ships are scheduled to load gasoline at European ports later this month but will take as long as three weeks before reaching East Coast ports like New York. On top of that, traders are finding it difficult to find available ships. Rates for trans-Atlantic voyage have soared in the past few days as shipbrokers try to line up tonnage.
While most attention was on the onshore infrastructure, there were ominous signs of damage to the offshore platforms and pipelines that produce one-quarter of U.S. oil. Shell reported that its West Delta 143 platform, which serves a pipeline hub, needed substantial repairs. Less than 20% of energy production within the Gulf of Mexico had been restored yesterday, according to the federal Minerals Management Service. Four days after Hurricane Ivan last year, 60% of production had been restarted, the agency said.
Ivan scrambled numerous critical underwater pipelines, essentially leaving functional producing platforms with no way to get the oil and gas to shore. Robert Bea, Shell's former chief engineer in the U.S. and a longtime student of the impact of hurricanes on the Gulf's energy infrastructure, says he has heard from a network of oilfield workers that the damage to pipelines and platforms could be "10 times what we saw in Ivan."
Even before Katrina, the refining industry faced a severe capacity crunch, a problem that promised to limit the prospects for cheaper gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for at least several years. Nor is it exclusively a U.S. problem: Growing demand for oil from China, India and other rising powers is aggravating the shortfall in refining and threatening to keep prices elevated for years.
While global demand is expected to grow by nearly two million barrels a day this year -- from 82.5 million barrels a day last year -- the world's capacity to refine and process crude oil is expected to grow by less than half that, according to the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.
For these reasons, Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a New York-based group, said that the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and increased gasoline imports from abroad won't fundamentally address the situation. "How could this not be a major problem for an indefinite period of time?" he said. Mr. Goldstein said he expects sustained high gasoline prices as demand exceeds supply. "It's powerful and it's ugly," he said. "But it's true."
--Chip Cummins and Steve LeVine contributed to this article.
Damage to Oil and Gas Facilities
Pushes U.S. Closer to Energy Crisis
By RUSSELL GOLD and THADDEUS HERRICK
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 2, 2005; Page A1
Hurricane Katrina's continuing disruption of a substantial portion of the Gulf Coast's vast network of refineries and pipelines is pushing the U.S. closer to a 1970s-style energy crisis, straining the oil industry's ability to deliver gasoline from Florida to Colorado, sending prices into uncharted territory and triggering panic among drivers in some areas.
Long gas lines were reported in Denver, Indianapolis, Hartford, Conn., Atlanta and Orlando, Fla., among other cities. In Charlotte, N.C., between 13% and 15% of stations had no gasoline and prices have soared as much as 70 cents a gallon in those stations that still have fuel to peddle, said Tom Crosby, a local AAA official there.
BACK TO THE '80S
See a timeline of gas prices since the 1980s.
President Bush took the unusual step yesterday of urging Americans not to buy gasoline if they don't have to. "Americans should be prudent in their use of energy," he said in brief Oval Office remarks. "Don't buy gas if you don't need it."
The president also made it easier for tankers to bring in gasoline from Europe, which has excess capacity for the fuel as motorists there increasingly buy diesel-powered cars. Wednesday, Mr. Bush temporarily lowered U.S. environmental standards that also eased the way for European gasoline.
The core of the unfolding situation is that four days after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, eight major refineries are still shut down and several could require a month or more to restart. In addition, there are early rumblings in the industry of significant, unreported damage to offshore pipelines, energy-gathering hubs and producing platforms that could take months to repair.
Neither Exxon Mobil Corp. nor Chevron Corp. released more than the briefest details about their offshore facilities. Royal Dutch Shell PLC reported damage to three key facilities: offshore producing platforms Mars and Cognac and a hub facility that gathers oil and gas from large deep-water platforms.
Shell reported yesterday that its Convent, La., refinery could initiate a restart in "about a week." Chevron said its large Pascagoula, Miss., refinery had been saved by a dike built in 1998 that "prevented catastrophic damage." Exxon said its giant Baton Rouge refinery was having pipeline and transportation issues and running at "reduced rates until normal feedstock supply and product movement is restored."
Last year, Hurricane Ivan, a less-powerful storm, hurt oil production for months, pushing up energy prices world-wide after it upended pipeline networks in the Gulf of Mexico. The price of crude rose from $44 to above $50 for two months.
• Updated photos | Graphics: Hotspots | New Orleans Map
• Prioritizing: If you had to flee your home, what would you take? Join the discussion.
• Question of the Day: How would you grade the federal government's handling of the hurricane so far?
• Katrina Wire: Latest Updates
• Katrina Reveals U.S. Energy Vulnerability
• Status of Energy Facilities | Pain at the Pump
• See complete coverage.
There was some good news. Valero Energy Corp. said power was restored to its St. Charles, La., refinery and Marathon Oil Co. said its Garyville, La., refinery could be producing gasoline by early next week. Two idled pipelines that had hampered fuel deliveries to the East Coast are now being brought back on line. Colonial Pipeline Co., knocked out of action by Katrina, said it was operating at 40% of capacity, with about 61% of capacity expected by day's end. Plantation Pipe Line Co., which is majority-owned by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners LP, said it resumed limited service Wednesday. Plantation said it had been able to restore about 150,000 barrels of capacity per day, or nearly 25% of its average daily throughput.
Whether a true energy crisis emerges -- with persistent fuel shortages, soaring gas prices and a wallop to the economy -- will depend on how quickly the onshore and offshore infrastructure gets back up and running, how deftly the industry and government handle fuel distribution in the meantime and, critically, whether large numbers of consumers panic.
A rush to fill gasoline tanks in large parts of the country would quickly drain stockpiles, leading to shortages, hoarding, long lines and even sharper price spikes. If every driver in the U.S. fleet of 220 million vehicles topped off his tank with 10 gallons, that would be an additional 2.2 billion gallons of demand for gasoline and diesel inventories that stood on Aug. 19 at 8.19 billion gallons and 3.23 billion gallons, respectively.
"In terms of the scale and impact on the American market, this is comparable to the oil embargo" of 1973 and 1974, said Jay E. Fakes, head of the federal Energy Information Administration from 1993 to 2000. The only answer, he says, is immediate conservation. His call for drivers to cut back was echoed by such oil-industry heavyweights as the American Petroleum Institute and the Petroleum Marketers Association of America.
The industry's ability to snuff out the gasoline-price spike is critical because if the crunch persists, it has the potential to significantly slow the U.S. and global economies or even trigger a recession. American consumers kept spending strongly through this summer even as crude-oil prices soared, largely because other factors -- low interest rates, rising home values and cheap imports -- offset the sting of higher prices at the pump. Their spending has been a linchpin of world-wide economic growth.
But signs of stress are emerging. Home values may be peaking. The government reported yesterday that the personal-saving rate dipped into negative territory for just the first time since the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, suggesting consumers are going into debt to support their spending habits. A sustained gasoline-price shock, many economists warn, could help tip the economy into a recession.
Gasoline stations in some parts of the country say supplies are drying up. Worst hit are the unbranded retailers -- stations that aren't affiliated with a major oil company such as Exxon or Chevron but still account for about one-third of U.S. gasoline sales. Jenny Love, a spokeswoman for Love's, an Oklahoma City-based chain of 160 interstate and highway locations, said some of the company's outlets were out of both gasoline and diesel fuel. "The unbranded retailer is at the bottom of the totem pole," she said. "There's nothing we can do about it."
Some service stations in gas-crimped areas like Atlanta were charging in excess of $5 a gallon for gas, before a gubernatorial state of emergency forced them to lower the price. The White House warned that federal officials would have "zero tolerance for price-gouging."
Cary Gavant, a 58-year-old Atlanta broker, says he conserved fuel last night by driving more slowly than usual on the 50 miles north on I-75 toward his suburban home from Atlanta and noticed that many other drivers were doing so, too. "The thought of not having gasoline was terrifying," he said.
While the triggering event for the country's energy squeeze was the destruction Katrina unleashed on the vital gasoline-producing region of Louisiana and Mississippi, the scene was set for this catastrophe by both drivers and the energy industry. U.S. drivers pump 11% of the world's crude oil into their tanks in the form of gasoline, and increasingly over the past couple of decades they have been buying gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks.
WALL STREET JOURNAL VIDEO
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson discusses why fuel rules were waived in order to increase capacity out of the Gulf Coast region. Plus, WSJ's Gerald Seib discusses the Bush administration's plan to release oil from government stockpiles. And AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson talks about how Katrina may affect the auto industry.
At the same time, the oil industry has been reluctant to invest in new refinery capacity because of historically low returns, even while refiners have pared back inventories to beef up margins. This reluctance has shrunk U.S. and international spare refining capacity, creating a world-wide gasoline-delivery system hard-pressed to cope with a major disruption such as the one wrought by Katrina.
Even though these twin trends were well-known, the scope of the disruption has caught even long-time oil-refining veterans by surprise. "In my 30 years, I do not remember a time like this," says Tom O'Malley, former chairman of Premcor Inc., a major U.S. refiner acquired this year by Valero. "It is absolutely clear that a significant amount of refining capacity that is currently down will take time to come up. And I don't think it's a matter of days. For some refineries, it could be a matter of months. There is certainly going to be a domestic product shortfall."
Still, Mr. O'Malley doesn't believe the U.S. is headed for an energy crisis. The rocketing wholesale and retail gasoline prices should fall back soon, as tankers full of gasoline from Europe begin arriving. "I think the industry, you will find, will do an amazing job of coming up with supply. It's a question of weeks, but this is no long-term problem."
Industry experts said they expect the refineries hardest hit by the hurricane to be out of service for more than a month since flooding can ruin the electric pumps that send crude oil through a refinery's complex system of pipes. "It looks quite serious," said Bob Funk, who recently retired as head of planning from Citgo Petroleum Corp., a U.S. refiner and subsidiary of Venezuela's national oil company. Mr. Funk expressed particular concern for a plant run by Exxon Mobil and Petroleos de Venezuela in Chalmette, La., which is on the Mississippi River near downtown New Orleans. Exxon Mobil said it couldn't provide any information on potential damage at the Chalmette refinery.
The extent of the probable damage to the plants struck by the storm, he says, is likely to be more than the Gulf Coast work force can repair, meaning refiners will have to bring workers in from other parts of the country. That and the extensive flooding are likely to slow refinery repair efforts. Even when the refineries are up and running it is unclear whether they will have adequate staffing, given the flood damage in surrounding communities and neighborhoods where workers live.
And while European traders reported as many as 20 bookings in the past two days for tankers to carry gasoline across the Atlantic, the shipments won't provide immediate relief. The ships are scheduled to load gasoline at European ports later this month but will take as long as three weeks before reaching East Coast ports like New York. On top of that, traders are finding it difficult to find available ships. Rates for trans-Atlantic voyage have soared in the past few days as shipbrokers try to line up tonnage.
While most attention was on the onshore infrastructure, there were ominous signs of damage to the offshore platforms and pipelines that produce one-quarter of U.S. oil. Shell reported that its West Delta 143 platform, which serves a pipeline hub, needed substantial repairs. Less than 20% of energy production within the Gulf of Mexico had been restored yesterday, according to the federal Minerals Management Service. Four days after Hurricane Ivan last year, 60% of production had been restarted, the agency said.
Ivan scrambled numerous critical underwater pipelines, essentially leaving functional producing platforms with no way to get the oil and gas to shore. Robert Bea, Shell's former chief engineer in the U.S. and a longtime student of the impact of hurricanes on the Gulf's energy infrastructure, says he has heard from a network of oilfield workers that the damage to pipelines and platforms could be "10 times what we saw in Ivan."
Even before Katrina, the refining industry faced a severe capacity crunch, a problem that promised to limit the prospects for cheaper gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for at least several years. Nor is it exclusively a U.S. problem: Growing demand for oil from China, India and other rising powers is aggravating the shortfall in refining and threatening to keep prices elevated for years.
While global demand is expected to grow by nearly two million barrels a day this year -- from 82.5 million barrels a day last year -- the world's capacity to refine and process crude oil is expected to grow by less than half that, according to the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation.
For these reasons, Larry Goldstein, president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, a New York-based group, said that the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and increased gasoline imports from abroad won't fundamentally address the situation. "How could this not be a major problem for an indefinite period of time?" he said. Mr. Goldstein said he expects sustained high gasoline prices as demand exceeds supply. "It's powerful and it's ugly," he said. "But it's true."
--Chip Cummins and Steve LeVine contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB...Ffree%5Ffeature
Man-Made Mistakes
Increase Devastation
Of 'Natural' Disasters
September 2, 2005; Page B1
While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made.
As Theodore Steinberg argues, God is getting a bum rap. "This is an unnatural disaster if ever there was one, not an act of God," says Prof. Steinberg, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "If the potential for mass death and destruction from extreme weather existed anywhere in the U.S., it existed in New Orleans."
In his 2000 book "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America," Prof. Steinberg documented how much of the toll from "natural" disasters, from the 1886 Charleston earthquake to 1990s hurricanes, has been exacerbated by human actions.
The temporary lull in hurricane activity in Florida, from 1969 to 1989, spurred a reckless building boom, for example, putting billions of dollars worth of condos and hotels within reach of storm surges, notes Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would have caused an estimated $90 billion damage had it occurred in 2000, he calculated. It caused just over $1 billion, in today's dollars.
It isn't only hurricanes whose destructiveness has been increased by human actions. Tornadoes turn mobile homes into matchsticks (one of Prof. Steinberg's first jobs was at a New York brokerage firm, where he followed the trailer-home industry). From 1981 to 1997, he found, more than one-third of all deaths from tornadoes occurred among people living in mobile homes; federal regulations didn't require them to withstand high winds, and a 1974 statute actually pre-empted stricter state standards with more lax federal ones.
Throughout the South and Midwest, mobile-home communities and poor neighborhoods are also much more likely to be sited in flood plains.
In New Orleans, the worst-hit parishes were the lower-income ones. But the city also ignored the power of nature. More than one million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity. "If these had been in place, at least some of the energy in the storm surge would have been dissipated," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis. "This is a self-inflicted wound."
Studies estimate that for every square mile of wetlands lost, storm surges rise by one foot.
Leaving aside whether the levees that broke in New Orleans could have been better constructed, their very existence contributed to the disaster. Built to keep the city from being flooded by the Mississippi, they also keep the Big Muddy from depositing silt to replenish marshes and the river's delta, as do projects that direct the river's water and sediment out to sea to create a deep shipping channel.
The result is that much of New Orleans fell below sea level. Combined with the dredging to build canals, "the Gulf of Mexico is a lot closer to New Orleans than it was when Hurricane Betsy ripped through in 1965," says Prof. Steinberg. Now the gulf is in the city.
The ultimate question is whether Katrina's power reflects human-caused global warming, or is at minimum a harbinger of the kinds of storms we can expect in a warmer world.
No single freak storm can be attributed to global climate trends. But for hurricanes to form, the surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic must exceed about 80° Fahrenheit. That is more likely in a warmer world.
The best science to date suggests the frequency of hurricanes doesn't reflect global warming. Straightforward physics, however, says their intensity might. As the seas and air warm, there is more evaporation, which fuels storms, and more energy available to pump them up. A new analysis by atmospheric physicist Kerry Emanuel of MIT suggests the net power of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and Pacific typhoons), a combination of the energy they pack and how long they last, "has increased markedly since 1970."
The power of storms in the North Atlantic has tripled, while the power of those in the western North Pacific has more than doubled.
Similarly, a 2004 study from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that a warmer world is likely to deepen hurricanes' central pressure (a measure of their power) and intensify the rainfall they bring. Today's storms, the scientists write, "may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
By continuing to blame weather extremes on random events, the "stuff happens" attitude, officials and city planners are ignoring their contributions to the disasters that have pummeled the planet and promise to become only worse.
Man-Made Mistakes
Increase Devastation
Of 'Natural' Disasters
September 2, 2005; Page B1
While storms such as Hurricane Katrina are sometimes called an act of God or a natural disaster, the devastation they leave behind is not. Some scientists believe even the storms themselves could be at least partly man-made.
As Theodore Steinberg argues, God is getting a bum rap. "This is an unnatural disaster if ever there was one, not an act of God," says Prof. Steinberg, an environmental historian at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. "If the potential for mass death and destruction from extreme weather existed anywhere in the U.S., it existed in New Orleans."
In his 2000 book "Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America," Prof. Steinberg documented how much of the toll from "natural" disasters, from the 1886 Charleston earthquake to 1990s hurricanes, has been exacerbated by human actions.
The temporary lull in hurricane activity in Florida, from 1969 to 1989, spurred a reckless building boom, for example, putting billions of dollars worth of condos and hotels within reach of storm surges, notes Roger Pielke Jr., of the University of Colorado, Boulder. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 would have caused an estimated $90 billion damage had it occurred in 2000, he calculated. It caused just over $1 billion, in today's dollars.
It isn't only hurricanes whose destructiveness has been increased by human actions. Tornadoes turn mobile homes into matchsticks (one of Prof. Steinberg's first jobs was at a New York brokerage firm, where he followed the trailer-home industry). From 1981 to 1997, he found, more than one-third of all deaths from tornadoes occurred among people living in mobile homes; federal regulations didn't require them to withstand high winds, and a 1974 statute actually pre-empted stricter state standards with more lax federal ones.
Throughout the South and Midwest, mobile-home communities and poor neighborhoods are also much more likely to be sited in flood plains.
In New Orleans, the worst-hit parishes were the lower-income ones. But the city also ignored the power of nature. More than one million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity. "If these had been in place, at least some of the energy in the storm surge would have been dissipated," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis. "This is a self-inflicted wound."
Studies estimate that for every square mile of wetlands lost, storm surges rise by one foot.
Leaving aside whether the levees that broke in New Orleans could have been better constructed, their very existence contributed to the disaster. Built to keep the city from being flooded by the Mississippi, they also keep the Big Muddy from depositing silt to replenish marshes and the river's delta, as do projects that direct the river's water and sediment out to sea to create a deep shipping channel.
The result is that much of New Orleans fell below sea level. Combined with the dredging to build canals, "the Gulf of Mexico is a lot closer to New Orleans than it was when Hurricane Betsy ripped through in 1965," says Prof. Steinberg. Now the gulf is in the city.
The ultimate question is whether Katrina's power reflects human-caused global warming, or is at minimum a harbinger of the kinds of storms we can expect in a warmer world.
No single freak storm can be attributed to global climate trends. But for hurricanes to form, the surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic must exceed about 80° Fahrenheit. That is more likely in a warmer world.
The best science to date suggests the frequency of hurricanes doesn't reflect global warming. Straightforward physics, however, says their intensity might. As the seas and air warm, there is more evaporation, which fuels storms, and more energy available to pump them up. A new analysis by atmospheric physicist Kerry Emanuel of MIT suggests the net power of tropical cyclones (hurricanes and Pacific typhoons), a combination of the energy they pack and how long they last, "has increased markedly since 1970."
The power of storms in the North Atlantic has tripled, while the power of those in the western North Pacific has more than doubled.
Similarly, a 2004 study from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that a warmer world is likely to deepen hurricanes' central pressure (a measure of their power) and intensify the rainfall they bring. Today's storms, the scientists write, "may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the next century as the earth's climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."
By continuing to blame weather extremes on random events, the "stuff happens" attitude, officials and city planners are ignoring their contributions to the disasters that have pummeled the planet and promise to become only worse.
HURRICANE KATRINA
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1125583...e_journal_links
Crisis News Tracker
September 5, 2005 9:46 a.m.
Updated regularly with news on the hurricane's aftermath. All times EDT.
Monday, Sept. 5
9:45 a.m. A city of hundreds of thousands is now just a fraction of that as people are airlifted, bused and floated out of New Orleans. Federal officials urged those still left in New Orleans to leave for their own safety. In New Orleans, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore told ABC's "Good Morning America'' on Monday that fewer than 10,000 people remained in the city, based on aerial reconnaissance.
9:10 a.m.: Miles-long lines of vehicles crawled into Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans, as residents were allowed to return for brief inspections of what's left of their homes. The traffic began moving into the parish at about 6 a.m., and officials planned to allow traffic in for 12 hours, though they encouraged residents to inspect their property, pick up personal items and leave. Most of the single-story bungalow homes in the neighborhood had water nearly to the rooflines.
8:25 a.m.: Oil prices continued to fall after industrialized nations agreed to release crude from their strategic stockpiles to help avert a severe fuel shortage in the U.S. Industrialized nations arranged by Monday to ship about 30 cargoes of gasoline to the U.S., Vienna's PV oil associates said, after the International Energy Agency on Friday said its 26 members would release two million barrels daily for 30 days to meet shortfalls in world energy markets. On London's International Petroleum Exchange Monday, October Brent was down $1.41 at $64.65 a barrel by midday in Europe – close to what it had been before Katrina hit. The New York Mercantile Exchange is closed for the Labor Day holiday.
6:30 a.m.: European Union nations on Monday prepared aid teams, food rations, water pumps and other emergency material. The European Commission said further pledges of aid had come in Sunday, including promises to ship power generators, cots, tents and first-aid kits. U.S. authorities made a rare request for help from Europe over the weekend, asking for anything from diapers and baby formula to forklifts and veterinarian supplies to speed up aid efforts. The NATO alliance has also started to coordinate food-aid shipments, drinking water, generators, and tarpaulins through its disaster coordination center.
2.45 a.m.: Carnival Corp. said its earnings are likely to be reduced by one cent to three cents a share due to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Most of the reduction is expected to fall in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ends Nov. 30, the Miami-based cruise-line operator said. Carnival is forecasting earnings of 45 cents a share for the current quarter and a profit of $2.70 a share for the fiscal year. Carnival said severe weather resulted in the cancellation of one voyage and the shortening of two others. The company has two ships based in New Orleans and doesn't expect them to operate from that port for an extended period of time.
1:43 a.m.: Oil prices fell Monday, declining more than $1 in London after industrialized nations agreed to release 60 million barrels of crude from their strategic stockpiles to help avert a severe fuel shortage in the U.S. The U.S. refinery system was struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina, with two storm-shuttered facilities restarting and flows of crude oil improving enough to allow refineries in the Gulf Coast and Midwest to ramp up production. But four damaged Gulf Coast refiners look likely to remain shut for weeks or even months, taking with them more than 5% of U.S. capacity.
Sunday, Sept. 4
8:55 p.m.: With nearly a quarter million evacuees already in Texas and more still pouring in, Gov. Rick Perry on Sunday ordered emergency officials to initiate an airlift to take some of them to other states that have offered help. Aid centers will be set up at airports in Houston and Dallas where incoming refugees can be given food, water and medical care before they are flown out. Two flights were scheduled Sunday night.
8:00 p.m.: MSNBC shows a civilian helicopter crashed in New Orleans on a spit of land surrounded by flood waters. The helicopter is lying on its side and smoking slightly. The AP reported that the two people on board escaped with only cuts and scrapes, according to Mark Smith of the state office of emergency preparedness.
7:45 p.m.: Here are updated death tolls reported by state officials from Katrina as of Sunday. The numbers are expected to rise.
ALABAMA: 2
FLORIDA: 11
GEORGIA: 2
LOUISIANA: 59
MISSISSIPPI: 161
TOTAL: 235
7 p.m.: It will cost at least $1.5 billion to rebuild destroyed highways in the Gulf Coast region, Transportation Secretary Mineta said. That amount would just restore Interstate 10 and U.S. 90, two major arteries leading into New Orleans. Mineta also said 15 flights an hour were arriving and departing from New Orleans International Airport by Sunday afternoon, and that more than 20,000 people had been flown out of the city in the last 72 hours.
6:30 p.m.: Multimedia: Latest AP video shows evacuations in New Orleans and progress in Biloxi. Updated WSJ gallery includes photo of city streets by hunkered-down staff at New Orleans Internet registrar DirectNic (More at mgno.com.)
6:20 p.m.: The Army Corps of Engineers says some of its contractors were shot at, then police shot fatally the gunmen who fired on the contractors. The contractors weren't killed, the Army Corps said. An earlier report incorrectly said the police had shot and killed the contractors.
• Updated photos | New Orleans Map
• See complete coverage.
5:55 p.m.: The AP reports from Fort Chaffee, Ark. After arriving here weary and hungry, thousands of people driven from their homes by faced one more task before they could rest: paperwork. Marion Landry, 84, held onto her younger sister's walker as the bedraggled pair went through the required registration. What they really wanted was a shower. "I've worn the same set of clothes for three days," said Fay Roberts, 81. "My hair is sweaty. I don't look like this. Normally I'm very nice."
4:52 p.m.: Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them, a deputy chief said. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said the shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge on U.S. 90, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. He said he had no other details.
4:40 p.m.: In the first official count, Louisiana emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had verified 59 deaths.
Ken Wells
3:50 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Ken Wells reports from New Orleans. Frank Churchville and Kenny Ellison have come from Alabama to help. Mr. Churchville is perched up in the bed of a white Ford F150 pickup truck, sporting a black T-shirt that has "Police" emblazoned across it in big white letters and, in case anyone misses that hint, a big black shotgun, locked and loaded, perched in his lap. He's a cop back in Mobile; Mr. Ellison a contractor there. As soon as they started hearing the reports from New Orleans, they lit out, one of an estimated 1,600 such volunteers who have come in with boats to search the still flooded ramparts of the city for Katrina's trapped and dead. "How can we get out of here?" pleads 19-year-old Janessa Bailey, who has walked three long blocks through the filthy water and has a fevered, stricken look on her face. "Do you know anything about the buses? Are they picking up people anywhere near?" Read Ken's full report.
3:20 p.m: The Wall Street Journal's Gary Fields reports from Washington. Alphonso Jackson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said the government is working with housing directors from around the country as well as private entities to identify more long term housing. "It's important to understand they will not [all] be in Louisiana or Mississippi. We are talking about a 500-mile radius," he said. Mr. Jackson said authorities also are exploring the wider use of rental vouchers. See the full report.
3:05 p.m.: WSJ.com rounds up editorials from Sunday's papers on the New Orleans catastrophe. Reactions ranged from frustration with the federal government's response to determination to rebuild the broken city. Plus, graphic showing newspaper front pages.
Lt. Gen. Honore
2:40 p.m.: Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore tells Fox News: "The local officials were doing the best they could given the conditions. They were in the conditions themselves and were also victims. … The storm took down the power, the storm took down the antennas. … The telephone goes down and that makes it very hard to coordinate. That takes you back 50 to 100 years. … Coordination is dependent on reliable communications. … I am not trying to defend this I am trying to explain this." See an AP profile of Honore. Recall that Honore was the one official New Orleans Mayor Nagin praised, calling him a "John Wayne" type. (Audio)
2:38 p.m.: Fox News's Geraldo Rivera, witnessing a woman being coaxed on to a helicopter, says, "This was a dress rehearsal for a nuclear attack on the major American city." Helicopter video shown on cable networks shows chopper rescues continuing, amid flooding stretching for miles. Men stand on slanted roofs of houses waiting for rescue. Earlier, Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, La., breaks down while telling NBC's Meet the Press of the slow-motion death of a colleague's stranded mother: "I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send somebody."
2:30 p.m.: The first group of evacuees who will be given shelter in Arizona arrived Sunday morning at Sky Harbor International Airport. The New Orleans diaspora stretches to New England as well. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says about 2,500 displaced people will arrive in the state for emergency shelter within the next 72 hours.
2:15 p.m.: Embattled FEMA Director Michael Brown said Sunday his agency and the Department of Homeland Security didn't ask for military help until they realized it was "beyond the capability of FEMA" to get its job done. "We asked for it as soon as it became necessary. As soon as we recognized this was beyond the capabilities of FEMA to do its traditional recovery efforts," Brown said during a press conference. "I think people need to understand the response was ongoing ... . This disaster did not start the day Katrina moved out of here; the disaster continued on and grew and grew," he said. See an August 2004 profile of Brown, which includes a discussion of low morale at FEMA.
1:45 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Melanie Trottman and Ann Zimmerman report from Dallas. Volunteers taped signs up on a long row of windows near the building's entrance, offering transportation to Sunday church services, jobs at Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino's Pizza, and pet help and care. One sign offered shelter to members of Alcoholics Anonymous, along with rides to local meetings. At Reunion Arena, 27-year-old Dallas resident Gerald Brown set up a makeshift barbershop to offer free haircuts, calling it God's work. His lamp is clamped to a metal guardrail and he's plugged the power cord of his clippers into an outlet outside the building. Elsewhere, Calvin Armstead, 34, who worked in New Orleans as a gas-station cashier, said he is debating whether to meet up with family in Houston or stay in Dallas, where he says he's had more outpouring of support from people than he had his entire life in New Orleans. "I'd like to go back to New Orleans but I don't think that's possible," he said. "Dallas sounds like a good idea."
1:30 p.m.: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld comments from the New Orleans airport: "As the president said, it is a natural disaster of historic proportions." He added, "It is important to keep the magnitude of it mind. …. It will take many, many, many months, into years, for this area to recover." Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) identifies Friday as the turning point in the rescue efforts.
12:40 p.m.: New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said 150 police officers were to leave for Gulf Coast region Monday, in addition to 172 officers sent on Saturday. Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said FEMA on Sunday requested 300 New York firefighters. They were to leave Monday to help fight fires and search for survivors. He said hundreds of firefighters had already volunteered before they were asked.
12:30 p.m. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned to her native Alabama to attend services at the Pilgrim Rest AME Zion church outside Mobile and a community center in the ravaged Bayou La Batre, 45 minutes away. About 718,000 homes and businesses in Mobile were left without power for days, and at least two people died.
11:48 a.m.: President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush visited the Red Cross's disaster operation center in Washington, where they thanked employees. The president also announced that the White House would hold a blood drive on Friday.
11:45 a.m.: British nationals caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina recounted horror stories of their experience sheltering in squalid and terrifying conditions as they arrived home Sunday. Will Nelson, 21 years old, who was visiting New Orleans after working on the Camp America cultural exchange program and took shelter in the city's Superdome, said conditions in the refuge deteriorated to desperate levels. Fellow summer camp worker Sarah Yorston, 21, said she witnessed "total chaos and devastation." She added "These people have lost everything and they are just desperate people doing desperate things." Another Briton, Marisa Haigh, said international tourists stranded in the Superdome had stuck together for safety. See Brits' Hell Inside The Terror Dome.
10:50 a.m.: Pool cameras show dramatic rescue of older woman from rooftop. Meanwhile, a woman's body remained at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, a business area in the lower Garden District with antique shops. The AP reports the body had been there since at least Wednesday. People covered her with blankets or plastic. By Sunday, a short wall of bricks had been built around her body, holding down a plastic tarpaulin. On it, someone spray-painted a cross and the words, "Here lies Vera. God help us.'' (See the photo in the WSJ photo gallery.)
10:41 a.m.: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says death toll from Hurricane Katrina is in the thousands, echoing bleak remarks made a day earlier by Louisiana's governor. He couldn't give a precise number on the impact of the devastation, but when asked if it was in the thousands, he told CNN, "I think it's evident it's in the thousands.''
10:40 a.m.: Wall Street Journal reporters Russell Gold in Dallas and Thaddeus Herrick in Houston report. Nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina cut through a main artery of the U.S. energy industry, a large amount of crucial infrastructure remains off line, leaving the world's largest economy and the rest of the globe on the brink of a potential energy crisis. A focused picture of the damage to the region's infrastructure remains elusive amid the post-storm chaos, but in broad-brush strokes, it is becoming clear the industry faces a two-pronged problem. Full report.
Chertoff and embattled Brown brief media
10:20 a.m.: "We are going to have to go house to house" to find survivors and the dead, Homeland chief Michael Chertoff tells reporters. "From this point on … I want to do everything as possible as quickly as possible." Answering questions from reports, he said, "I'm not going to take one minute" away from working on the crisis to answers questions on what may or may not have gone wrong in the government's earlier efforts. He declined to give an approximate death toll. See profiles of Chertoff and other key people in the crisis.
10:00 a.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Robert Guy Matthews reports. In an effort to soften the blow of higher fuel prices and disrupted supplies, the federal government is taking steps to increase the supply of diesel fuel as some states moved to suspend gasoline excise taxes. States that suspend gas taxes stand to lose millions of dollars in revenues. Late last week, the state of Georgia suspended its 7.5 cents-a-gallon gas tax and 4% sales tax on gasoline purchases until Oct. 1. Read the full report.
9:55 a.m.: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told "Fox News Sunday" that a grim toll is expected to be found in swamped homes and elsewhere. "We need to prepare the country for what's coming. ... We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods, it is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine,'' Mr. Chertoff said.
7:33 a.m.: Pope Benedict offered his prayers to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. "These days we are all pained by the disaster caused by the hurricane in the United States of America," Pope Benedict said. "I want to ensure my prayer for the dead and their relatives, for the wounded without a roof, for the sick, the children, the elderly and I bless those who are busy with the difficult rescue and rebuilding operation."
6:47 a.m.: South Korea said it will send $30 million to the U.S. for hurricane relief, according to an official with the South Korean Prime Minister's Office.
2:48 a.m.: Associated Press gives snapshot of evacuee status across the south of the U.S. Governor Rick Perry said more than 120,000 evacuees are in 97 shelters across Texas, with another 100,000 in hotels and motels in the state. Hundreds more are housed in churches or private homes.
1:25 a.m.: North Korea's Red Cross expressed sympathy to its U.S. counterpart over the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The North Korean Red Cross said it hoped "the living of the inhabitants in the afflicted areas return to normal as early as possible."
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1125583...e_journal_links
Crisis News Tracker
September 5, 2005 9:46 a.m.
Updated regularly with news on the hurricane's aftermath. All times EDT.
Monday, Sept. 5
9:45 a.m. A city of hundreds of thousands is now just a fraction of that as people are airlifted, bused and floated out of New Orleans. Federal officials urged those still left in New Orleans to leave for their own safety. In New Orleans, Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore told ABC's "Good Morning America'' on Monday that fewer than 10,000 people remained in the city, based on aerial reconnaissance.
9:10 a.m.: Miles-long lines of vehicles crawled into Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans, as residents were allowed to return for brief inspections of what's left of their homes. The traffic began moving into the parish at about 6 a.m., and officials planned to allow traffic in for 12 hours, though they encouraged residents to inspect their property, pick up personal items and leave. Most of the single-story bungalow homes in the neighborhood had water nearly to the rooflines.
8:25 a.m.: Oil prices continued to fall after industrialized nations agreed to release crude from their strategic stockpiles to help avert a severe fuel shortage in the U.S. Industrialized nations arranged by Monday to ship about 30 cargoes of gasoline to the U.S., Vienna's PV oil associates said, after the International Energy Agency on Friday said its 26 members would release two million barrels daily for 30 days to meet shortfalls in world energy markets. On London's International Petroleum Exchange Monday, October Brent was down $1.41 at $64.65 a barrel by midday in Europe – close to what it had been before Katrina hit. The New York Mercantile Exchange is closed for the Labor Day holiday.
6:30 a.m.: European Union nations on Monday prepared aid teams, food rations, water pumps and other emergency material. The European Commission said further pledges of aid had come in Sunday, including promises to ship power generators, cots, tents and first-aid kits. U.S. authorities made a rare request for help from Europe over the weekend, asking for anything from diapers and baby formula to forklifts and veterinarian supplies to speed up aid efforts. The NATO alliance has also started to coordinate food-aid shipments, drinking water, generators, and tarpaulins through its disaster coordination center.
2.45 a.m.: Carnival Corp. said its earnings are likely to be reduced by one cent to three cents a share due to the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Most of the reduction is expected to fall in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ends Nov. 30, the Miami-based cruise-line operator said. Carnival is forecasting earnings of 45 cents a share for the current quarter and a profit of $2.70 a share for the fiscal year. Carnival said severe weather resulted in the cancellation of one voyage and the shortening of two others. The company has two ships based in New Orleans and doesn't expect them to operate from that port for an extended period of time.
1:43 a.m.: Oil prices fell Monday, declining more than $1 in London after industrialized nations agreed to release 60 million barrels of crude from their strategic stockpiles to help avert a severe fuel shortage in the U.S. The U.S. refinery system was struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina, with two storm-shuttered facilities restarting and flows of crude oil improving enough to allow refineries in the Gulf Coast and Midwest to ramp up production. But four damaged Gulf Coast refiners look likely to remain shut for weeks or even months, taking with them more than 5% of U.S. capacity.
Sunday, Sept. 4
8:55 p.m.: With nearly a quarter million evacuees already in Texas and more still pouring in, Gov. Rick Perry on Sunday ordered emergency officials to initiate an airlift to take some of them to other states that have offered help. Aid centers will be set up at airports in Houston and Dallas where incoming refugees can be given food, water and medical care before they are flown out. Two flights were scheduled Sunday night.
8:00 p.m.: MSNBC shows a civilian helicopter crashed in New Orleans on a spit of land surrounded by flood waters. The helicopter is lying on its side and smoking slightly. The AP reported that the two people on board escaped with only cuts and scrapes, according to Mark Smith of the state office of emergency preparedness.
7:45 p.m.: Here are updated death tolls reported by state officials from Katrina as of Sunday. The numbers are expected to rise.
ALABAMA: 2
FLORIDA: 11
GEORGIA: 2
LOUISIANA: 59
MISSISSIPPI: 161
TOTAL: 235
7 p.m.: It will cost at least $1.5 billion to rebuild destroyed highways in the Gulf Coast region, Transportation Secretary Mineta said. That amount would just restore Interstate 10 and U.S. 90, two major arteries leading into New Orleans. Mineta also said 15 flights an hour were arriving and departing from New Orleans International Airport by Sunday afternoon, and that more than 20,000 people had been flown out of the city in the last 72 hours.
6:30 p.m.: Multimedia: Latest AP video shows evacuations in New Orleans and progress in Biloxi. Updated WSJ gallery includes photo of city streets by hunkered-down staff at New Orleans Internet registrar DirectNic (More at mgno.com.)
6:20 p.m.: The Army Corps of Engineers says some of its contractors were shot at, then police shot fatally the gunmen who fired on the contractors. The contractors weren't killed, the Army Corps said. An earlier report incorrectly said the police had shot and killed the contractors.
• Updated photos | New Orleans Map
• See complete coverage.
5:55 p.m.: The AP reports from Fort Chaffee, Ark. After arriving here weary and hungry, thousands of people driven from their homes by faced one more task before they could rest: paperwork. Marion Landry, 84, held onto her younger sister's walker as the bedraggled pair went through the required registration. What they really wanted was a shower. "I've worn the same set of clothes for three days," said Fay Roberts, 81. "My hair is sweaty. I don't look like this. Normally I'm very nice."
4:52 p.m.: Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them, a deputy chief said. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley said the shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge on U.S. 90, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. He said he had no other details.
4:40 p.m.: In the first official count, Louisiana emergency medical director Louis Cataldie said authorities had verified 59 deaths.
Ken Wells
3:50 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Ken Wells reports from New Orleans. Frank Churchville and Kenny Ellison have come from Alabama to help. Mr. Churchville is perched up in the bed of a white Ford F150 pickup truck, sporting a black T-shirt that has "Police" emblazoned across it in big white letters and, in case anyone misses that hint, a big black shotgun, locked and loaded, perched in his lap. He's a cop back in Mobile; Mr. Ellison a contractor there. As soon as they started hearing the reports from New Orleans, they lit out, one of an estimated 1,600 such volunteers who have come in with boats to search the still flooded ramparts of the city for Katrina's trapped and dead. "How can we get out of here?" pleads 19-year-old Janessa Bailey, who has walked three long blocks through the filthy water and has a fevered, stricken look on her face. "Do you know anything about the buses? Are they picking up people anywhere near?" Read Ken's full report.
3:20 p.m: The Wall Street Journal's Gary Fields reports from Washington. Alphonso Jackson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said the government is working with housing directors from around the country as well as private entities to identify more long term housing. "It's important to understand they will not [all] be in Louisiana or Mississippi. We are talking about a 500-mile radius," he said. Mr. Jackson said authorities also are exploring the wider use of rental vouchers. See the full report.
3:05 p.m.: WSJ.com rounds up editorials from Sunday's papers on the New Orleans catastrophe. Reactions ranged from frustration with the federal government's response to determination to rebuild the broken city. Plus, graphic showing newspaper front pages.
Lt. Gen. Honore
2:40 p.m.: Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore tells Fox News: "The local officials were doing the best they could given the conditions. They were in the conditions themselves and were also victims. … The storm took down the power, the storm took down the antennas. … The telephone goes down and that makes it very hard to coordinate. That takes you back 50 to 100 years. … Coordination is dependent on reliable communications. … I am not trying to defend this I am trying to explain this." See an AP profile of Honore. Recall that Honore was the one official New Orleans Mayor Nagin praised, calling him a "John Wayne" type. (Audio)
2:38 p.m.: Fox News's Geraldo Rivera, witnessing a woman being coaxed on to a helicopter, says, "This was a dress rehearsal for a nuclear attack on the major American city." Helicopter video shown on cable networks shows chopper rescues continuing, amid flooding stretching for miles. Men stand on slanted roofs of houses waiting for rescue. Earlier, Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish, La., breaks down while telling NBC's Meet the Press of the slow-motion death of a colleague's stranded mother: "I'm sick of the press conferences. For God's sake, shut up and send somebody."
2:30 p.m.: The first group of evacuees who will be given shelter in Arizona arrived Sunday morning at Sky Harbor International Airport. The New Orleans diaspora stretches to New England as well. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney says about 2,500 displaced people will arrive in the state for emergency shelter within the next 72 hours.
2:15 p.m.: Embattled FEMA Director Michael Brown said Sunday his agency and the Department of Homeland Security didn't ask for military help until they realized it was "beyond the capability of FEMA" to get its job done. "We asked for it as soon as it became necessary. As soon as we recognized this was beyond the capabilities of FEMA to do its traditional recovery efforts," Brown said during a press conference. "I think people need to understand the response was ongoing ... . This disaster did not start the day Katrina moved out of here; the disaster continued on and grew and grew," he said. See an August 2004 profile of Brown, which includes a discussion of low morale at FEMA.
1:45 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Melanie Trottman and Ann Zimmerman report from Dallas. Volunteers taped signs up on a long row of windows near the building's entrance, offering transportation to Sunday church services, jobs at Kentucky Fried Chicken and Domino's Pizza, and pet help and care. One sign offered shelter to members of Alcoholics Anonymous, along with rides to local meetings. At Reunion Arena, 27-year-old Dallas resident Gerald Brown set up a makeshift barbershop to offer free haircuts, calling it God's work. His lamp is clamped to a metal guardrail and he's plugged the power cord of his clippers into an outlet outside the building. Elsewhere, Calvin Armstead, 34, who worked in New Orleans as a gas-station cashier, said he is debating whether to meet up with family in Houston or stay in Dallas, where he says he's had more outpouring of support from people than he had his entire life in New Orleans. "I'd like to go back to New Orleans but I don't think that's possible," he said. "Dallas sounds like a good idea."
1:30 p.m.: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld comments from the New Orleans airport: "As the president said, it is a natural disaster of historic proportions." He added, "It is important to keep the magnitude of it mind. …. It will take many, many, many months, into years, for this area to recover." Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) identifies Friday as the turning point in the rescue efforts.
12:40 p.m.: New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said 150 police officers were to leave for Gulf Coast region Monday, in addition to 172 officers sent on Saturday. Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said FEMA on Sunday requested 300 New York firefighters. They were to leave Monday to help fight fires and search for survivors. He said hundreds of firefighters had already volunteered before they were asked.
12:30 p.m. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice returned to her native Alabama to attend services at the Pilgrim Rest AME Zion church outside Mobile and a community center in the ravaged Bayou La Batre, 45 minutes away. About 718,000 homes and businesses in Mobile were left without power for days, and at least two people died.
11:48 a.m.: President Bush and First Lady Laura Bush visited the Red Cross's disaster operation center in Washington, where they thanked employees. The president also announced that the White House would hold a blood drive on Friday.
11:45 a.m.: British nationals caught up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina recounted horror stories of their experience sheltering in squalid and terrifying conditions as they arrived home Sunday. Will Nelson, 21 years old, who was visiting New Orleans after working on the Camp America cultural exchange program and took shelter in the city's Superdome, said conditions in the refuge deteriorated to desperate levels. Fellow summer camp worker Sarah Yorston, 21, said she witnessed "total chaos and devastation." She added "These people have lost everything and they are just desperate people doing desperate things." Another Briton, Marisa Haigh, said international tourists stranded in the Superdome had stuck together for safety. See Brits' Hell Inside The Terror Dome.
10:50 a.m.: Pool cameras show dramatic rescue of older woman from rooftop. Meanwhile, a woman's body remained at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Magazine Street, a business area in the lower Garden District with antique shops. The AP reports the body had been there since at least Wednesday. People covered her with blankets or plastic. By Sunday, a short wall of bricks had been built around her body, holding down a plastic tarpaulin. On it, someone spray-painted a cross and the words, "Here lies Vera. God help us.'' (See the photo in the WSJ photo gallery.)
10:41 a.m.: U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt says death toll from Hurricane Katrina is in the thousands, echoing bleak remarks made a day earlier by Louisiana's governor. He couldn't give a precise number on the impact of the devastation, but when asked if it was in the thousands, he told CNN, "I think it's evident it's in the thousands.''
10:40 a.m.: Wall Street Journal reporters Russell Gold in Dallas and Thaddeus Herrick in Houston report. Nearly a week after Hurricane Katrina cut through a main artery of the U.S. energy industry, a large amount of crucial infrastructure remains off line, leaving the world's largest economy and the rest of the globe on the brink of a potential energy crisis. A focused picture of the damage to the region's infrastructure remains elusive amid the post-storm chaos, but in broad-brush strokes, it is becoming clear the industry faces a two-pronged problem. Full report.
Chertoff and embattled Brown brief media
10:20 a.m.: "We are going to have to go house to house" to find survivors and the dead, Homeland chief Michael Chertoff tells reporters. "From this point on … I want to do everything as possible as quickly as possible." Answering questions from reports, he said, "I'm not going to take one minute" away from working on the crisis to answers questions on what may or may not have gone wrong in the government's earlier efforts. He declined to give an approximate death toll. See profiles of Chertoff and other key people in the crisis.
10:00 a.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Robert Guy Matthews reports. In an effort to soften the blow of higher fuel prices and disrupted supplies, the federal government is taking steps to increase the supply of diesel fuel as some states moved to suspend gasoline excise taxes. States that suspend gas taxes stand to lose millions of dollars in revenues. Late last week, the state of Georgia suspended its 7.5 cents-a-gallon gas tax and 4% sales tax on gasoline purchases until Oct. 1. Read the full report.
9:55 a.m.: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told "Fox News Sunday" that a grim toll is expected to be found in swamped homes and elsewhere. "We need to prepare the country for what's coming. ... We are going to uncover people who died hiding in the houses, maybe got caught in floods, it is going to be as ugly a scene as you can imagine,'' Mr. Chertoff said.
7:33 a.m.: Pope Benedict offered his prayers to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. "These days we are all pained by the disaster caused by the hurricane in the United States of America," Pope Benedict said. "I want to ensure my prayer for the dead and their relatives, for the wounded without a roof, for the sick, the children, the elderly and I bless those who are busy with the difficult rescue and rebuilding operation."
6:47 a.m.: South Korea said it will send $30 million to the U.S. for hurricane relief, according to an official with the South Korean Prime Minister's Office.
2:48 a.m.: Associated Press gives snapshot of evacuee status across the south of the U.S. Governor Rick Perry said more than 120,000 evacuees are in 97 shelters across Texas, with another 100,000 in hotels and motels in the state. Hundreds more are housed in churches or private homes.
1:25 a.m.: North Korea's Red Cross expressed sympathy to its U.S. counterpart over the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. The North Korean Red Cross said it hoped "the living of the inhabitants in the afflicted areas return to normal as early as possible."
Bush Chooses John Roberts as Next US Chief Justice Bloomberg
U.S. President George W. Bush, acting only two days after the death of William H. Rehnquist, said he will nominate federal appeals court Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to be the nation's 17th chief justice. Roberts, 50, was in line to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, with Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to begin tomorrow. Bush instead will pick a new nominee for that seat. "Both those who've worked with him and those who have faced him in the courtroom speak with admiration of his striking ability as a lawyer and his natural gifts as a leader,'' Bush said from the Oval Office in Washington with Roberts at his side. "Judge Roberts has earned the nation's confidence.'' In announcing Roberts's nomination so quickly -- two days before Rehnquist's funeral -- Bush said he hoped the Senate would confirm him before the formal start of the Supreme Court's term on Oct. 3. "It is in the interest of the court and the country to have a chief justice on the bench on the first full day of the fall term,'' said Bush. Roberts, who until two years ago was an appellate litigator at a Washington law firm, said he was "honored and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me.'' A former official in two Republican administrations, Roberts is now a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He had been an overwhelming favorite to win confirmation as an associate justice by the Senate, where Republicans hold a 55-45 advantage.
`Raises the Stakes'
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, a Judiciary Committee member who previously vowed to ask Roberts tough questions about his views on constitutional law, suggested he would try to hold Roberts to an even higher standard. "This nomination certainly raises the stakes in making sure that the American people and the Senate know Judge Roberts's views fully before he assumes perhaps the second most powerful position in the United States,'' Schumer said in an e-mailed statement. Bush said he would fill O'Connor's seat ``in a timely manner.'' He faces conflicting, probably even irreconcilable, pressures, as he prepares to fill the second vacancy. Dealing with sagging approval ratings and criticism over his response to Hurricane Katrina, he may try to reach out to moderates with his next appointment. At the same time, his political base will want a new justice to be at least as conservative as Rehnquist, who voted to allow the death penalty, restrict abortion and limit affirmative action. And some political allies say Bush must appoint either a woman or a racial minority.
Formal Offer
"Roberts has soaked up the white male seat,'' said Manuel Miranda, executive director of the Third Branch Conference a Washington-based coalition of conservative groups that support Bush's judicial nominees. Bush officially offered Roberts the chief justice position at 7:15 a.m. today Washington time after the two met privately at the White House yesterday at 5:30 p.m., spokesman Scott McClellan said. "This had been something that had been in the president's thinking for some time in case the chief justice retired'' or died or became unable to fulfill his duties, McClellan said. White House chief of staff Andy Card notified congressional leaders early today of Bush's decision. Justice John Paul Stevens, acting as liaison for the court, was also notified of the president's decision, McClellan said.
Court Moves May Give Bush Political High Ground Los Angeles Times
US Supreme court loses Chief Justice William Rehnquist ABC Online
[urlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/politics/politicsspecial1/05cnd-scotus.html]New York Times[/url] - DetNews.com - San Francisco Chronicle - Reuters - all 3,867 related »
U.S. President George W. Bush, acting only two days after the death of William H. Rehnquist, said he will nominate federal appeals court Judge John G. Roberts Jr. to be the nation's 17th chief justice. Roberts, 50, was in line to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, with Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to begin tomorrow. Bush instead will pick a new nominee for that seat. "Both those who've worked with him and those who have faced him in the courtroom speak with admiration of his striking ability as a lawyer and his natural gifts as a leader,'' Bush said from the Oval Office in Washington with Roberts at his side. "Judge Roberts has earned the nation's confidence.'' In announcing Roberts's nomination so quickly -- two days before Rehnquist's funeral -- Bush said he hoped the Senate would confirm him before the formal start of the Supreme Court's term on Oct. 3. "It is in the interest of the court and the country to have a chief justice on the bench on the first full day of the fall term,'' said Bush. Roberts, who until two years ago was an appellate litigator at a Washington law firm, said he was "honored and humbled by the confidence the president has shown in me.'' A former official in two Republican administrations, Roberts is now a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He had been an overwhelming favorite to win confirmation as an associate justice by the Senate, where Republicans hold a 55-45 advantage.
`Raises the Stakes'
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, a Judiciary Committee member who previously vowed to ask Roberts tough questions about his views on constitutional law, suggested he would try to hold Roberts to an even higher standard. "This nomination certainly raises the stakes in making sure that the American people and the Senate know Judge Roberts's views fully before he assumes perhaps the second most powerful position in the United States,'' Schumer said in an e-mailed statement. Bush said he would fill O'Connor's seat ``in a timely manner.'' He faces conflicting, probably even irreconcilable, pressures, as he prepares to fill the second vacancy. Dealing with sagging approval ratings and criticism over his response to Hurricane Katrina, he may try to reach out to moderates with his next appointment. At the same time, his political base will want a new justice to be at least as conservative as Rehnquist, who voted to allow the death penalty, restrict abortion and limit affirmative action. And some political allies say Bush must appoint either a woman or a racial minority.
Formal Offer
"Roberts has soaked up the white male seat,'' said Manuel Miranda, executive director of the Third Branch Conference a Washington-based coalition of conservative groups that support Bush's judicial nominees. Bush officially offered Roberts the chief justice position at 7:15 a.m. today Washington time after the two met privately at the White House yesterday at 5:30 p.m., spokesman Scott McClellan said. "This had been something that had been in the president's thinking for some time in case the chief justice retired'' or died or became unable to fulfill his duties, McClellan said. White House chief of staff Andy Card notified congressional leaders early today of Bush's decision. Justice John Paul Stevens, acting as liaison for the court, was also notified of the president's decision, McClellan said.
Court Moves May Give Bush Political High Ground Los Angeles Times
US Supreme court loses Chief Justice William Rehnquist ABC Online
[urlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/politics/politicsspecial1/05cnd-scotus.html]New York Times[/url] - DetNews.com - San Francisco Chronicle - Reuters - all 3,867 related »
Hurricane Maria Strengthens Over Atlantic Washington Post
Hurricane Maria continued to intensify early Monday over warm water in the open Atlantic, but remained only a threat to shipping interests, forecasters said. The storm was centered 475 miles east of Bermuda at 11 a.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center said. It was moving north at 8 mph and forecasters said gradual turns to the north and northeast would keep Maria well to the east of Bermuda. Its top sustained wind speed was approaching 100 mph, up from 90 mph in the early morning, and the system was expected to continue strengthening until it is sapped of its strength when it reaches cooler water later in the week.
This NOAA satellite image taken Monday, Sept. 5, 2005 at 2:45 a.m. EDT shows a dense area of clouds over the Northern Plains associated with showers and thunderstorms. Fewer clouds can be seen over the Northeast and Southeast. Clouds associated with two areas of disturbed weather can be seen east of Florida, and clouds associated with Hurricane Maria can be seen far out in the Atlantic.
Maria is the fifth hurricane and 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, one of the busiest on record. Historically, only about four or five named storms form by this time of year, according to the hurricane center. Peak storm activity typically occurs from late August through mid-September.
On the Net:National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
Thanks for the support Last chapter Kansas City Star
Now, Hurricane Maria forms over open Atlantic Hindustan Times
Guardian Unlimited - Florida Today - Monsters and Critics.com - Orlando Sentinel - all 460 related »
Hurricane Maria continued to intensify early Monday over warm water in the open Atlantic, but remained only a threat to shipping interests, forecasters said. The storm was centered 475 miles east of Bermuda at 11 a.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center said. It was moving north at 8 mph and forecasters said gradual turns to the north and northeast would keep Maria well to the east of Bermuda. Its top sustained wind speed was approaching 100 mph, up from 90 mph in the early morning, and the system was expected to continue strengthening until it is sapped of its strength when it reaches cooler water later in the week.
This NOAA satellite image taken Monday, Sept. 5, 2005 at 2:45 a.m. EDT shows a dense area of clouds over the Northern Plains associated with showers and thunderstorms. Fewer clouds can be seen over the Northeast and Southeast. Clouds associated with two areas of disturbed weather can be seen east of Florida, and clouds associated with Hurricane Maria can be seen far out in the Atlantic.
Maria is the fifth hurricane and 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, one of the busiest on record. Historically, only about four or five named storms form by this time of year, according to the hurricane center. Peak storm activity typically occurs from late August through mid-September.
On the Net:National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov
Thanks for the support Last chapter Kansas City Star
Now, Hurricane Maria forms over open Atlantic Hindustan Times
Guardian Unlimited - Florida Today - Monsters and Critics.com - Orlando Sentinel - all 460 related »
Lawmakers face crowded agendas in final week of session San Francisco Chronicle
After more than seven months of wrangling, negotiating and pleading for votes, California legislators will try to put the finishing touches on about 400 bills as their 2005 session ends this week. Measures that would recognize gay marriages, raise the minimum wage, allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses and promote a massive expansion of solar power need to clear final hurdles in the next few days to reach the governor's desk. Also on lawmakers' agendas are bills that would boost nutrition requirements for school food, require identifying marks on handgun bullets to help solve crimes, allow alternatives to passing the high school graduation exam and authorize Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to cancel the Nov. 8 special election. The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn for the year on Friday, but an earlier — or even slightly later departure — is possible. Here are some of the key bills that face votes this week: GAY MARRIAGE: Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, will try again to convince the Assembly to approve a bill that would recognize gay marriages performed in California. His first attempt, in June, fell four votes short. But the Senate gave him another chance last week by approving another of his bills that was turned into a gay marriage measure after it passed the Assembly. That amended bill is back for another Assembly vote that will determine if it makes it to Schwarzenegger, who has indicated he'd rather have the issue decided by the courts or voters, not by his signature on the bill. DRIVER'S LICENSES: Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, is making another attempt — his fifth in seven years — to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, a step he says will improve highway safety. But his latest bill, which is awaiting a vote in the Assembly, seems to be headed for a veto by Schwarzenegger. The Republican governor, who vetoed Cedillo's bill last year, has raised a series of objections to the legislation. His latest: It shouldn't be enacted until the federal government issues regulations covering the licenses. The Assembly amended the bill last week to allow the Department of Motor Vehicles to wait eight months after the federal regulations come out to issue the licenses, which would have to have a different look than standard driver's licenses and wouldn't be widely accepted as valid identification documents. Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Margita Thompson, said the amendments won't satisfy the administration. "We still need to see what the parameters are in terms of the regulations that are disseminated ... before we can make a decision in California," she said. "Any state action remains premature." SOLAR POWER: Schwarzenegger has backed off his support for a bill that would offer subsidies to home and business owners who install solar energy systems. He said he wouldn't accept amendments that set wage standards for workers who install the systems on businesses. Now the Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers are trying to negotiate a compromise that would result in the bill being signed into law. MINIMUM WAGE: This is another bill that seems certain to draw a veto from Schwarzenegger. It would raise California's minimum wage by $1 an hour, to $7.75, in two steps and then tie future increases to inflation. It's strongly opposed by Schwarzenegger's allies among employers, particularly restaurant owners. The governor vetoed a less ambitious minimum wage increase last year. Bill supporters say the state's minimum wage has lagged behind inflation and minimum wages in other West Coast states, forcing many low-wage workers into public assistance programs. Business groups contend an increase in the wage would cost jobs. SPECIAL ELECTION: A bill by Assemblyman Johan Klehs, D-San Leandro, would specify that Schwarzenegger has the power to cancel the special election he called for Nov. 8. But the bill, awaiting a vote in the Senate, probably won't reach him. It needs support from at least a few Republican lawmakers and isn't likely to get it. In any event, Schwarzenegger has said he has no plans to cancel the election, despite polls showing little support for it.
On the Net: www.assembly.ca.gov and www.senate.ca.gov
Politics May Rule Who Says 'I Do' Los Angeles Times
Legislature reflects state's schizophrenia on gay marriage San Jose Mercury News
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After more than seven months of wrangling, negotiating and pleading for votes, California legislators will try to put the finishing touches on about 400 bills as their 2005 session ends this week. Measures that would recognize gay marriages, raise the minimum wage, allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses and promote a massive expansion of solar power need to clear final hurdles in the next few days to reach the governor's desk. Also on lawmakers' agendas are bills that would boost nutrition requirements for school food, require identifying marks on handgun bullets to help solve crimes, allow alternatives to passing the high school graduation exam and authorize Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to cancel the Nov. 8 special election. The Legislature is scheduled to adjourn for the year on Friday, but an earlier — or even slightly later departure — is possible. Here are some of the key bills that face votes this week: GAY MARRIAGE: Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, will try again to convince the Assembly to approve a bill that would recognize gay marriages performed in California. His first attempt, in June, fell four votes short. But the Senate gave him another chance last week by approving another of his bills that was turned into a gay marriage measure after it passed the Assembly. That amended bill is back for another Assembly vote that will determine if it makes it to Schwarzenegger, who has indicated he'd rather have the issue decided by the courts or voters, not by his signature on the bill. DRIVER'S LICENSES: Sen. Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, is making another attempt — his fifth in seven years — to allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, a step he says will improve highway safety. But his latest bill, which is awaiting a vote in the Assembly, seems to be headed for a veto by Schwarzenegger. The Republican governor, who vetoed Cedillo's bill last year, has raised a series of objections to the legislation. His latest: It shouldn't be enacted until the federal government issues regulations covering the licenses. The Assembly amended the bill last week to allow the Department of Motor Vehicles to wait eight months after the federal regulations come out to issue the licenses, which would have to have a different look than standard driver's licenses and wouldn't be widely accepted as valid identification documents. Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Margita Thompson, said the amendments won't satisfy the administration. "We still need to see what the parameters are in terms of the regulations that are disseminated ... before we can make a decision in California," she said. "Any state action remains premature." SOLAR POWER: Schwarzenegger has backed off his support for a bill that would offer subsidies to home and business owners who install solar energy systems. He said he wouldn't accept amendments that set wage standards for workers who install the systems on businesses. Now the Republican governor and Democratic lawmakers are trying to negotiate a compromise that would result in the bill being signed into law. MINIMUM WAGE: This is another bill that seems certain to draw a veto from Schwarzenegger. It would raise California's minimum wage by $1 an hour, to $7.75, in two steps and then tie future increases to inflation. It's strongly opposed by Schwarzenegger's allies among employers, particularly restaurant owners. The governor vetoed a less ambitious minimum wage increase last year. Bill supporters say the state's minimum wage has lagged behind inflation and minimum wages in other West Coast states, forcing many low-wage workers into public assistance programs. Business groups contend an increase in the wage would cost jobs. SPECIAL ELECTION: A bill by Assemblyman Johan Klehs, D-San Leandro, would specify that Schwarzenegger has the power to cancel the special election he called for Nov. 8. But the bill, awaiting a vote in the Senate, probably won't reach him. It needs support from at least a few Republican lawmakers and isn't likely to get it. In any event, Schwarzenegger has said he has no plans to cancel the election, despite polls showing little support for it.
On the Net: www.assembly.ca.gov and www.senate.ca.gov
Politics May Rule Who Says 'I Do' Los Angeles Times
Legislature reflects state's schizophrenia on gay marriage San Jose Mercury News
Contra Costa Times - MTV.com - Inside Bay Area - Detroit Free Press - all 43 related »
Bush aide hails US Muslims' anti-terrorism efforts Chicago Sun-Times
President Bush's top aide, Karen Hughes, praised the Islamic Society of North America for creating a brochure condemning terrorism and religious extremism and called American Muslims her "new allies" in helping her convey a positive image of the United States to the larger Islamic world.
American Muslims Open Convention Guardian Unlimited
From State Dept., Advice for Muslim Convention New York Times
Miami Herald - Indianapolis Star - Chicago Tribune - NewsBlaze - all 64 related »
President Bush's top aide, Karen Hughes, praised the Islamic Society of North America for creating a brochure condemning terrorism and religious extremism and called American Muslims her "new allies" in helping her convey a positive image of the United States to the larger Islamic world.
American Muslims Open Convention Guardian Unlimited
From State Dept., Advice for Muslim Convention New York Times
Miami Herald - Indianapolis Star - Chicago Tribune - NewsBlaze - all 64 related »
Toll Suspected to Soar as Body Recovery Begins
By Jacqueline L. Salmon and Josh White
ST. GABRIEL, La., Sept. 5 -- Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing floods along the Gulf Coast could mark one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, as the macabre task of locating and cataloguing its dead moves into its early stages. Officials estimate the death toll could rise to several thousand over coming days.
The search-and-rescue efforts in coastal communities of Louisiana and Mississippi are turning their focus to recovering the bodies, as workers attempt to reach isolated communities that were ravaged by high winds and flooding that reached rooftops. The more than 200 confirmed dead suggest a grimmer total, as rescuers break residential windows to find bodies floating in flooded houses, to discover victims under piles of tree limbs, wood planks and rocks, and to secure bodies found floating in the streets to fence posts.
Totals of the dead are elusive, say local, state and federal officials, because of great difficulty finding missing people trapped in nursing homes, office buildings and apartment complexes. Debris is piled more than 10 feet high in Mississippi. In New Orleans, the battle is against deep waters and completely obstructed roadways.
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) told NBC's "Today" that "it wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000" dead as a result of the catastrophe, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) said thousands were probably killed.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in Baton Rouge on Monday, warned that the death toll is "going to be an unhappy number."
Should that number reach near the 10,000 mark, Katrina could be remembered as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. The September 1900 hurricane that swamped Galveston, Tex., left more than 8,000 dead. The San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 claimed about 3,000 lives.
Mississippi's estimate of the dead is 150, but official death numbers are not released until a coroner has identified the body. In Hancock County, for example, rescue officials believe the announced total of 36 dead could easily rise to between 600 and 1,000. Rescuers there were going from house to house and leaving coded markings to indicate suspected deaths, and then moving on.
"It's access more than anything," said Mick Bullock, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, who said there have been reports of people being trapped in their attics for the past week. "There's so much debris still blocking traffic. These local roads are really still covered up, and there are places we haven't been able to get to. . . . It's going to be an extensive and long process. The reality is that the death toll will climb."
Louisiana officials have counted 71 dead so far.
In St. Gabriel, a tiny hamlet south of Baton Rouge, La., the dead may soon outnumber the living.
In a cavernous warehouse, across from the local baseball field in this gritty town of 5,000, the bodies of those killed during Katrina's fury and its deadly aftermath started arriving yesterday.
Plucked from the filthy floodwaters, the bodies will be transported in refrigerated trucks to this temporary morgue. There, they will be washed, examined, photographed, fingerprinted and, eventually, released to their families when they have been identified. Seven refrigerated trucks were lined up to hold bodies for processing.
This morgue, essentially the major clearinghouse for those killed in Louisiana, and a similar facility in Mississippi will take bodies from several regional collection points throughout the affected area. The St. Gabriel mortuary unit is set up to process in excess of 5,000 dead, said Ricardo Zuniga, a FEMA spokesman.
Jeffrey Kraft, publisher of American Funeral Director magazine in Rockville, said the facility was significantly larger than the temporary morgue set up to handle the dead from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, where more than 2,700 died.
Once bodies are turned over to the smaller collection points, basic identifying information and specific data about where the body was found is noted. Then, the bodies travel under police escort to the larger mortuary units for forensic inspection. After all of that information is processed, the bodies move on to state control for identification and notification of families.
On Monday, before the truckloads of body bags began to arrive in St. Gabriel, federal and state officials briefly opened the facility -- expected to be the main morgue for bodies retrieved west of the Mississippi River -- to journalists before it is closed to anyone except morgue staff.
Officials said they wanted to show families, and the country, the conditions under which the bodies would be handled.
"Families need to know what happened to their loved one," said David Senn, a forensic odontologist who helped identify victims of the Columbia shuttle disaster and the World Trade Center attacks.
Inside the facility, slightly smaller than a football field, sheets of black plastic were taped down to concrete floors. A dozen metal gurneys were already lined up near the loading dock, ready to transport bodies to the blue-and-white decontamination tent. Officials said they will be able to process 140 bodies a day.
FBI fingerprint specialists and teams of volunteer forensic pathologists, forensic odontologists, archaeologists, and DNA experts from FEMA's Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team and its Disaster Medical Assistance Team will examine the bodies after they have been decontaminated. A veterinary team will separate human from animal remains. One escort will accompany each body through the entire route, Ellis said.
On a tent pole near the start of the grim assembly line was taped a handwritten sign. "Let the dead teach the living," it said. It is, said Ellis, "a dignified, respectful process."
Staff writers Sally Jenkins in Waveland, Miss., and Timothy Dwyer in New Orleans and staff researcher Karl Evanzz in Washington contributed to this report. White reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle
By Jacqueline L. Salmon and Josh White
ST. GABRIEL, La., Sept. 5 -- Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing floods along the Gulf Coast could mark one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, as the macabre task of locating and cataloguing its dead moves into its early stages. Officials estimate the death toll could rise to several thousand over coming days.
The search-and-rescue efforts in coastal communities of Louisiana and Mississippi are turning their focus to recovering the bodies, as workers attempt to reach isolated communities that were ravaged by high winds and flooding that reached rooftops. The more than 200 confirmed dead suggest a grimmer total, as rescuers break residential windows to find bodies floating in flooded houses, to discover victims under piles of tree limbs, wood planks and rocks, and to secure bodies found floating in the streets to fence posts.
Totals of the dead are elusive, say local, state and federal officials, because of great difficulty finding missing people trapped in nursing homes, office buildings and apartment complexes. Debris is piled more than 10 feet high in Mississippi. In New Orleans, the battle is against deep waters and completely obstructed roadways.
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) told NBC's "Today" that "it wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000" dead as a result of the catastrophe, and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) said thousands were probably killed.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in Baton Rouge on Monday, warned that the death toll is "going to be an unhappy number."
Should that number reach near the 10,000 mark, Katrina could be remembered as the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. The September 1900 hurricane that swamped Galveston, Tex., left more than 8,000 dead. The San Francisco earthquake and fire in 1906 claimed about 3,000 lives.
Mississippi's estimate of the dead is 150, but official death numbers are not released until a coroner has identified the body. In Hancock County, for example, rescue officials believe the announced total of 36 dead could easily rise to between 600 and 1,000. Rescuers there were going from house to house and leaving coded markings to indicate suspected deaths, and then moving on.
"It's access more than anything," said Mick Bullock, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, who said there have been reports of people being trapped in their attics for the past week. "There's so much debris still blocking traffic. These local roads are really still covered up, and there are places we haven't been able to get to. . . . It's going to be an extensive and long process. The reality is that the death toll will climb."
Louisiana officials have counted 71 dead so far.
In St. Gabriel, a tiny hamlet south of Baton Rouge, La., the dead may soon outnumber the living.
In a cavernous warehouse, across from the local baseball field in this gritty town of 5,000, the bodies of those killed during Katrina's fury and its deadly aftermath started arriving yesterday.
Plucked from the filthy floodwaters, the bodies will be transported in refrigerated trucks to this temporary morgue. There, they will be washed, examined, photographed, fingerprinted and, eventually, released to their families when they have been identified. Seven refrigerated trucks were lined up to hold bodies for processing.
This morgue, essentially the major clearinghouse for those killed in Louisiana, and a similar facility in Mississippi will take bodies from several regional collection points throughout the affected area. The St. Gabriel mortuary unit is set up to process in excess of 5,000 dead, said Ricardo Zuniga, a FEMA spokesman.
Jeffrey Kraft, publisher of American Funeral Director magazine in Rockville, said the facility was significantly larger than the temporary morgue set up to handle the dead from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, where more than 2,700 died.
Once bodies are turned over to the smaller collection points, basic identifying information and specific data about where the body was found is noted. Then, the bodies travel under police escort to the larger mortuary units for forensic inspection. After all of that information is processed, the bodies move on to state control for identification and notification of families.
On Monday, before the truckloads of body bags began to arrive in St. Gabriel, federal and state officials briefly opened the facility -- expected to be the main morgue for bodies retrieved west of the Mississippi River -- to journalists before it is closed to anyone except morgue staff.
Officials said they wanted to show families, and the country, the conditions under which the bodies would be handled.
"Families need to know what happened to their loved one," said David Senn, a forensic odontologist who helped identify victims of the Columbia shuttle disaster and the World Trade Center attacks.
Inside the facility, slightly smaller than a football field, sheets of black plastic were taped down to concrete floors. A dozen metal gurneys were already lined up near the loading dock, ready to transport bodies to the blue-and-white decontamination tent. Officials said they will be able to process 140 bodies a day.
FBI fingerprint specialists and teams of volunteer forensic pathologists, forensic odontologists, archaeologists, and DNA experts from FEMA's Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team and its Disaster Medical Assistance Team will examine the bodies after they have been decontaminated. A veterinary team will separate human from animal remains. One escort will accompany each body through the entire route, Ellis said.
On a tent pole near the start of the grim assembly line was taped a handwritten sign. "Let the dead teach the living," it said. It is, said Ellis, "a dignified, respectful process."
Staff writers Sally Jenkins in Waveland, Miss., and Timothy Dwyer in New Orleans and staff researcher Karl Evanzz in Washington contributed to this report. White reported from Washington.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle
Democrats Pledge More Intense Scrutiny of Roberts
By Jo Becker
Senate Democrats yesterday promised to subject John G. Roberts Jr. to an increased level of scrutiny in light of President Bush's decision to nominate the 50-year-old appeals court judge to replace the late William H. Rehnquist as chief justice.
But with conservatives and liberals alike saying that Roberts is on track to be confirmed, the focus was already shifting to what both sides believe will be the real battle: Bush's yet-to-be-named pick to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
O'Connor's seat is critical because she often provided a swing vote on such controversial issues as affirmative action, abortion and prayer in public places. Roberts was initially chosen to replace her, but instead is now poised to succeed Rehnquist, a reliable conservative who died Saturday of thyroid cancer.
The rare opening of two seats on the nine-member court gives Bush the opportunity to dramatically move the balance of power on the court to the right.
The switch, which comes as the Bush administration struggles to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had both sides hurriedly recalibrating their strategies. Senate leaders agreed to postpone Roberts's confirmation hearings, which had been scheduled to start today, probably until next Monday.
Bush urged the Senate to quickly confirm Roberts in time for the Oct. 3 start of the new Supreme Court term, saying that the Senate was "well along in the process of considering Judge Roberts's qualifications."
But Senate Democrats said that the move to make Roberts the 17th chief justice of the United States required careful deliberation, particularly given Roberts's relatively short, two-year tenure as a federal appeals court judge.
"The stakes are higher and the Senate's advice and consent responsibility is even more important," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). "If confirmed to this lifetime job, John Roberts would become the leader of the third branch of the federal government and the most prominent judge in the nation."
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee plan to renew their calls for the White House to release memos and other documents from Roberts's 1989-1993 tenure as principal deputy solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, his highest government posting. "Judge Roberts has a clear obligation to make his views known fully and completely," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y).
Still, even liberal groups opposed to Roberts's nomination said yesterday that the shift is unlikely to alter his chances of being confirmed, given that Republicans are in firm control of the Senate. Some Republicans argued that it will even help his prospects, given that replacing Rehnquist with Roberts isn't likely to change the ideological center of the court.
Kate Michelman, a former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said that what senators must do now is highlight Roberts's record on civil rights, his skeptical writings about the legal underpinnings of abortion rights and other stances to "show people what it means to have his views on the court and lay the groundwork for the next nomination fight."
Democrats are already moving to link the two nominations. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said that a review of memos that Roberts wrote while a young lawyer in the Reagan administration shows that Roberts sought to "weaken voting rights, roll back women's rights, and impede our progress toward a more equal nation."
Before the Senate acts on Roberts new nomination, Kennedy said, the Senate has a right to know who Bush intends to nominate for O'Connor's position. "The American people care deeply about the overall balance of their highest court."
With President Bush's approval ratings at an all-time low and his administration under fire over its handling of Hurricane Katrina, some conservatives are worried that Bush will forgo the chance to pick another conservative in favor of someone who will not provoke a fight.
Manuel Miranda, former legal counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the founder of a conservative group that follows judicial issues, said Bush must keep his campaign promise to nominate a justice in the tradition of conservative Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, or risk "sinking even lower in the polls."
"If anything is keeping him afloat right now, it's conservative support," Miranda said.
Meanwhile, Democrats on the Hill are feeling more emboldened by the president's weakened political standing, according to interviews with senior aides and Democratic strategists. Ron Klain, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, said Democrats may be more willing to fight a staunchly conservative second pick.
"As his poll numbers fall, his domestic problems accumulate, and as independent voters increasingly wonder if he is out of touch with what's going on in the country, then Democrats in conservative states have less to fear by crossing him," Klain said.
The question for Democrats is whether the American public, consumed with images of the devastation in the Gulf Coast s
By Jo Becker
Senate Democrats yesterday promised to subject John G. Roberts Jr. to an increased level of scrutiny in light of President Bush's decision to nominate the 50-year-old appeals court judge to replace the late William H. Rehnquist as chief justice.
But with conservatives and liberals alike saying that Roberts is on track to be confirmed, the focus was already shifting to what both sides believe will be the real battle: Bush's yet-to-be-named pick to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
O'Connor's seat is critical because she often provided a swing vote on such controversial issues as affirmative action, abortion and prayer in public places. Roberts was initially chosen to replace her, but instead is now poised to succeed Rehnquist, a reliable conservative who died Saturday of thyroid cancer.
The rare opening of two seats on the nine-member court gives Bush the opportunity to dramatically move the balance of power on the court to the right.
The switch, which comes as the Bush administration struggles to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had both sides hurriedly recalibrating their strategies. Senate leaders agreed to postpone Roberts's confirmation hearings, which had been scheduled to start today, probably until next Monday.
Bush urged the Senate to quickly confirm Roberts in time for the Oct. 3 start of the new Supreme Court term, saying that the Senate was "well along in the process of considering Judge Roberts's qualifications."
But Senate Democrats said that the move to make Roberts the 17th chief justice of the United States required careful deliberation, particularly given Roberts's relatively short, two-year tenure as a federal appeals court judge.
"The stakes are higher and the Senate's advice and consent responsibility is even more important," said Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). "If confirmed to this lifetime job, John Roberts would become the leader of the third branch of the federal government and the most prominent judge in the nation."
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee plan to renew their calls for the White House to release memos and other documents from Roberts's 1989-1993 tenure as principal deputy solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, his highest government posting. "Judge Roberts has a clear obligation to make his views known fully and completely," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y).
Still, even liberal groups opposed to Roberts's nomination said yesterday that the shift is unlikely to alter his chances of being confirmed, given that Republicans are in firm control of the Senate. Some Republicans argued that it will even help his prospects, given that replacing Rehnquist with Roberts isn't likely to change the ideological center of the court.
Kate Michelman, a former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said that what senators must do now is highlight Roberts's record on civil rights, his skeptical writings about the legal underpinnings of abortion rights and other stances to "show people what it means to have his views on the court and lay the groundwork for the next nomination fight."
Democrats are already moving to link the two nominations. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said that a review of memos that Roberts wrote while a young lawyer in the Reagan administration shows that Roberts sought to "weaken voting rights, roll back women's rights, and impede our progress toward a more equal nation."
Before the Senate acts on Roberts new nomination, Kennedy said, the Senate has a right to know who Bush intends to nominate for O'Connor's position. "The American people care deeply about the overall balance of their highest court."
With President Bush's approval ratings at an all-time low and his administration under fire over its handling of Hurricane Katrina, some conservatives are worried that Bush will forgo the chance to pick another conservative in favor of someone who will not provoke a fight.
Manuel Miranda, former legal counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the founder of a conservative group that follows judicial issues, said Bush must keep his campaign promise to nominate a justice in the tradition of conservative Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, or risk "sinking even lower in the polls."
"If anything is keeping him afloat right now, it's conservative support," Miranda said.
Meanwhile, Democrats on the Hill are feeling more emboldened by the president's weakened political standing, according to interviews with senior aides and Democratic strategists. Ron Klain, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, said Democrats may be more willing to fight a staunchly conservative second pick.
"As his poll numbers fall, his domestic problems accumulate, and as independent voters increasingly wonder if he is out of touch with what's going on in the country, then Democrats in conservative states have less to fear by crossing him," Klain said.
The question for Democrats is whether the American public, consumed with images of the devastation in the Gulf Coast s