[Previous entry: "A bias towards boys is unbalancing Asia"] [Next entry: "The American god of words"]

01/14/2006:

"Requiem for the Crescent City"

NEW ORLEANS -- Assemble the brass band and let the funeral march begin, because the old New Orleans is dead.

The passing of our most distinctive city, so prominent in American imagination and lore, became official Wednesday when a blue-ribbon commission presented its plan to rebuild on the mud-caked ruins. One way or another -- through a proposed moratorium on rebuilding in the areas flooded when the levees failed, or through protracted argument over whether to have a moratorium -- the plan all but guarantees additional months of delay and rot. Every day, meanwhile, more evacuees will decide to make new lives for themselves elsewhere.

Play a mournful dirge for the lost city they have left behind.
washingtonpost.com

2 Million Displaced By Storms
The Federal Emergency Management Agency yesterday increased its count of people displaced from the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita by nearly a third, to about 2 million people. A FEMA spokeswoman attributed the sharp rise to a reporting error.

According to a news release, FEMA is paying rental assistance to 685,635 families whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the Aug. 29 and Sept. 24 storms, an increase of 167,000, or 32 percent, over a month ago. FEMA officials generally estimate three people per household as a rule of thumb.

In December, the agency counted only recipients of a transitional housing assistance program created Sept. 23, FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews said. Shortly before Christmas, FEMA discovered that it had not counted families receiving rental assistance under a traditional disaster aid program, she said.