FBI Raids New Orleans Police Department

by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica

Correction (8/8/2009): This post originally stated that five people were wounded during the Danziger Bridge incident. In fact, it was four people.

For anybody who has followed our reporting on the violence that followed Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans Times-Picayune has an interesting story today.

According to the paper, FBI agents this week raided the New Orleans Police Department’s homicide unit, seizing files and computer drives connected to the so-called Danziger Bridge incident of September 4, 2005. The bureau is investigating the episode, during which NOPD officers loosed a fusillade of bullets on a group of civilians as they walked over the bridge, killing Ronald Madison and James Brissette, and wounding four others.

The police officers involved say they began shooting in response to gunfire from the civilians; that claim is vigorously disputed by the shooting victims.

The FBI raid focused on two NOPD officers tasked with carrying out the police department’s internal probe of the shooting. One of those detectives, Sergeant Gerard Dugue, has also been investigating the murder of Henry Glover.

As we’ve reported, Glover died after he was denied medical attention by a group of NOPD officers, according to witnesses. Federal agents are also scrutinizing his death — including the possibility that he was shot by police — and in recent months, federal prosecutors have called officers before a grand jury.

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Study Recommends Public-Private Partnership and Strategic Approach to Redeveloping New Orleans' Economy

New Orleans should craft a comprehensive economic redevelopment plan that combines public- and private-sector funding with a centralized structure, according to a study issued today by the RAND Corp.

Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent failures of levees in New Orleans in August 2005 devastated the city's economy in addition to destroying buildings and causing more than 1,800 deaths. Even before the storm, the city's population was declining and the economy was not robust, which complicated recovery efforts, according to the study.

The Horizon Initiative, a private-sector organization formed in 2006 to help New Orleans' economic recovery, asked the RAND Gulf States Policy Institute (RGSPI) to recommend the most effective organizational and strategic approaches to revitalizing the city's economy.

“This is a unique opportunity to not only repair the damage from the storms, but also address some pre-existing problems, in a comprehensive way, to forge a stronger, more vibrant economy for the city of New Orleans and the surrounding region,” says Kevin McCarthy, author of the report and a senior social scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

The study is not a detailed redevelopment plan, but provides recommendations for designing an effective organizational structure for those efforts.

RGSPI, a partnership between RAND and seven universities in the Gulf States region, examined 17 other cities' economic development efforts. The analysis showed that in many cases, economic development work was spread across a range of different agencies without a common development strategy, and in some cases, with competing messages. The most successful efforts incorporated three key elements: a comprehensive design, an appropriate organization, and an effective implementation plan.

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Video: New Orleans Health

In this only-on-the-Web video, New Orleans is having trouble holding enough health providers to meet the needs of the area. The region is still recovering from Hurricane Katrina which slammed the U.S. Gulf Coast two years, flooding most of the city.

Katie Couric interviews the chief of staff of a New Orleans hospital.

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Survey of Hurricane Preparedness Finds One-Third On High Risk Coast Will Refuse Evacuation

According to a new survey of people in high-risk hurricane areas conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health Project on the Public and Biological Security, one-third (31%) of residents say if government officials said they had to evacuate due to a major hurricane this season, they would not leave. This is an increase from 2006 when 23% said they would not evacuate.

The survey was conducted in eight states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas—and only included residents of counties within 20 miles of the coast. The poll included a special sample of the New Orleans metropolitan area.

The top reasons people give for not evacuating involve issues of safety and security. Three-quarters (75%) say their home is well-built and they would be safe there. Over half (56%) feel that roads would be too crowded, and slightly more than one in three (36%) feels that evacuating would be dangerous. One-third (33%) worry that their possessions would be stolen or damaged while one in four (27%) say they would not evacuate because they do not want to leave their pets.

“Public officials need to be concerned that the further we get from the severe hurricanes of 2005, the less willing people are to evacuate,” says Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Officials need to remind people that many homes are vulnerable to major storms. They also need to ensure safe evacuation routes are available and the public is aware of them.”

These findings are based on interviews conducted June 18 - July 10, with 5,046 adults in high hurricane risk counties in eight states.

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Survey: Labor Demand Still Soaring in Gulf Coast Area

Labor markets in areas damaged by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 continue to be among the most active markets in the United States, according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine DataSeries.

For the last three months, the average monthly count of online advertised vacancies in the New Orleans metro area was 17,300, a level that is more than double the monthly average for the three months before Katrina.

"In the last three months, the average number of ads for the nation was 11% above the three months prior to Katrina, well below the growth in the Lake Charles (65%), Pascagoula (30%), Gulfport (41%) and New Orleans (105%) metro areas for the same period," says Gad Levanon, economist at TheConference Board. "The Houma metro area had a very dramatic rise in online ads after the storm and the average monthly number of advertised vacancies is still running about 1,700 ads per month, a level that is over five times the pre-hurricane level."

Adds Levanon: "Labor demand is also stronger than the national average in many of the metro areas where the Katrina evacuees fled."

Again, while vacancies were up 11% nationally, the three-month moving averages seen in Baton Rouge (74%), Austin (76%), Houston (49%), San Antonio (86%), and Dallas (37%) are much greater, the survey says.

The labor demand covers a wide range of occupations. In New Orleans the largest increase in demand is for office and administrative support, business and financial operations, and management occupations. "It's not just construction," notes Levanon. "In the damaged areas, the number of ads for architects and engineers has more than doubled, reflecting there building efforts. The high labor demand is a positive sign for the revitalization of the Gulf Coast area. But it is just part of the overall dynamic of the area. Population shifts make a big difference."

In some areas like Lake Charles, the labor force has rebounded almost to its pre-hurricane size while New Orleans' labor force is reported to be down over 30 percent from its previous level. "Part of the labor demand reflects the difficulty of finding workers in the reduced local labor force," he says.

The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series is released monthly and measures the number of unduplicated online jobs postedon more than 1,200 major Internet job boards and smaller job boards that serve niche markets and smaller geographic areas.

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You Still Can't Drink the Water, But Now You Can Touch It

Engineers have developed a system that uses a simple water purification technique that can eliminate 100 percent of the microbes in New Orleans water samples left from Hurricane Katrina. The technique makes use of specialized resins, copper and hydrogen peroxide to purify tainted water.

The system--safer, cheaper and simpler to use than many other methods--breaks down a range of toxic chemicals. While the method cleans the water, it doesn't yet make the water drinkable. However, the method may eventually prove critical for limiting the spread of disease at disaster sites around the world.

National Science Foundation-funded researchers Vishal Shah and Shreya Shah of Dowling College in Long Island, New York, collaborated with Boris Dzikovski of Cornell University and Jose Pinto of New York's Polytechnic University in Brooklyn to develop the technique. They will publish their findings in Environmental Pollution.

"After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, scientists have had their backs against the wall trying to develop safeguards," says Shah. "No one knows when a similar situation may arise. We need to develop a treatment for decontaminating flood water before it either comes in contact with humans or is pumped into natural reservoirs."

The treatment system that the researchers are developing is simple: a polymer sheet of resins containing copper is immersed in the contaminated flood water. The addition of hydrogen peroxide generates free radicals on the polymer. The free radicals remain bound to the sheet, where they come in contact with bacteria and kill them.

The researchers are working to lower the amount of copper in the treated water end product and improving the system's impact on chemical toxins. Shah believes it could be ready for emergency use within five to seven years.

To develop their process, the researchers built upon a century-old chemical mechanism called the Fenton reaction - a process wherein metal catalysts cause hydrogen peroxide to produce large numbers of free radicals.

Free radicals are atoms or molecules that have an extra electron in dire need of a partner (they obtain the partner by stripping it from a nearby atom, damaging the "victim" in the process). In large quantities, the radicals can destroy toxic chemicals and even bombard bacteria to death or irreparably damage a microorganism's cell membrane.

Applying their technique to water from the Industrial and 17th Street canals in New Orleans, the researchers were able to destroy all of the bacteria within 15 minutes. In tests with laboratory water samples containing even higher bacterial concentrations, the exact same process killed at least 99 percent of the bacteria in 90 minutes.


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