C. RAY…..WHY DID YOU GO WRONG?

C. RAY…..WHY DID YOU GO WRONG?

(New York Times, Campbell Robertson)

(BBC NEWS, Times-Picayune, Frank Donze)

(David Hammer, Michelle Krupa, Frazer Chronicle)

I had never heard of the man, he came busting onto our television screens and into our conscious minds in the days following the human and national disaster that hurricane Katrina became. Nobody told the Federal Government of the United States to get off their asses and start doing your jobs, but C. Ray did.

I think it was at that time that I begin to admire this man in the horrific storm wreckage brought to his city. I was, at the time driving a truck over the road and saw firsthand the relief migration towards those areas that had been hit the hardest, in fact the company I was driving for took a trailer load of relief supplies for those people who were in need.

Before we go much further, I think that I should place the Katrina Hurricane in its proper spot in the category of savvier Tropical Cyclones to hit the U.S. mainland since those records have been kept. You first have to have a delicate balance of situations to converge into one area, the first of which is a large body of warm water. Their power comes from the evaporation of water from the ocean surface, which ultimately recondenses into clouds and rain when moist air rises and cools to saturation. The strong rotating winds of a tropical cyclone are a result of the conservation of angular momentum imparted by the earth’s rotation as air flows inward towards the axis of the rotation.

Of course we human’s monitor everything in our lives today, we categorize by shape, size, speed and strength how an incident or event will impact us. I’ve lived in the middle part of the United States all of my life, I used to like the seasons…..but not so much anymore. I never did like the cold, I saw absolutely no reason for thermometer to dip below what I call the belly button line, below 20 degrees.

However I have no control over the temperature of a winter day…..except to drag my butt to a warmer climate, and then complain about the heat, or the muggy conditions…..and the bugs and snakes. So I guess I’ve cast my life with this northern extreme that me and mine live in.

When I was researching this article for publication today I learned a few things about the weather and what causes some of the most dreaded of events. Snow, ice, rain and hurricanes and tornados can be killers for humanity in today’s high tech world. It reminds us of how little we really are in control of our lives…..and we don’t like that.

Snow, ice and rain-fall inland is caused by a different set of weather making recipes, updrafts, lake effects, and winds and weather patterns from afar all work to affect the Midwestern weather, making it completely different than its sister, tropical weather. However, either pattern of weather can be a dreaded killer for human beings…..and as I said, there’s nothing that we can do.

 

DEADLIEST U.S. HURRICANES

The National Hurricane Center has detailed a top 30 list of deadliest Tropical Hurricanes to hit the United States from 1492 to present day. How these people cataloged deadly hurricanes, say before 1900, is beyond me, but they have, and here’s the top ten:

 1. Great Galveston, Texas, 1900, category 4, (8,000) deaths

 2. Lake Okeechobee, Florida, 1928, category 4, (2,500) deaths

 3. Katrina, (five coastal states,) 2005, category 3, (1,200) deaths

 4. Cheniere Caminanda, Louisiana, 1893, category 4, (1,100-1,400) death

 5. Sea Island, (two coastal states,) 1893, category 3, (1,000-2,000) deaths

 6. Georgia-South Carolina, 1881, category 2, (700) deaths

 7. Audrey, (three coastal states,) 1957, category 4, (416) deaths

 8. Great Labor Day Hurricane, (Florida Keys,) 1935, category 5, (408) deaths

 9. Last Island Louisiana, 1856, category 4, (400) deaths

10. Miami Hurricane, Florida, 1926, category 4, (372) deaths

 

I knew that Galveston, Texas, lost thousands of citizens during the 1900 tragedy, but I didn’t know about the Lake Okeechobee Lake storm that claimed so many lives, 2,500. All told, of the top ten savvier hurricanes, the state of Louisiana was hit four times, suffering more than 3,000 deaths, and billions of dollars in damage.

The city of New Orleans was approximately 80% under water, thousands were without homes, scores were injured, and more than a thousand people were dead…..and all within 24 hours. It is a foregone conclusion that the response to the human and property disaster was…..shall we say, typical Bush administration response. Katrina wasn’t a war, where money could be made, there weren’t any headline grabbing events, and until the President figured out the best time for a photo opp, he twiddled his thumbs until his handlers saw the right opportunity.

C. Ray went through all of this and seemed, at least to me, to suffer right along with the rest of his citizens. He seemed almost powerless, and honestly my heart went out to the man and his plight as probably the leader, or at least a key player, in the recovery of his community.

I don’t use the word hero very often, but I used it for C. Ray, and I figured deservedly so. With little time spent elsewhere, C. Ray had lived in the New Orleans area his entire life. When his second term as New Orleans Mayor, due to term limits, in 2010, C. Ray stepped down, but continued to work for his community.

CLARENCE RAY NAGIN Jr.

C. Ray, Clarence Ray Nagin Jr. was born in 1956 at New Orleans Clarity Hospital into a modest-income family, where Ray Sr. worked two jobs to support his family. The Nagin family lived on Allen Street in the 7^th Ward, followed by a stay at near Claver Catholic Church in the Treme Neighborhood.

Nagin came to political and public light first as an employee, in 1985, at Cox New Orleans, the city’s cable television franchise which was run by media conglomerate Cox. The franchise had a history of complaints, low profits, and stagnant growth, and one of the poorest-performing components within Cox.

Nagin was promoted to general manager, and quickly implemented upgrades to the system, spent $500 million to develop the stations fiber-optic cable, introduced new services, including digital cable television, high speed internet, and telephone. In 1989, he was appointed to oversee all of Cox properties in south Louisiana as vice-president and general manager of Cox Louisiana. Between 1985 and 2002, eight hundred jobs were added, and near the end of his relationship with Cox, customer satisfaction was near 90% as opposed to less than 50% when Nagin came on board with the Cox Corporation.

As they say…..the rest is history, Nagin ran for the mayor of his home city, New Orleans, in 2002 and again in 2006, and was retired because of term limits in 2010. Through his association with 100 Black Men, Nagin had greased the wheels of his campaign during his initial run for mayor

Shortly after taking office, Nagin launched an anti-corruption campaign within city government, including crackdowns on the New Orleans Taxicab Bureau and Utilities Department. Scenes of handcuffed city officials being lead out of city hall were met with first with amazement, and then quick enthusiasm.

Nobody was too big for Nagin; he fired an entire vehicle inspection department, including a cousin, police asked what should be done with he to which Nagin retorted, “if he’s guilty, arrest him.” It was acts like these that gave C. Ray creditability, and lead to a 2004 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report of the city of New Orleans, highlighting many accomplishments, 4,500 new jobs gained, and that as many as 38,000 New Orleanais has risen out of poverty.

HURRICANE KATRINA

In August of 2005 Hurricane Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico early Friday, August 26, and Nagin and his administration advised New Orleanians to keep a close eye on the storm and be prepared to evacuate. There were several public statements encouraging people to leave, but also telling them if they did not evacuate, “we will take care of you.”  By 10:00 A.M. Saturday, August 27, a mandatory evacuation was ordered for all low-lying areas in the surrounding parishes. In addition to the low-laying area evacuation, President Bush declared a federal state of emergency for the entire state of Louisiana.

Regional evacuation plans called for voluntary evacuation about 48 hours from Katrina’s landfall arrival, however by late Saturday night, Nagin was advised by the National Hurricane Center that the path of Katrina was confirmed, and would hit New Orleans. C. Ray immediately ordered the city attorney to draw up legal documents for calling for a mandatory evacuation of the city, the first in the city’s history dating back almost 300 years.

After the hurricane hit, the Army Corp of Engineers constructed levee system collapsed throughout the city, plunging close to 80% of the city that is famous for the Mradi-Gras, under as much as 20 feet of brackish water.

Absolutely nobody could have been prepared for the kind of disaster that overtook New Orleans, not the city, not the state, not Fema, and not the federal government. All communications were down, utility service was almost totally nonexistent, everybody had failed on the run-up to the disaster, and it would take 7 days before the last stranded victim was snatched from a rooftop.

COMPOUNDING THE MISTAKE

After Katrina, some begin making bold statements, demanding for socially reengineering New Orleans; I remember these demands, their rhetoric, and the implications. Let’s face the facts of life in the south, and on Capitol Hill, the demands, and the reengineering weren’t meant for the white people of the city…..it was a blatant power struggle by some heavy shakers to rid the city on the gulf of much of its black population.

C. Ray, during his time directly after the hurricane, held many public town hall meetings designed to inform people of what was going on in the city. It was during one of these open meetings that he proclaimed that New Orleans would be a majority African-American city, because it was what God wanted.

His comment referring to New Orleans as the “chocolate city,” wasn’t only off key, by this time, January, 2006, it was unnecessary. It was about this time, when I occasionally checked the progress of the New Orleans area that I begin to wonder about C., Ray. Whenever anybody professes to know God, maybe on a personal basis, support can begin to unravel…..which it did.

No matter what anybody thinks or says about the New Orleans’s Mayor, during the early aftermath of the Katrina hurricane, C. Ray held the city together, and did bring pressure to bear on the federal government and Fema for an almost total lack of effort at the most, and complete disorganization at least.

I LOST TRACK OF C. RAY

Over the years, since the storm, like most of us Northerners, I’d read little snippets about the city, the region, and C. Ray. However in the winter of 2007 I got the chance first hand to see what was happening with the city on the Gulf of Mexico. To say that I was shocked would be an understatement, mile after mile of abandoned residential as well as commercial areas…..it looked like a demilitarized zone.

I immediately wanted to know where our tax dollars went, and during my freight drops, the people that I talked to wanted to know too. At the time I was working six days a week and sometimes as many as 18 hours a day, and had neither the time nor the effort to inquire as to the dispensation of the relief funds.

In January of 2008, more than two years after the storm I returned to the city again with my truck, and wife. I drove through the same area, one that had been hit hard along U.S. 10 and we were both thunderstruck, many of the same areas right along the water hadn’t been touched, leaving us both to wonder where the relief funds had gotten too.

Ray Nagin is one of only three black mayors, and the first to be charged, tried and convicted of corruption, a truly sad day for the city, the region and the state. If Ray Nagin can be corrupted by position and money…..is anybody to be trusted? For me the jury is still out, Nagin was convicted on 20 of 21 counts, including bribery, wire fraud, and filing false tax returns.

Sentencing has been set for June 11, 2014, ironically C. Ray Nagin’s 58^th birthday, it kind of makes one wonder what other coincidences are involved with C. Ray. It’s strange how people with power, people with authority come to feel that they are invincible……(obviously C. Ray did not have a clear channel to God.)

HAVE A NICE DAY!