Earth is our home: September 2005 Archives

One year ago Hurricane Jeanne crashed into Stuart, Florida causing wind damage, severe flooding, and disruption for miles up and down the adjacent coast that lasted for weeks.  One of the UU congregations North of us lost their building, others had serious damage.  Our building is four years old, and it stood up the storm, but we lost all our trees.  This was the second major hurricane to come ashore in our little city in two weeks Schools reopened in November, many schools systems lost so many class rooms that they are reopened last month on double sessions.  Because of the labor shortage repairs to homes took months,  the porch of my house was repaired in June.  Many of my congregants were getting insurance checks in March to repair serious roof damage.  Three congregants homes were totaled, and have subsequently relocated.  The shock remains.

So you can understand my "Yes" when I checked the Hurricane maps this morning.  No tropical depressions in the Atlantic Basin!  Cooler dry air is filtering into Florida.  I know the "hurricane season' ends eight weeks from now, but September is the peak.  And I keep thinking that Greenland needs some rain.

Evacuations must be planned, when government officials order hundreds of thousands of people to get in their cars and drive tragedies can result. A bus evacuating Houston exploded as its brakes stressed from stop and go traffic sent fire into the passenger compartment, filled with elderly patients with open oxygen tanks.
The New York Times reports:
A bus carrying elderly evacuees from an assisted living center in Houston was rocked by multiple explosions on its way to Dallas early this morning, killing at least 24 elderly residents.,
The bus was carrying 45 people - 38 residents, 6 staff members and the driver - from Brighton Gardens of Bellaire, an assisted living center in Bellaire, a suburb southwest of Houston, when it caught fire on Interstate 45, the main highway connecting Dallas and Houston. The explosions occurred near Wilmer, a suburb about 15 miles from downtown Dallas.
Witnesses and local officials said smoke, possibly from the brakes, had forced the driver to pull over to the side of the road before at least three explosions covered the bus in flames at about 7 a.m. Central time.

When asked about Hurricane Rita bearing down on Houston, Sir John Lawton, chairman of the United Kingdom's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution lashed out the destructive policies of Bush administration. He referred to the President and his staff as "the climate loonies in the States."

When asked for clarification he said ""There are a group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate."

"I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer."

With his comments, Sir John becomes the third of the leaders of Britain's scientific establishment to attack the US over the Bush government's determination to cast doubt on global warming as a real phenomenon.

A relatively new Unitarian Universalist reported to her minister the following conversation overheard in her community's coffee shop. It seems that two women were talking, and one woman expressed dissatisfaction with her mainstream church, it was rigid, do nothing, too dogmatic, and so forth. The other woman commiserated and the began talking about other local churches the two of them dismissing each in turn. Finally they got to the Unitarian Universalist Church, what do they believe? one woman asked the other. "Oh," said the other with authority, "they re-cycle."

"They recycle" maybe that would not be the one thing you would say, if asked what religious liberals believe. But perhaps our neighbors know us better than we know ourselves. Most Unitarian Universalists believe they are environmentalists, but perhaps we are the committed to an environmentalism that is inadequate to the crisis facing our planet. Global warming is bringing climate change, and climate change has given us an increase in violent storms, hot seas, and unusual draughts. Tomorrow Hurricane Rita will come assure, hitting the same region where Hurricane Katrina caused so much damage.

Bill McKibben outlines why the old environmentalism has died of its own inadequacies and why we must move on to entirely new orientation if we are to save our planet. Our religious commitment to being in right relation to our planet will require real change change in our economy and way of life.

For the last three days we have had rain and winds coming from Rita. I am a hundred and thirty miles North of Miami on the Atlantic Coast, I guess I am four hundred miles from the Hurricane. (See the lake about one third of the way up the state of Florida, northern edge of the lake but on the Atlantic.)

As she moved from the Atlantic into the Gulf of Mexico she began to intensify and grow larger, so even though it has moved four hundred miles since we first began to feel it, we are still in its circle of influence.

She will be a big one when it gets to Texas. Looks like it will mess with the Corpus Christi and Galveston, and cause flooding in Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas Fort Worth. Rain could endanger recovery in New Orleans. Houston? Depends on where it comes ashore.

State and local evacuation plans the United States assume that people own a car! Few if any of these plans make any provision for providing transportation in the case of a "mandatory evacuation" to people who have no car, no truck, no SUV to wisk them away on the interstate to a safe haven away from whatever disaster is about to visit their city.

This was not a secret before the Katrina, we simply choose to ignore the implications. In September 2004, a full year before his city flooded New Orleans mayor Rick Nagin stated that he could not order a mandatory evacuation in advance of Hurricane Ivan because he had no way of evacuating people without cars.

There are 11 million households in the United States that have no motor vehicles. That means as many as 30 million people are left out of the evacuation plan on file with FEMA for their city or region. Thats more people than California, our largest state!

My own state is prone to Hurricanes and its citizens have often been advised to evacuate. Florida's Department of Emergency Management's website, has a chart walking people through the decision of whether they should stay put or evacuate in an emergency, advises citizens in either case to fill their cars with gas. No mention of what to do if you have no vehicle, as is the case for 8.1 percent of Florida households.

How can we make real our promises to each other? We say that we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We say that "we the people" form a government to provide for the common defense, we include an equal protection clause in that constitution. How can we leave the poor, the elderly. the frugal, the ecologically aware, and sight limited behind?

Thanks to Allison Stein Wellner, a writing on Alternet for bringing this to my attention.

There is no such thing as a traditional family pattern! How can there be traditional family value?

There are family patterns that have lasted a long time, but the ideal that is put forward Male Dominated, Female as Housekeeper children bearing the father's name, is a concept of the family that is less than four thousand years old and took root only among a minority of the worlds population.

More ancient than Patriarchy, there prevailed a more egalitarian form of family, some in which lineage was traced through the women, but all in which both men and women were equal in law and practice.

In English speaking colonial America, the male owned all property,and marriages were arranged by men, to facilitate property arrangements. That was a "traditional" family, for the male property holding European settlers in North America. The European who settled in North American brought their family pattern with them, but on this continent with lots of land to steal, and so the children were not as dependent on inheritance for land.

In the decades prior to the American Revolution, a radical change in family relations began to emerge. We see it in the church records of marriage and baptism. In Concord, Massachusetts in decade of the 1760s, more than half of the first born children baptized at the church, were born less than seven months after their parents were married! The diaries also indicate considerable concern, anxiety, "what is going on with the children, they are so defiant." Unlike their parents, they were choosing who they would marry, and defying the arrangements made between patriarchs.

With two generations beginning in New England, the old Patriarchal arranged marriage system collapsed in America, and a family formed on the basis romantic love and self initiated courtship emerged.

In the 1840s we begin to see another big change in the family, men going off to work.....for millennia in Europe and Asia, the patriarchal household had been the center of economic work. Silversmiths for example worked in their shops and their residence was attached. Bankers had offices in their residences, as did lawyers. Pastors lived in pastorates, next to the church. Farmers lived in a farm house on the farm, or walked out to their plot from a nearby village.

In the 1840s that pattern broke down, and males began to spend hours away from the residence, in offices, in shops, in factories and middle class women ecame the de facto head of the household, and child rearing The resident patriarch that had been the basis of the European traditional marriage was no longer resident.

The new division of roles for men and women began to become articulated. women as nurturers, men as bread winners. We do not find those ideas before, most women worked in their husbands trade in the centuries before, men had supervised children.

In the twentieth century a new pattern emerged, becoming significant in the middle decades of that century. We see middle class women going off to work, women pursuing careers children being cared for in the day time by institutions and service providers. Again a new pattern, a new way of being family.

I have not surveyed the change in Native American family patterns, the change in African American family patterns, or the changes in the family patterns of Europeans who became industrial workers. Each of these are significantly different from what was considered to be ideal by the dominant groups in American society both in the past and in the present. I have only surveyed the changes in what was considered "ideal" by the white people of property.

But even with those limitations, I believe we can see from this very brief trot through the family history that family patterns change, family dynamics change. There is no one way of being family in the United States today, no singular way of being family that is embraced by a majority, and none of the many ways of being family we see in the United States have sufficient antiquity to claim to be the traditional American family.

From Zora Neale Hurston€š1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
This excerpt is from chapter 18, about the 1938 hurricane that whisked through the Palm Beach and South Florida.



So she was home by herself one afternoon when she saw a band of Seminoles passing by. The men walking in front and the laden, stolid women following them like burros. She had seen Indians several times in the Glades, in twos and threes, but this was a large party.

They were headed toward the Palm Beach road and kept moving steadily. About an hour later, another party appeared and went the same way. Then another just before sundown. This time, she asked where they were all going and at last one of the men answered her.

"Going to high ground. Saw-grass bloom. Hurricane coming.€š

Lias announces to his friends that he has decided to leave and invites them to join him. He says: If Ah never see you no mo€š on earth, Ah€š I'll meet you in Africa.

Others hurried east like the Indians and rabbits and snakes and coons. But the majority sat around laughing and waiting for the sun to get friendly again.

Sometime that night the winds came back. Everything in the world had a strong rattle, sharp and short like Stew Beef vibrating the drum head near the edge with his fingers. By morning Gabriel was playing the deep tones in he center of the drum. So when Janie looked out of her door, she saw the drifting mists gathered in the west€š that cloud field of the sky€š to arm themselves with thunders and march forth against the world. Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

It woke up old Okechobee and the monster began to roll in is bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble. The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses further around the shore heard the big lake and wondered. The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed.

One of the great illusions of religious liberalism is the idea that the political division in the United States continues to be between liberals and conservatives. The problem with this understanding is that the new political right is not conservative by any traditional understanding of that term.

I was taught that conservatives sought to conserve that which is good and that which abides, but the new political right is advancing an agenda that is strikingly at odds with traditional conservative understandings of constitutional liberties, church and state relationships, and foreign policy. In two areas the departure of the political right from conservative values is striking, the right's war against science, and the right's attacks against environmentalists. Check out this commentary by Jim Motavalli on right wing think tanks who are misusing science to blame environmental groups for the Katrina disaster.

Four years after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, the people of New Orleans experienced flooding as the result of Hurricane Katrina.

Will it be safe to go home? Eric Schmelzer looks back, and asks what can New Orleans learn from the Environmental Protection Agencies response in lower Manhattan?

This is a story I heard from another storyteller, and I have told it for at least ten years. I have embellished it I am sure. It is good for homecoming. If anyone knows its author please let me know. A Unitarian Universalist native of Japan remembers the story from his childhood.

Kori was a poor stone cutter,
everyday Kori went up the mountain and knelled down
Kori banged and chipped and chisled
at the stone mountain,
everyday he took stone away, stone for building,
beautiful stone.

But Kori felt weak and insignificant,
Kori wished to be great and powerful.

Now in Japan in those days there were many gods,
and one of them overheard Kori wishing to great,
"I wish I was the greatest thing in the whole universe"
Kori was heard to cry, "great like the sun."
and lo and behold Kori's wish was fulfilled
and he found that he was the Sun.
Powerful and magnificent,
he beat his rays down upon the mountain.
Kori felt powerful now.

But then a cloud passed by
and blocked Kori's view of the mountain,
so he couldn't beat down his rays,
Kori was immediately transformed into the cloud,
now he was powerful,
he could block the Sun,
but in a moment a strong breeze blew Kori the cloud away,
and Kori was transformed into the wind,

now Kori thought the wind must be the most powerful thing,
and he blew some leaves around,
and picked up a child's kite and made it soar,
and then he really came roaring along
and hit the side of the mountian,

But Kori the wind was easily defected by the mountain,
and Kori was transformed into the mountain.

Now Kori thought to himself as mountain
I must be the most powerful thing in the whole universe,
powerful enough to withstand the wind,
that blows the clouds around,
the clouds that block the sun's rays at will,
and the sun that beats down its heat on the mountain all day.

And Kori reveled in his power as mountain,
just then he heard high up on the mountain,
the sound of a stonecutter,
banging and chipping and chisling on the face of the mountain,
and taking stone away for building,
the powerful mountain could not withstand
the slow determined work of the stonecutter,
and just as quickly as before Kori became Kori again,

and Kori understood that the most powerful thing
one can be in this creation,
is finding all that you really are.

Kori came home and found himself,
but he never would he have ever known himself,
unless he gone out,
become the sun, and the clouds, the wind,
and the mountains.
He would not have know who he was.

We like Kori have gone out,
and now we have come home again, gathering with our wiser heads,
and our refreshed spirits, and our renewed hopes,
for another year.

NOAA is tracking Ophelia for the South Carolina Coast with a expected time of arrival of Tuesday.  They brought Michael Brown back to Washington to plan for future emergencies.  Is four days enough warning? (Posted at midnight, Saturday wee morning.

Once again I pray that the models are wrong, that the meteorologists left out some important cross currents, misjudged the water temperature, something.  Doesn't Greenland need some rain.

(Saturday late morning update.  Hurricane weakened by wind shear overnight.  Reports say that it  has reformed and getting stronger this morning.  They predict a Carolina land fall from Savannah to Wilmington as possible landfalls.  They are less sure of path than they were last night.)

(Sunday morning update still a hurricane, but moving slowly North toward Virginia.  Winds keeping it off the Carolina coast.)

This is not a happy immigrant story, but it is a renewal story.  It is not a suffering Indian story, but it does have a message of good news.  In many stories of the indigenous peoples of this land, a sea turtle emerges and first soil and ground, and then vegetation, and finally animal and human life grow upon the back of the turtle.  Thus this land is known as Turtle Island.

Handed down as a traditional Cherokee story from grandmother to grandchild.  Similar stories are to be found other indigenous people.
€¨The storytellers say that spirits foretold since the beginning of the people, that a monster with white eyes would cross the great eastern water.  The monster would possess evil and terrifying power, and would wreak destruction in its path.  The spirits of the animals and trees would wither. €¨
Prophecy states that Mother Earth herself would be devastated and her heartbeat would become faint. The monster was said to devour the children of Turtle Island tribe by tribe, with no escape.  If one did survive, its spirit would be dead since it would now be lost and have no connection to its ancestors. 

Then after many generations, the Earth would begin to sing a death song due to the severity of the harsh conditions. ۬
When this happens, the children of the people who followed the white-eyed monster to the island would look into their hearts and realize that they faced annihilation at the hands of their fathers.  They would find that the spirits the original people being reborn, waiting to guide the children of the white-eyed monster. €¨
The few keepers of the truth would emerge, becoming strong enough to overcome the power of the white-eyed monster, restoring Mother Earth back to health.  The children of the tribes of Turtle Island would lead the people back to the right way.  The races will  live in peace, the spirit of the animals and trees would return to safety, and the monster with white eyes would fail to exist.

Unless we are completely gullible we know that politicians stage photo-ops, we know that they are more attentive to appearances than to substance and we have learned that one needs to take whatever they say to the media with a grain of salt.  But when the President diverts "assets" needed for New Orleans disaster relief for his own public image we must cry "dereliction of duty."

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

Thanks to Americablog for the Landrieu press release.

There is something peculiar about people living in Florida.  We watch tropical storms.  I have a handy little widget on my Macintosh, that allows me to check NOAA's Atlantic Basin Storm Tracking Maps.  We watched Katina crash through South Florida and go out into the Gulf on Thursday, August 25th.  Since Katina came ashore on the Gulf Coast on August 29th,  Leo blew itself out in the Atlantic.  At present Maria is heading North into the cold waters and the experts assume that she is no threat.  September and October have historically been active months for storms, the hurricane season is not over yet. 

It has been stated that global warming will generate more hurricanes.  Of all the popular ideas about changes in the weather this may be this most controversial.  There are so many factors involved in the generation of hurricanes.

So I offer this brief outline of the controversy.  First, I believe the argument that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps energy is valid, and the evidence that we are seeing the effects of this phenomenon in atmospheric warming is convincing.  Hurricanes are produced by warm water, and there is evidence that over all ocean water temperatures have increased. 

However it is a fact that in the tropics the water is very warm during the summer.  Hurricanes existed before homo sapiens, and every summer for millennia there have been several tropical storms that came ashore on the coast line of the Western Hemisphere.  Tropical storms are common to Asia as well.

Furthermore, the Gulf of Mexico is relatively shallow, and it gets over 300 days of tropical sun,  it would be warm even if there were no carbon build up in the atmosphere. (Katrina traveled over water that at least 88° F.) So on the one hand hurricanes are naturally occurring tropical storms and the Gulf of Mexico is ideal location for tropical storms to become intense and very large.  And on the other hand the atmosphere and the oceans are warming, making hurricane generation more intense.

It would be a stretch to argue that any particular hurricane is the result of global warming.  The evidence does not support such a conclusion. But the combination of atmosphere warming and ocean warming lead to inescapable conclusion that we will have more large, intense hurricanes in the years ahead. Ruth Curry, research specialist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.writes " In order to form, a hurricane must have ocean temperature of at least 80 degrees down to a depth of 164 feet.  Sea surface temperatures all over the tropics are running 1.8 to 3.6 degrees above normal. This is due to global warming."

What must we do?  In Florida the building codes were changed after Hurricane Andrew, the first storm to record Category Five winds to hit the United States.*  Those newer buildings have stood against the strong hurricanes that come ashore in 2004.  Older, less well built structures were destroyed.  We can plan coastal communities with a view toward withstanding strong hurricanes.  FEMA should not spend disaster money to rebuild the same kinds of structures that were wiped out by storm surge and strong winds.  We must require cities to have disaster plans and demand that any evacuation plans include how to aid the poor, the aged, those with small children, and those with medical needs.

We must work to address the question of global warming, restricting and eventually reversing carbon build up into the atmosphere.  But for the time being this will not reverse the trend toward intense storms.  That would require a radical turn in policy, pursued over many decades.  It is sobering to read Roddy Scheer who writes "according to UN estimates, the Kyoto treaty, if fully implemented, would reduce the projected temperature rise of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius by only 0.1 degree over the next century.

The consequences of global warming include radical changes to our environment including rising seas, changes in rain patterns, and intensification of both summer and winter storms.  It is absurd to talk about love for Mother Nature, or advocating respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part while pursuing policies that fundamentally alter our environment, endanger wild life, undermine agriculture and change weather patterns.

*(Hurricane Gilbert which hit Jamaica and Mexico had been the Category Five on record. Hurricane Camile which hit the Gulf Central Coast in 1962 and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 which came ashore in Palm Beach Country, Florida in 1935 were probably Category Five hurricanes but they blew before we had instruments to measure such high atmosphere wind intensity.)

"We will not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of saving lives."  George W. Bush on September 3, 2005

We have heard reports of trucks full of water and other supplies sitting for days, waiting for permission to enter New Orleans,  Now the Red Cross reports that they were ordered by Homeland Security to stay out New Orleans because their aid would prevent people in New Orleans from evacuating.

Bureaucrats make plans, and even when they have difficulty implementing their plans, they use their power to prevent others from interfering with their plans.  George W. Bush has told us that he was in constant communication with Homeland Security, FEMA, the Governors of the states, the Mayor of New Orleans.  While the party line was that the storm overwhelmed the response, why no response at all?

In the case of New Orleans, in terms of food, water,  and medical supplies I did not see an inadequate response that was overwhelmed by need.  I saw no response.  I observed the  rapid response of FEMA to Florida in 2004, and I note the fact that every news organization has had no problem reporting on every corner of New Orleans within hours of the end of the hurricane.  Rescue operations were able to come into New Orleans, but not food, water and medical supplies.

These and other bewildering parts of this story raises questions for this observer.  Was a decision made to withhold resources that would support the population left behind by the middle class evacuation?  Did the bureaucrats decide to depopulate New Orleans, and then find themselves overwhelmed with the logistics of their decision?

Some will object that I am advancing "a conspiracy theory."  Politicians do make policies, and sometimes those policies prove to be problematic to implement and destructive in their results.  When policies go awry politicians engage in obfuscation and blaming.  Three thousand years of recorded history indicates that politicians lie.  In a democratic republic we must hold our leaders accountable.

So we need to ask.  Did the catastrophe of New Orleans arise due to incompetence, and being "out of touch?"  This is a popular explanation and it has merit.  But this administration has shown a designing intelligence in the past, that behind the rhetoric and diversions we have discovered a policy, and a plan.  Plans don't always work, as past Presidents have discovered.  What did the President know, and when did he know it?

"Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the 'human storm." David Brooks writes today in the New York Times,  basing his post Katrina analysis on Barry's historical account of how societies have responded to storms.

The mayor announced an evacuation of New Orleans late on Saturday, and everyone was given an equal opportunity to get in their car and drive to a hotel somewhere and save themselves.  This "free enterprise" solution privileges those with means, proves very difficult for those with moderate incomes, but for the hundreds of thousands of poor it was impossible.  America's privileged classes wonder why people didn't evacuate? why do they engage in unauthorized shopping.  Why don't they just sit and wait for the political "leaders" to take care of them?  Why?  America's privileged classes need to take a field trip.  Go visit the America that works in the hotels, the restaurants, the docks and warehouses of our largest port.  The people who make New Orleans and other big cities work.  Perhaps they should try to buy a car on money left over from paying for rent and food when earning minimum wage.  Call it a learning experience.

Since America's privileged are not likely to make that effort maybe a little history instead.  Brooks writes about New Orleans experience in the wake of storms:
"Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans.  As Barry writes in his account, "Rising Tide," the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played "Bye Bye Blackbird" as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.
Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water's pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long's success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.
We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.
Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come."
It is one week since Katrina crashed into Florida.  She hit again on Monday morning.  The physical damage will last for years.  The human storm will last longer and be more profound than the wind storm.

George W. Bush interviewed on ABC's morning show claimed that "no one thought the levee's protecting New Orleans would break." This was by way of explanation of his inaction in the face of catastrophe when Hurricane Katrina hit the Central Gulf Coast.  He said that when that they began to get an estimate of the storm's damage was on Tuesday!, he began to take action!

The Weather Bureau (NOOA) was forecasting a direct hit on New Orleans by a category 3 hurricane on Friday, the storm was category 5 on Saturday evening.  The Weather Bureau published potential storm damage on their web site 48 hours before the storm came ashore.

But the politics of denial practiced by this President go back well before the Katrina was spawned out of the warm waters of the Atlantic.  In 2003 the administration began diverting the money that Congress had authorized for the reconstruct the levees two years ago for pay for an unfunded war against Iraq.  Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune web site, reported: "No one can say they didn't see it coming....Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."  Bush says he is surprised by the storm damage. Perhaps he should speak to the Weather Bureau.