Bus Convoy to Move Thousands From Superdome to Astrodome

Everyone must leave New Orleans

Governor: Everyone must leave New Orleans Gerardo Mora/European Pressphoto Agency Rescue workers searched for survivors in New Orleans. Governor: Everyone must leave New Orleans 8/31/2005, 10:33 a.m. CT By BRETT MARTEL The Associated Press NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The governor of Louisiana says everyone needs to leave New Orleans due to flooding from Hurricane Katrina. "We’ve sent buses in. We will be either loading them by boat, helicopter, anything that is necessary," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. Army engineers trying to plug New Orleans’ breached levees struggled to move giant sandbags and concrete barriers into place, and the governor said Wednesday the situation was growing more desperate and there was no choice but to abandon the flooded city. "The challenge is an engineering nightmare," Gov. Kathleen Blanco said on ABC’s "Good Morning America." As the waters continued to rise in New Orleans, the Pentagon began mounting one of the biggest search-and-rescue operations in U.S. history, sending four Navy ships to the Gulf Coast with drinking water and other emergency supplies, along with the hospital ship USNS Comfort, search helicopters and eight swift-water rescue teams. Red Cross workers from across the country converged on the devastated region. The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags Wednesday into the 500-foot gap in the failed floodwall. But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city’s waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris. Officials said they were also looking at a more audacious plan: finding a barge to plug the 500-foot hole. The death toll from Hurricane Katrina reached at least 110 in Mississippi alone, while Louisiana put aside the counting of the dead to concentrate on rescuing the living, many of whom were still trapped on rooftops and in attics. The Red Cross reported it had about 40,000 people in 200 shelters across the area in one of the biggest urban disasters the nation has ever seen. A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina’s full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months. "We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Mayor Ray Nagin said on ABC’s "Good Morning America, "and the other issue that’s concerning me is we have dead bodies in the water. At some point in time the dead bodies are going to start to create a serious disease issue." Blanco said she wanted the Superdome — which had become a shelter of last resort for about 20,000 people — evacuated within two days, along with other gathering points for storm refugees. The situation inside the dank and sweltering Superdome was becoming desperate: The water was rising, the air conditioning was out, toilets were broken, and tempers were rising. At the same time, sections of Interstate 10, the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east, lay shattered, dozens of huge slabs of concrete floating in the floodwaters. I-10 is the only route for commercial trucking across southern Louisiana. The sweltering city of 480,000 people — an estimated 80 percent of whom obeyed orders to evacuate as Katrina closed in over the weekend — also had no drinkable water, the electricity could be out for weeks, and looters were ransacking stores around town. "The logistical problems are impossible and we have to evacuate people in shelters," the governor said. "It’s becoming untenable. There’s no power. It’s getting more difficult to get food and water supplies in, just basic essentials." She gave no details on exactly where the refugees would be taken. But in Houston, Rusty Cornelius, a county emergency official, said at least 25,000 of them would travel in a bus convoy to Houston starting Wednesday and would be sheltered at the 40-year-old Astrodome, which is no longer used for professional sporting events. The Federal Emergency Management Agency was considering putting people on cruise ships, in tent cities, mobile home parks, and so-called floating dormitories — boats the agency uses to house its own employees. Once the levees are fixed, Maj. Gen. Don Riley of the Army Corps of Engineers said, it could take close to a month to get the water out of the city. If the water rises a few feet higher, it could also wipe out the water system for the whole city, said New Orleans’ homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert. A helicopter view of the devastation over Louisiana and Mississippi revealed people standing on black rooftops, baking in the sunshine while waiting for rescue boats. "I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour after touring the destruction by air Tuesday. All day long, rescuers in boats and helicopters plucked bedraggled flood refugees from rooftops and attics. Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said 3,000 people have been rescued by boat and air, some placed shivering and wet into helicopter baskets. They were brought by the truckload into shelters, some in wheelchairs and some carrying babies, with stories of survival and of those who didn’t make it. "Oh my God, it was hell," said Kioka Williams, who had to hack through the ceiling of the beauty shop where she worked as floodwaters rose in New Orleans’ low-lying Ninth Ward. "We were screaming, hollering, flashing lights. It was complete chaos." Looting broke out in some New Orleans neighborhoods, prompting authorities to send more than 70 additional officers and an armed personnel carrier into the city. One police officer was shot in the head by a looter but was expected to recover, authorities said. A giant new Wal-Mart in New Orleans was looted, and the entire gun collection was taken, The Times-Picayune newspaper reported. "There are gangs of armed men in the city moving around the city," said Ebbert, the city’s homeland security chief. Also, looters tried to break into Children’s Hospital, the governor’s office said. On New Orleans’ Canal Street, dozens of looters ripped open the steel gates on clothing and jewelry stores and grabbed merchandise. In Biloxi, Miss., people picked through casino slot machines for coins and ransacked other businesses. In some cases, the looting took place in full view of police and National Guardsmen. Blanco acknowledged that looting was a severe problem but said that officials had to focus on survivors. "We don’t like looters one bit, but first and foremost is search and rescue," she said. Officials said it was simply too early to estimate a death toll. One Mississippi county alone said it had suffered at least 100 deaths, and officials are "very, very worried that this is going to go a lot higher," said Joe Spraggins, civil defense director for Harrison County, home to Biloxi and Gulfport. In neighboring Jackson County, officials said at least 10 deaths were blamed on the storm. Several of the dead in Harrison County were from a beachfront apartment building that collapsed under a 25-foot wall of water as Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds Monday. Louisiana officials said many were feared dead there, too, making Katrina one of the most punishing storms to hit the United States in decades. Blanco asked residents to spend Wednesday in prayer. "That would be the best thing to calm our spirits and thank our Lord that we are survivors," she said. "Slowly, gradually, we will recover; we will survive; we will rebuild." Across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, more than 1 million residents remained without electricity, some without clean drinking water. Officials said it could be weeks, if not months, before most evacuees will be able to return. Emergency medical teams from across the country were sent into the region and President Bush cut short his Texas vacation Tuesday to return to Washington to focus on the storm damage. Also, the Bush administration decided to release crude oil from federal petroleum reserves to help refiners whose supply was disrupted by Katrina. The announcement helped push oil prices lower. Katrina, which was downgraded to a tropical depression, packed winds around 30 mph as it moved through the Ohio Valley early Wednesday, with the potential to dump 8 inches of rain and spin off deadly tornadoes. The remnants of Katrina spawned bands of storms and tornadoes across Georgia that caused at least two deaths, multiple injuries and leveled dozens of buildings. A tornado damaged 13 homes near Marshall, Va. ___ Associated Press reporters Holbrook Mohr, Mary Foster, Allen G. Breed, Adam Nossiter and Jay Reeves contributed to this report. ___ On the Net: National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

Hurricane Devestation

Methane Gas Cover

Friday, August 05, 2005

Credit: Credit: GISS, NASA Can you help in reducing this blanket of methane gas that is warming up our Earth? Recent evidence holds that methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in creating a warming greenhouse effect but is easier to control. Atmospheric methane has doubled over the past 200 years, and its smothering potency is over 20 times that of CO2. Methane may even be responsible for a sudden warming of the Earth by seven degrees Celsius about 55 million years ago. As most methane is produced biologically, the gas is sometimes associated with bathroom humor. The largest abundance released by the US, however, is created when anaerobic bacteria break down carbon-based garbage in landfills. Therefore, a more effective way to help our planet than trying to restrict your own methane emissions would be to encourage efficient landfill gas management.

When Dad Is Also the Boss

 

 When Dad Is Also the Boss
Lachlan Murdoch quit his father’s company. Wouldn’t you?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2005, at 1:57 PM PT

When Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s 33-year-old son and heir apparent, announced last week he was quitting News Corp., his father, a man widely believed to possess no emotions, said he was "particularly saddened" by the decision.

The press, by contrast, was particularly delighted, because nothing is better for newsstand sales than a squabbling family of billionaires. The press was also particularly confused. Early reports blamed Lachlan’s departure on clashes with his father over management of the television station group (according to today’s Wall Street Journal). Other theories:

—The family was fighting over how to include the children Rupert had with third wife Wendi Deng in the trusts that control the company.

—Lachlan’s wife, model Sarah O’Hare, "is believed to prefer living in Sydney," as the Financial Times put it on Saturday.

—Or, as Johnnie Roberts of Newsweek suggested, perhaps 32-year-old James Murdoch, who runs the BSkyB business in Britain, has become the favorite son.

Whatever the reason, Lachlan Murdoch’s departure is a warning for all family-controlled public companies. It’s a sign of just how difficult—and increasingly unlikely—it will be for the young heirs to inherit the top jobs.

The persistence of family-controlled, publicly held companies, in which founding families either hold a majority of shares or a special class of stock that gives them extra voting rights, would seem to be an anachronism in today’s age of shareholder democracy. After all, no geneticist would assert that the great-grandchildren of a 19^th-century industrialist, or the children of a 20^th-century media baron, automatically inherit management skills. And yet the practice persists at many large companies, particularly in the media industry. In the 1990s, Brian Roberts took the reins of cable giant Comcast from his father, Ralph Roberts, and Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. succeeded his father at the New York Times Co. Slate‘s owner, the Washington Post Co., is run by Donald Graham, who inherited the top job from his mother, Katharine Graham.

But don’t expect to see many more public dynasties. After the meltdowns and frauds of 2001-2002, investors are paying more attention to corporate governance. They are increasingly aware of how multigenerational family control can hurt shareholders. At Adelphia, two generations of Rigases drove the company into bankruptcy. At Cablevision, the conflict between father Charles Dolan and son James Dolan spilled out of the boardroom and into public view.

Demography is another reason dynasties will weaken, as News Corp.’s example shows. Rupert Murdoch, thrice-married and 74 years old, is a rather old dad. He was in his 40s when sons Lachlan and James, offspring of his second marriage, were born. He and third wife Wendi Deng have two preschool-aged girls. Murdoch is hardly alone among business big shots in having multiple sets of children, or in being an older father. But the age gulf means that children have less time to grow into roles at the company than they might have had in years past.

Lachlan came to work in the family business right after graduating from Princeton. He had 11 years of experience and was responsible for substantial News Corp. properties, including HarperCollins, the New York Post, and the U.S. television station group. But it’s difficult to make the case that a 33-year-old, no matter how talented, is prepared to take the helm of a company as large and complex as News Corp.

Because the company grew more quickly than his children came of age, Murdoch hired and promoted a cadre of strong operating executives, like Fox News chief Roger Ailes and Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin. The presence of such heavyweights, who built up independent power bases, presented a further obstacle to promoting the kids rapidly: If Chernin or Ailes felt slighted by the rise of an inexperienced family member, they might bolt.

As Murdoch’s December-June romance shows—Wendi Deng is 36—there’s another demographic trend that works against dynasties. Men and women are leading longer work lives. CEOs retire at 65 only when they have to. So, even if CEOs have time to shepherd sons and daughters through lengthy apprenticeships, there’s no guarantee they’ll get out of the way when the kids are ready to rule. Queen Elizabeth, still going strong at 79, has shown little sign that she’s willing to cede the throne to 56-year-old Prince Charles.

Prince Charles can’t get hired by any other monarchy. But the adult children of long-serving CEOs can leave, and they do. At AIG, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg brought his two sons, Jeff and Evan, into the company he regarded as a family business. But as they hit their 40s, and as it became clear to them that their father had no intention of leaving the executive suite alive, both sons left. Evan became CEO of insurer ACE Limited, and Jeff ultimately became CEO of Marsh & McLennan. (Like his father, Jeff Greenberg recently saw his career spiked because of an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.)

Even if the child has an ample apprenticeship, and if the parent is willing to step down, heirs at public companies must climb higher barriers to reach the top spot today than they did 20 or even 10 years ago. Corporations are more complex than they ever have been. They’re more likely to operate businesses in multiple sectors and in many different countries, to face brutal competition, and to come under pressure from activist investors. Given the stakes, it’s difficult to justify handing off the reins to a son or daughter without undertaking an exhaustive search—even when the heir is qualified. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs has something of a dream résumé. A Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Berkeley, he has spent 15 years working his way up the ladder at the company, spearheading vital projects and running key business units. And yet his promotion to CEO in July was regarded as controversial because he was succeeding his father, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs.

Lachlan’s departure is no great loss to the business side of News Corp. Chernin, Ailes, and other Murdoch lieutenants are extremely capable. But as entertainment, it’s a tremendous blow. If Murdoch’s kids were to stay, and were even half as smart and ruthless and controversial as their dad, News Corp. would be enthralling to watch for at least another generation

Urban Outsider Artists Evoke Society’s Margins

 

Tom Powel Imaging, courtesy of Deitch Projects

Swoon, a street artist and recent graduate of Pratt Institute, is making her New York gallery debut at Deitch Projects

August 3, 2005
Urban Outsider Artists Evoke Society’s Margins
By ROBERTA SMITH

Jeffrey Deitch may spend more time in a well-pressed pinstripe suit than any other downtown art dealer, but he is second to none when it comes to diverting street art’s creative energies into the white cube of the traditional gallery. At the moment both of Mr. Deitch’s white cubes – former garages in the relatively quiet southwest quadrant of SoHo – are going full blast with installations by two resourceful streetwise artists, a veteran and a promising newcomer.

The larger Deitch space, on Wooster Street near Grand Street, has been taken over by Barry McGee, who helped ignite the street-graffiti art renaissance that emanated from San Francisco in the 1990’s. This is his third solo appearance with the gallery, and he has gone all out, venturing into new areas (abstract painting of all things) and presenting enough work in drawing, graffiti, video, photography, animatronic sculptures and over-the-top installation art for several shows. It is aptly titled "One More Thing."

Meanwhile, around the corner in the smaller Deitch space (on Grand near Wooster), a street artist and recent graduate of Pratt Institute who calls herself Swoon is making her New York gallery debut. She is presenting a shadowy stage-set-like reverie on the sidewalks, tenements and elevated subways of New York that was also inspired by the spontaneous, unregulated squatter structures of Kowloon Walled City, a Hong Kong slum that was bulldozed in 1993. So far, Swoon has been known for the large-scale linoleum block prints of expertly drawn city folk that she has been plastering around the Lower East Side and Brooklyn for several years. They earned her a place in the Greater New York exhibition at P.S. 1 in Queens, where, consistent with her preference for anonymity, her paste-on prints appear unlabeled in an obscure stairwell. Most people will come across them as on the street, entirely by accident.

These two environments form a remarkable loop of energy and thought about art and life and the ways they can be merged into a third thing, something highly artificial and visually immersive, yet profoundly real and infused with social commentary. They are the work of urban outsider artists whose main subject is the urban outsider.

Mr. McGee’s piece operates between extremes of recognizable modernist strategies to evoke society’s margins, where subcultures produce their own visual signs and art forms. On the one hand he makes grandiose (and somewhat macho) use of found objects: you enter the show through the back of a large truck turned on its side, to be confronted by a three-story-high pileup of wrecked, rusted, heavily graffitied vans, cars and trucks. On the other hand, he pursues geometric abstraction with effortless dispatch, covering walls with patchworks of panels painted with fluorescent-colored variations on a three-color stepped block pattern. The eye-popping results update Op Art while also evoking the subcultures of sign painting and quilt making.

As for the in between, it is hard to know where to start. Animatronic figures tag the walls with graffiti. Some appear to be made of the carved wood African sculptures that street vendors sell; others are life-size replicas of Mr. McGee’s friends, hoodies and all, including two of the graffiti artist Josh. One version of Josh is sighted in a very convincing re-creation of a public restroom that fills a shipping container at the bottom of the wreck pileup. He is adding his best-known tag, AMAZE, to a graffiti-covered mirror.

Meanwhile, videos blaring from a towering kiosk of old television monitors makefurther use of Mr. McGee’s paintings and the signature sad-sack faces and figures of his drawings. Also here are videos, purchased on the Internet, that show members of street gangs brandishing their tattoos and hand signs. Down some stairs, two walls are covered in beautifully rusted metal plates that turn out to be recycled typesetters trays. Up other stairs, a small shed lined with metal plates (trompe l’oeil this time) leads by ladder to a basement hideaway where the walls are covered with drawings on paper napkins by the artist’s father, while the floor is a veritable snake pit of cables and brightly painted DVD players for the videos. A third stairway leads to a dense display of Mr. McGee’s drawings on paper and empty night train bottles – along with photographs of graffiti artists in action.

Playing chapel to Mr. McGee’s cathedral, Swoon’s relatively intimate, unified installation nonetheless shows her ingeniously parlaying her linoleum-block prints and doilylike paper cutouts into an ambitious walk-in environment that is magical in both its complexity and its hands-on directness.

Intact found objects have little role here, although the piece includes some old doors and bits of molding and rickety-looking wood structures that suggest fire escapes and subway trestles. The dominant factor here is a flexible pictorial language that depicts workaday people of diverse ethnicities and urban vistas, often in combination. Motifs can migrate among printed paper, paper cutout, wood cutout, paint and stencil. And there are whiffs of the artist’s Southern roots (she was born and brought up in Florida) in the form of frequent silhouettes of trunk-nosed elephant moths and cut-out paper that hangs overhead like Spanish moss. Although a little further along you discover that the hanging cutouts actually depict the Coney Island Cyclone.

Precedents for Swoon’s work include various forms of 80’s street-oriented art: Keith Haring’s chalk figures (which were also on paper), Richard Hambleton’s Ab Ex figures and Martin Wong’s lovingly exact depictions of tenements and graffiti. She also builds on the traditions of the German Expressionist woodblock print, American Social Realism and the slightly heated-up illustrational style of postwar magazines and cheap novel covers. There’s an implicit conservatism to Swoon’s style; sometimes the piece feels like a visit to the set of "West Side Story." But the show creates an engrossing perception of life on the move, conjured up by an artist whose talent is all revved up with lots of places to go.

At Deitch Projects, SoHo: Barry McGee’s "One More Thing," at 18 Wooster Street, and Swoon’s debut, at 76 Grand Street, continue through Aug. 13; (212) 343-7300.

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