[Mb-civic] Two Storms, Ample Warning - William Raspberry - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Two Storms, Ample Warning

By William Raspberry
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; Page A25

Last week brought us one big story -- and one almost incomprehensibly 
huge one. The huge story, of course, is the still-unfolding devastation 
of Hurricane Katrina. The merely big one was a report out of the Census 
Bureau that the number of Americans falling into poverty has increased 
again, for the fourth straight year.

If the two stories have anything in common it is the willingness of 
Americans -- the political majority, the politicians and the media -- to 
ignore clear portents, right up to the point when disaster strikes.

Back in June 2004, Walter Maestri, chief of emergency management for 
Jefferson Parish, La., was lamenting in the New Orleans Times-Picayune 
that the president's budget was transferring money meant for reinforcing 
the levees that were keeping the waters of Lake Pontchartrain out of 
downtown New Orleans to homeland security and the war in Iraq.

The Institute for Public Accuracy found at least nine articles in the 
Times-Picayune about the unavailability of federal money for hurricane 
and flood control projects -- including a five-part 2002 series on the 
threat of a major hurricane. It was titled "Washing Away."

That is to say, while no one could have predicted the ferocity of 
Katrina -- a storm of unprecedented fury -- it was known that New 
Orleans was in jeopardy from deteriorating levees.

And back in 1998, former senator Fred Harris and Alan Curtis, president 
of the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation, the private-sector continuation 
of the 1968 Kerner Commission, were warning of resurgent poverty.

"If anything, the numbers out of the Census Bureau underestimate the 
problem of poverty in America," Curtis said in an interview last week. 
"The bureau's definition of the poverty threshold is $19,300 a year for 
a family of four. But a lot depends on where you happen to live. By one 
scale I'm familiar with, that family of four -- if they lived in 
Baltimore -- would cross the poverty threshold at $44,000 a year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/05/AR2005090501382.html
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