Friday, December 30, 2005

Eve of New Years Eve::::::::::::::



This is a picture of my daughter Fran and I.

I have been prompted to write more... seems I have readers... :-D
This has been an extremely busy week for a short one .;.... I am
responsible for a set of servers that provided both logon and file
storage for this crazy array of systems that are in use here. On my
way home last Friday I got a phone call telling me that they wanted me
to give up two of the four servers I manage and bring them and the
steel case they are located in back to the JFO for use by another
group.....So my job is document retention as a primary role, I have to
ensure that none of the data that I am taking over there gets lost. I
put some up on a network server at the JFO, and then had to find
inventive ways to get TONS of other data over to a different
system\domain that is in my building that I also manage. I always find
I am learning a ton about upper level operations of servers and
networks when I do this, what can talk to what, what can write to what,
what can backup to where.. it is all very confusing till you get up to
your elbows in electrons and just do it. So...... one of the things I
discovered is that one should NEVER let doctors, dentists, coronors or
morturary officers set up file systems. Your middle of the road
administrative assistant could do a much better job of organizing
files...... Imagine if you will.. groups rotating out every couple
weeks, each group bringing in its own set of geniuses with attached
egos to "get this place going right" and setting out all these
changes.. and let that run for the duration of a disaster this big. I
got the task of unwinding all those attempts at reorginazation and
backup and try to put together a single record copy of the relevant
data for each body that went through this place. So.. Dental records
include personal effects but not the other way around, X-ray does not
talk to anyone elses data.. and they name all files associated with a
single individual by the same number which is etched on a metal dog tag
attached to each body bag.....so if you search for a folder name like
01-00001 you get back 25 files... one for personal effects (maybe) one
for Dental (more likely) one for Xray and.. every backup o fthem ever
created. How to tell which folder is the most recent is an excercise
in raw will..... and there are around 1400 individuals with these
types of file complexities. So this week, I have been cornering leads
and giving them the deep grilling about data handling and best
practices...... came up with a solution last night on the way home and
am currently making it work.. going to turn a data base of 400 plus
Gigabytes of data into about 100 and back it up every night.. easy
money.. :-D
Here is a fun factoid... I mentioned that the powers that be are going
to MOVE the JFO... the back story is, when it was leased, there was a
sale in progress.... since that time real estate in this town has
skyrocketed in value.. so the original owner has tried to back out of
the deal.... The new owner came in with full price no negotiations
needed and bought the property for August of 05's sales price (much
below current value)... the new owner wants to quadruple the rent or
something like that and FEMA is tryi8ng to find another place to move
to... 2,000 people, cross town.. miles and miles of blue cable and
fiber optics and telephone lines (which is scrapped by the way and all
new goes into the new building).. what took months to build will be
rebuilt in a week in a new location and group by group they are going
to move.... for me I get 16 hour days (wow look at that over time) and
it is going to probabliy fall RIGHT at Mardi Gras... I was hoping to
get a handfull of beads and get women to flash me to get the beads...

In summing up my year, this has been a great year. One of my happiest
times ever. I made some decisions last spring early that kicked off a
great time for me. Those of you that know me well know there were some
dark days the last few years (not all.... and there were some great
days in there too!!) but I am not sure I have ever been happier.
Happy New Year to you all and my best wishes into the new one.

Friday, December 23, 2005




For those of you celebrating Christmas wherever you are, happy holidays. This picture is of a beach community South and West of New Orleans that I believe was primarily blown away by a direct hit from Rita. Hard to tell at this scale but the broken teeth of those pylons marches off to the horizon where houses and businesses once stood. This picture was taken last Thursday, almost 4 months after this hurricane hit. There are few Happy holidays in Louisiana this year, with official stats saying 200,000 homes destroyed by these two storms. The Southern half of Louisiana largly looks like this.

Everyone here has Terabytes of photos such as these. They decorate the halls of the JFO and are on the desktops of virtually everyone that touches this disaster.









They announced the locations where the city of New Orleans will put 8,000 trailers in the city limits this week. City parks, neighborhoods, any flat and otherwise unoccupied places. They are earmarked for workers, university, city officials and are grouped so they can be together. As you might imagine, the city is fighting with itself as to who has the authority to place these trailers .. the city council says one thing, the mayor (that insipid dumbass) says another. The governor (clearly the product of cousins marrying) is still harping on FEMA as being the bad guy for the state not getting everyone in a home yet.... and this is just barely day 120. The mayor of St Gabriel where the old morgue was is trying to hold up FEMA for 1.2 million a month in rent he charged us taxpayers for use of the abandoned school and is complaining that he put a new roof on it and wants us to pay for it.. any of you guys that ever rented a place ever paid for having the roof replaced>? He may get an extra month out of this ploy.. at this scale, it is hard to imagine the total value of the entire community exceeting 1.2 million very much.. I have posted pics of this community earlier in this blog. I would liike to see where the money goes though. If the mayor starts driving a new Cadillac, I would not be real surprised... :-)

I will have new news of my involvement in seperating FEMA and the state at the morgue. This has turned into a very interesting proposition. I am learning so much about who is supposed to do what here and.. how things end up going badly and sometimes very well. Happy Holidays to you all. Thinking about Colorado quite a bit during this season.

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Things of interest to me:::::::



This is a Nutria. Notice it has a kinda square snout? it is bigger than a muskrat, up to about the same size as a beaver and a voracious herbivore that has caused a lot of damage to native plants all over the south and south west. We use to varmint hunt them in west Texas as they tended to dig holes in earthen dams of farm lakes and ponds and ruin them. Imported from South America they have become one of those ecological disasters you hear about from time to time. They were along the side of the road the other day and I got this picture of them.

So.. DMORT is going to be moving out.. the plan is for the DMORT people to be totaly gone by Feb 28 and turn all this activity over to the state. We are talking now about what place FEMA is going to have on this location up to and after that time, there seem to be lots of options. For those of you that think you work in a fluid environment, you cannot imagine how quickly the road map changes for what happens tomorrow on one of these disasters. Virtually no plan survives writing it into a word document. FEMA is very used to moving in and out of
locations. In their minds, every one of these sites are temporary. I know they can either leave and donate, or loan some of this equipment to the state (hmmmmmm).... the data belongs to them, but the phones and switching gear is FEMA, the trailers are a bout half FEMA and half
DMORT, the generators, external lighting and security is all from FEMA . Everyone is going home for Christmas and a new bunch rotating in next Wednesday.

Not sure what to do with some reduced time down, but movies are on the list this weekend. Going to cook some food in the apartment, read.. do some laundry and maybe get out and see some of the sights in town during the daylight. There is a very nice Museum just down the street from the apartment too.. Maybe get some time walking on the levee ... supposed to be very nice weather anyway... YAY.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Yousef's::::::::::

Yousef's::::::::::
Yousefs is a corner store here in "town". It has gasoline, cold drinks and beer, a kind of deli (Boudan HERE!!) and various sundried items. It is aparently also a kind of speak easy, after hours they lock the doors and you can get in the side by knowing a secret knock and you can
get in and drink beer in the cool without the watchful eye of John law and those pesky liquor control agents. People here in the DMORT always thought the name was some kind of horrible misspelling of some kind of "Serve Yo Sef" kind of coloquialism..... I had to laugh.. I have been
in the store several times and I have met Yousef.. he is a black muslim and this is his store. This is one of the more bizarre points of this kind of place ... Yousef is a practicing muslim, in the heart of some bizarre cross between a Catholic state religion here and the prostelitizing evangelical Christians..... in a country that wears American flags on everything that is at war with radical elements of the very religion this store owner in the middle of absolutely no where
makes a living (I have not been too impressed with the "live and let live" attitudes I have found here). Yet Yousef survives and seems to flourish selling pork and alcohol products he neither consumes nor believes in (you can buy Pig Lips out of a one gallon wide mouth jar at the front for $0.75 each.... ok. even I am not that brave but they are a local favorite.. purple, pickled and juicy). Since all of us are foreigners we are not included on the inside of things, but it is clear
to me that Yousef is doing ok for himself and his family. He has a sign on the door "no cell phones inside" which he enforces..... I wonder why but am afraid to ask.


There is another part of NDMS (National DIsaster Medical System) which includes DMORT and DMAT (Disaster Medical Assistance Team.. esentially MASH from volunteers)... one you likely have not heard about is VMAT (Veterinary Medical Assistance Team) which comes in to help with animals that have been hurt or displaced by the disaster. So from New Orleans dogs and cats and what ever plus cows and other lifestock displaced by the storm here..VMATS had a resence in the old morgue before we moved over here but has since left this disaster as being
complete. They tried to save starving animals in the NO metro area and either find the owners or find new owners for them. They saved thousands of animals from death as far as I know and I ever saw a single thing about them in the news.

Friday, December 16, 2005

Friday::


Sorry guys. Internet has been down for the last three days and has prevented me from blogging recently. I have some prepared and will be presenting them consecutively here for the next few days.

Ok.. I got to brag. This stretch of 70 degree days is amazing. It actually warms UP when it rains here so today is expected to be warmer and rainy and in truth realliy smells like a damp spring morning. They have been doing extensive burning up and down the Mississippi and the outdoors smells like wood smoke and a couple nights ago it was even hazy with smoke at the apartment.

I met a woman from Andrews here at DMORT this week. She just rotated in and is the Finance section Chief for DMORT in region six I think. She is also the justice of the peace and aparently the coronor in Andrews as well. Since this is my official FEMA region six address, it was interesting that I knew so little about the town.. :-) turns out she knows my parents there and had played golf with mom and dad as couples many years ago and that my mom inspired her to be in FEMA or in this case DMORT which she got to by being the coronor of Andrews... odd little world.

I am also liking my new rental car. It is a fully decked out Chevy Impala. Electric everything, nice sound system, cloth seats and a V-8 I think. FEMA gets this for the price of a compact car so I am a very happy boy. Makes my commutes quite comfy. The local Public radio station is very similar to the one in the Springs so I get all my favorite morning and evening programming for that commute. Ok.. it is not perfect as there is not a drive through Starbucks directly on the route (sigh.. the things you must abandon when you are roughing it).

I think I am surprised at how bad things still are in the disaster zone south of us. I think people are not in danger of dying of thirst, hunger or exposure but there is very little movement towards restoration of some normalcy of life in the southern half of this state. The latest uproar is over trailers, who has them, who pays for them, where do they go, who gets them how long do they keep them... what a mess. you have to prepare a site for them and they have to plumb in sewage, power and water and these sites have to be available for the duration of the disaster.. so years. land has been hard to come by, the actual purchase of the units has been slowed by the purchase process... FEMA is saying they want to move in (gulp) 125,000 ??? trailers??? ok.. so the next big wind is gonna stack up a giant tally of trailers. It is very difficult to both believe and sometimes get your arms around some of these numbers. But in Louisiana alone there are over 50,000 people still in hotels and I have no idea how many are in tents, in tents INSIDE their old houses, barns, anything with a roof on it. There is a very healthy debate in New Orleans about whether to put on Mardi Gras there or not. The debate is: If we do not put on this party we will starve in the dark with no income, so lets all go back to work :: vs :: we do not have sewage, power or infrastructure, is this really the best time to shut down and have a party for two weeks??

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Saturday::: Again


I wanted to post more pictures from the strike teams. These are pretty deep into the disaster area and are often very rural in the Western Parishes more affected by RITA. The focus of DMORT of course is human remains, but they come across lots of other items. Here is some of the damage they saw up close and personal and the trials they went through to both recover people and cemetary escapees (this IS the land of Cool Hand Luke...... what we got here.. is a failure to communicate).

Today is the day lots of the staff rotate out. There will be a group go out at Christmas and another one come in on the 28th for a shot at the new year. DMORT is not that big an organization and it is possible that I will be able to meet nearly everyone in the cadre before I leave the disaster. There are some interesting characters here carrying names like "mudflap" and "Bigun".

I am going to see Narnia tomorrow before I go to work in the evening.. we are switching in some new network equipment in advance of taking the populace here inside the web of the FEMA networking gnomes. I will write my short review of the movie and hope for the best.

The cafeteria lady here is under fire for the "down home" cooking that is done. We have lots of people from places like New York and California and other uptown places like Nebraska that do not favor this style of cooking. We have chicken with almost every meal (very much like central america) baked, fried, wings, buffaloed, BBQ'd, fried, stewed and gumboed....Beef tends to be ground and served as meat loaf, hamburgers or meat balls. There is rice for almost every dish, the red beans and, the chicen and, the etoufe' (sp??) all have rice. This cook also has a fondness of putting shrimp in the most unlikely things like the spagetti sauce and then not warning folk that may have allergies..... let the eater beware. I helped her with her descriptions of food and it sounds better to eat than it did before. I kind of like it all, the greens are fresh at the DMORT facility, and hwile I wish there was more fresh fruit, I would eat like a pig here if I ate my meals here.

So DMORT will put these remains in caskets for people, even the bodies that have been disinterred. Just to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, people are complaining that they are not going back into the original coffin that the dear departed were once planted in. My son Jake will remember the movie The Mummy where they were talking about the state of the mummy they had found and decided it was a bit "gooey" to be so old. Well, the entire caskets coming out of these cemetaries are like that.. goo... so the government is offering these not quite top of the line metal caskets, with nice fittings to rebury folk and.... are getting grief about it.

Friday, December 09, 2005

Strike Teams:::::::::::


DMORT has strike teams that go out to recover bodiies from any source. So, from washed away cemetaries, storm deaths etc. Frequently these bodies are in very rugged places both rural and urban. The Guy in the Green top is a DMORT person, they wear paramilitary uniforms and are very distinctive... the guys in black are Federal Police.. note the ratio.. and how attentive they are.. and how armed they are. All the strike teams went with armed escorts it seems. I did not take this picture rather one of the strike team members did. There are still strike teams out in the field today, rescuing washed away coffins, and retrieving bodies from locations they are identified. There is still a trickle of bodies as they re-open more and more of New Orleans and find victims in the houses.

Life is fun here, quick switch of gears. This is just the best job. I would wish everyone could have the opportunity to get involved and try to help in an effort like this. the JFO is doing a toys for tots campaign and you should see the mountain of toys that has accumulated for delivery to kids, it is very impressive.

Back to 50 today, this last cold spell almost took the leaves off the tree. I recommend a winter here ... it is very relaxing.

Monday, December 05, 2005

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....... send winter away!!!

Ok.. today is the day I get to quit bragging about how nice it is here. It is 40 degrees and a cold rain at 11 am.. I was sitting last night watching the rain come down on my patio in shorts.. so it is officially miserable.

The parking lot of the Main building of the morgue is all made with white limestone gravel and shells, they grade it and roll it and grade and roll and it becomes just like concrete. "they assure me" it will not be horribly dusty in the summer but we will see.

I lament not being able to take the time to have seen Harry Potter or the forthcoming Lion Witch and Wardrobe. I will have an additional backlog of books and movies to have seen by the time I abandon the disaster next year.

Morgue Stats and urban legends. Something just under 1000 bodies recovered to the morgue, about 125 identified about 135 are tentatively identified, and just over 100 have been released. The most recent hateful urban legend is that FEMA is taking the bodies in but intend to keep them forever. The most southern and remote parishes are reluctant to release bodies for both religious and political reasons including this particular urban lgend. There are private estimates taht there are at least as many still out there as have been brought in. At least one mausoleum was discovered all barnacle encrusted... aparently washed out to sea by a previous hurricane and redeposited on land with Rita. Two of the Parishes had mass graves from a previous hurricane... unidentified bodies from the 40's .... that were disenterred and the location of them is undetermined..... I was working on a computer in the dental lab when a positive ID was made today.... a very odd mixture of happiness and sadness.... They had an antemortem "life" photo of a smiling 7 or 8 year or so old boy.. with stubby front teeth and a peculiar gold tooth on his right incisor...that matched photos exactly of postmortem photos of the remains of this little guy.... hard not to think of my son in that circumstance... that I am glad his mom will know where he is... my job is to keep the computers and files that allow these matches running and safe from lost or corruption.

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Sundays in a Morgue:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Sundays in a Morgue:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Happy days!!!... we had a “gate incident” yesterday evening that has everyone a bit jumpy here today. It follows closely on the heels of one more public problem that happened at the JFO two days ago where a man with a big knife wanted to “cut a FEMA employee” and has prompted emails suggesting we wear nothing FEMA on the outside of our work. Our incident was a family that is sure that their family member is being held here and were crashing the gate to rescue this poor dead person. We presume they are thinking that they could just tell which is theirs from the remains and pick them up out of the hundreds that are here. In a way this is the problem with being so secretive with these things, it creates an aura of distrust that somehow we are keeping information from people that they could better interpret than these professionals. I saw perhaps 20 body bags in the morgue for autopsy yesterday all on mobile stainless steel tables and none of them more than 8 inches thick. Certainly not a shape recognizable as a human in there at all. Our gate crashers are very lucky as all these guards are armed and most are recently back from the military in Iraq …. I am certain no one wants any additional victims.

Urban Legends::::: The latest one is from New Orleans …. The worst Urban Legends are the ones that are just barely possible… This one is especially heinous as it is especially racial and hateful. It is now passed around that the Corps of Engineers purposefully blew up the levees in the poor areas of New Orleans to relieve pressure on the levees so that more affluent (read here the color white) neighborhoods would be spared the worst of the flooding. This one has apparently gone national in some regard so if you hear it do not be surprised. I have seen the maps and laid my hands on the 3d table maps of the flooded areas and while the poorer parts flooded worse, there were plenty of breaks in middle class neighborhoods and.. it presumes a level of coherence within the corps I am not sure exists… I bet that this one stays around for awhile.. see if the congress investigates it. FEMA T shirts in New Orleans now read Federal Employees Missing Again and Fix Everything My Ass.

I love my weather here. I had half a day off yesterday so that I opened the double back doors to my patio and sat essentially on the outside till almost ten pm. It was 72 degrees till then….. I am loving my winter without snow. This part of the world WILL feed you. I have never seen such giant portions in all my life. If I ate my Per Diem here I would weigh 1100 lbs in six months…….

News on the political front. FEMA rarely keeps contractors on past the initial setup of a disaster, taking in Local Hires and DAE’s (like me) to handle the work load as the Disaster matures. We are at the time when the contractors (several of them extremely talented folk) are being pared back and all are not eligible to be converted to local hires or DAE’s and it is pretty high tension here about this transition. It did happen quickly and last night so I am all alone here today and may only have one helper here for my duration here. I am going to be on call from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm.. oh.. and also from 8:00 pm to 7:00 am J… gosh.. that is 24 hour call!! Imagine my time sheet if you will… good thing I am used to working with people on the phone solving issues eh?? Things are running smoothly so life is good here at last.

Friday, December 02, 2005

Morgue Humor:::::::::

Got a new place last night.. this is my third move. i am staying at the Riverview Condos and have a one bedroom apartment there. It is a bout half the size of my last one bedroom but seems very spacious after being in such confined spaces for this amount of time. Pictures to follow when I get to see it in daylight,,...... It has very close parking.. about 30 square feet of back yard and patio... a nice kitchen small living area and decent bathroom on a queen bed.. I can live in it for a long time and be ok.

The JFO has lots of urban legends about the DMORT facility. One is that they have a 30 foot alligator (no typo) in a freezer truck that ate a bunch of bodies and was killed so they could reclaim the parts for identification.. (notes below on the accuracy of these).... One of the reasons there are so many bodies here (many hundreds) is that the cemetaries floated away (they are on the surface remember), There is a story that one of the floating mauseleums was captured, flown into the morgue in the old facility and cracked open in hopes of finding clues to the location this body (bodies?) might belong. The Floating cement enclosure was opened only to be found full of snakes trying to evade the flood and on opening the snakes almost explosively left that enclosure and sent the staff running terrified into the night.

The alligator "does" exist. Actually the head does, I hve seen it, and it was perhaps 9 feet as an adult. Aparenly this gator had staked out one of the floaters as lunch and was waiting for it to get properly tender before consuming it. When humans came to reclaim the body, the gator attacked and was killed by armed guards that aparently accompany all these recovery missions. The head was returned to the morgue as some kind of grisly trophy... but no one felt the need to necropsy the beast to see who if anyone was inside and he was 1/3 the length of the story over at the JFO. The snake story is very true and is actually documented on tape from one of the running autopsy cameras... not sure if you wll see it on Americans funniest home videos anytime here soon but you have never seen men and women move so fast in your life....I believe them all to have been poisonous snakes based on what I could see... It apparently shook up one worker so bad they had to be released and sent home more or less permanently.