Where Were the Buses?

In the immediate wake of the crisis that has been unfolding this week in the "Big Easy," focus needs to remain on helping the victims. Canadians can donate to the Canadian Red Cross online or by telephone at 1-800-418-1111. All major Banks will also be accepting donations as of September 6th.

Nonetheless, I'm still trying to figure out why those same convoys of buses, sent to rescue thousands of stranded refugees after Katrina, weren't dispatched before this deluge to stop this human tragedy, before it ever started.

It's not like we didn't have a pretty good idea of what was coming. Even CNN was onto that.

An estimated 1 million people evacuated New Orleans and surrounding areas as Hurricane Katrina approached the Gulf Coast Sunday. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said 75 percent to 80 percent of residents had been evacuated by Sunday evening. Some 30,000 people were taken to the Louisiana Superdome, reported CNN.

"We are in lockdown mode now," Nagin said on WWL-AM.

Walter S. Maestri, director of the Jefferson Parish Department of Emergency Management, estimated 1 million people had been evacuated. Approximately 1.3 million people live in the New Orleans metro area.

On Sunday evening, the hurricane was about 130 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River and expected to hit land early Monday. Conditions were already beginning to deteriorate along portions of the central and northeastern Gulf Coast.

Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, told CNN Katrina is the strongest hurricane he has ever seen. "Not just because of the intensity but the size of this and the area that it`s hitting," he said.

Mayfield said there is a lot of attention on the threat Katrina poses to New Orleans, but western Mississippi is also going to get hit hard. New Orleans lies below sea level, separated from the Mississippi by huge levees.

I'll have more to say about Katrina in future days. But to give you an idea where I am heading, read a bit of this from Alan Eisner of Reuters News:

Virtually everything that has happened in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina struck was predicted by experts and in computer models, so emergency management specialists wonder why authorities were so unprepared.

"The scenario of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was well anticipated, predicted and drilled around," said Clare Rubin, an emergency management consultant who also teaches at the Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management at George Washington University.

Computer models developed at Louisiana State University and other institutions made detailed projections of what would happen if water flowed over the levees protecting the city or if they failed.

In July 2004, more than 40 federal, state, local and volunteer organizations practiced this very scenario in a five-day simulation code-named "Hurricane Pam," where they had to deal with an imaginary storm that destroyed over half a million buildings in New Orleans and forced the evacuation of a million residents.

At the end of the exercise Ron Castleman, regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared, "We made great progress this week in our preparedness efforts.

"Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management. These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies," he said.

In light of that, said disaster expert Bill Waugh of Georgia State University, "It's inexplicable how unprepared for the flooding they were." He said a slow decline over several years in funding for emergency management was partly to blame.

In comments on Thursday, President George W. Bush' said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."

But Louisiana State University engineer Joseph Suhayda and others have warned for years that defenses could fail. In 2002, the New Orleans Times Picayune published a five-part series on "The Big One" examining what might happen if they did.

Also on my mind is this hard-hitting story, posted August 31, 2005, at Editor And Publisher:

Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city, the waters may still keep rising in New Orleans. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal.

With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until it's level with the massive lake.New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane.

In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside. Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle.

The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain.

At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

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."

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:

"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."

Garry J. Wise

Visit our Website: www.wiselaw.net

B.C. Supreme Court tosses traditional definition of adultery

In this new era of same-sex marriage and same-sex divorce, Canadian family law is, of necessity, undergoing a fudamental re-thinking.

The case below, excerpted from CTV.ca, highlights just one of many new challenges to our most basic (but now, patently anachronistic) family law principles.

In short, the traditiional definition of adultery, as extra-marital sexual relations between a spouse and a person of the opposite sex, is no longer applicable (in B.C., anyways). No doubt, courts in Ontario and the rest of the country will follow.

(We'll be arguing this same issue in a same-sex divorce proceeding in Toronto shortly. We'll keep you posted):

A B.C. Supreme Court judge granted a Vancouver woman a divorce Tuesday after deciding that the woman's husband had indeed engaged in adultery when he had sex with another man. The traditional definition of adultery is voluntary sex between a spouse and someone of the opposite gender, to whom he or she isn't married.

But Justice Nicole Garson of the B.C. Supreme Court said Tuesday that she had been persuaded to make a change in the traditional definition of adultery. The woman, who can be identified only as Ms. P due to a court order, was challenging Canada's divorce legislation after Garson earlier ruled that her husband's extramarital affair with a man didn't legally count as adultery.

The woman had been married nearly 17 years when, last October, she discovered her husband was having an affair with a younger man. She and her husband separated immediately and she filed for divorce two months later, seeking an immediate end to their marriage. Her husband signed an affidavit on Jan. 5, 2005, acknowledging his adulterous relationship, and didn't appear in court in February to contest the divorce.

Canada's Divorce Act allows for a no-fault divorce after a one-year separation, on grounds of marital breakdown. It also allows for an immediate divorce if there is admitted or proven adultery or cruelty. But Garson refused to grant an immediate divorce -- because the definition of adultery in common law didn't include homosexual relations.

"I was completely devastated and I felt like I didn't matter," Ms. P told CTV's Canada AM. The judge told the woman last Friday that she would hear the case again if a lawyer could argue why the legal definition of adultery should be broadened to include same-sex adultery. The woman's lawyer, barbara findlay (who spells her name in lower-case letters), argued that the traditional definition of adultery is as outdated as the original common-law definition of marriage, which was based on procreation.

"We argued, and the federal government agreed with us, that the court can make what is called in law an incremental change in light of current circumstances," said findlay, "so that divorce will, from now on, be understood to be available where there is, for example, intimate genital contact between two people, one of whom is married."

Garson's decision is expected to have far-reaching consequences across Canada, said findlay, because of the increasing number of same-sex marriages that will inevitably lead to same-sex affairs. She added that, because adultery isn't defined through federal legislation, judges hearing similar cases in other provinces will likely be persuaded by the B.C. judge's decision. "I would expect that other judges faced with the same question would rule in the same way," findlay told CTV....

The woman has also launched a constitutional challenge based on the Charter, saying the definition of adultery discriminates against gay and lesbian couples because it makes divorce less accessible to them compared to homosexuals.

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

Visit our website: www.wiselaw.net/family.html