Stories from the heart

I read this this morning and my heart aches for those who have been lost to gun violence. There are many kinds, homicide, suicide and of course mass shootings. They all share the same fact – death by a gun – but the way they were killed and how they were killed, differ.

These are some from the Washington Post that are about 9 individuals killed by a gun. I have little more to add but to ask that you read these stories and make no judgements other than the fact they are American and almost all of them are of color they are also largely people who were working class, they were not Gangsters or involved in the act of a crime nor even doing anything that would make you go, “Hmm well that is what you get going out to, coming home at…” Guns did this and the people who had the guns got them easily and had no problem using them to kill. We always need a motive, how about “Hey I got a gun let me go shoot some shit. I got to make it right” Who they kill why they kill is secondary to the fact that they had a gun and they used it to shoot to kill a fellow human. What more motive do you need? All gun crimes are hate crimes.

These are nine stories from America’s homicide crisis.

Jaylon was on his front porch.

Jody was at the park.

Juanita was sitting in her car.

Violence found them all

By Washington Post Staff

Nov. 27, 2022

Fowler reported from Jackson, Miss.; Gilsinan reported from St. Louis; Cusick reported from New Orleans; Freedman reported from Memphis; Bailey reported from Baton Rouge; Connors reported from Cleveland; and Rosenzweig-Ziff reported from Washington, D.C.

Topper photos by Kathleen Flynn, Dustin Franz, Maddie McGarvey and Joe Martinez.

Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Copy editing by Dorine Bethea. Story editing by Amanda Erickson. Design and development by Stephanie Hays. Data analysis by John D. Harden. Design editing by Madison Walls.

During the last three years, homicides nationwide have reached their highest levels in decades.

The deadly spike coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic: The rate of killings rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 and remained high through the following year, according to a Washington Post database created to track the toll. Even now, as the bloodshed has slowed, the homicide rate outpaces pre-pandemic levels.

This gun violence tends to grab headlines when it occurs in horrific public spasms: at a Walmart in Virginia, a nightclub in Colorado, an elementary school in rural Texas. But the focus on mass shootings obscures the totality of the American ailment: people killed on city streets and inside their homes, deaths that seldom attract national attention and cases that rarely involve high-profile prosecutions. In many, an arrest has yet to be made.

The slayings have left a trail of grieving families, neighborhoods in mourning and an untold number of people dealing with the trauma of sudden, brutal loss. And the toll is not equally borne.

Gun crime disproportionately impacts people of color, especially Black men. Victim data collected from each city profiled here show Black people made up more than 80 percent of the total homicide victims in 2020 and 2021. And while data show gun deaths have surged around the country, a number of cities lead the way.

The Post visited nine of these places, which have seen some of the nation’s highest recent murder rates. They are spread mostly across the South and Midwest. Some have long been in the spotlight for their homicide numbers, others have not.

In each place, monuments have sprung up to commemorate those lost, some informal and fleeting, others lasting — some public, some private. They mark a death, but just as important, they remind everyone who sees them of the lives lived: the aspiring aerospace engineer, the retired chef who cooked for the hungry, the teen so funny he was granted five minutes at the end of class to joke around, the 4-year-old who laid flowers on her dad’s grave last Father’s Day.

Cleveland

Lawrence Morgan, 17

‘He was my person.’

Bethany Rohrer, left, and a friend of her late son Lawrence Morgan comfort Allison Radulov during a vigil held in memory of Lawrence in Parma, Ohio.

A couple of years before he was killed, 17-year-old Lawrence Morgan posted a sign on his bedroom door: “Guns Forbidden.

“He was always talking about how he hated how people carried guns,” said Joey Kline, Lawrence’s best friend since fourth grade. “He was just so against guns.”

He had other passions too. His mother Bethany Rohrer said her son loved basketball and making people laugh. He was goofy and endearing — one of his teachers even offered him five minutes at the end of every class to joke around, as long as he cut it out during lessons.

“Every memory I have of him is of us laughing and smiling,” Kline said.Lawrence’s uncle Bob Schnable puts together a picture board before a celebration of life ceremony.

Friends were always popping over to Lawrence’s house in Parma, a Cleveland suburb; his mother wanted it that way. The boys would sometimes wander to a nearby park or drive around the neighborhood. That is what they were doing the afternoon of June 21, when someone started firing.

At least 170 people were killed in Cleveland in 2021

Lawrence was shot seven times in the chest and died on the scene. Police later arrested Gunnar Glaszewski, 16, and charged him with murder and felonious assault. Gunnar and Lawrence lived a couple of blocks from each other and went to the same high school. “There was a six-month period where Gunnar was at our house every day,” Rohrer said. “Then they had a falling out, and they weren’t friends anymore.”

The day after Lawrence was killed, two of his friends created a memorial at the corner where he was shot. They wrapped a telephone pole in strips of crepe paper — red and purple, his favorite colors — and attached star-shaped balloons. At the base, they pinned a large piece of poster board with #LLL — Long Live Law.

That evening, they held a vigil. A small crowd of friends and family lit candles; Beyonce’s “Heaven” played in the background.

“He was my person, really the only person I could ever talk to,” said a sobbing Allison Radulov, a friend from middle school. “He’s just a genuine person, never out to hurt anyone.”

“Lawrence was such a good kid,” said Tashondra Forster. “He tried to direct my son on the right path. He was just a positive role model for him.”

St. Louis

Damion Baker, 25

He helped a woman to her car. Then the shooting started.

Family members of Damion Baker mourn near his casket during the memorial and celebration of life services at Lighthouse Baptist Church

Damion Baker was in elementary school when he picked up the phrase he’d use for the rest of his life: “Well, technically …”

It tickled his mom An’namarie Baker to hear her son carefully explain some finer point. The expression captured Baker’s essence, she said. He was witty and diligent, a leader in school and a Division I college football player who went on to run his own construction business.

262 people were killed in St. Louis in 2020

Baker was “cooler than a Cadillac with AC in hundred-degree weather,” his friend Kevin Spraggins Jr. said at his funeral. He had great taste in sweatshirts, An’namarie said, and gave “the best hugs,” according to his aunt Carlotta Baker.

That kindness was on full display on July 3 when Baker escorted a woman to her car in downtown St. Louis. The pair were shot in an attempted carjacking. She survived; Baker died at the age of 25. The case remains unsolved.

At a service in Baker’s honor, images flashed across the auditorium screen ahead of the ceremony. In one photo, Baker is a skinny kid with big ears. In another, he is a grinning teenager in a #17 jersey at Christian Brothers College High School. In one video clip, he is teaching his beloved niece De’Sanyi, now 5, how to brush her teeth. (“Don’t eat” the toothpaste, he advises her on the video.)

Baker dreamed of playing for the NFL, making enough money so his mother would not have to work. But when he realized that was not going to happen, he adjusted. “One thing D-Bake told me was, ‘if we’re stand-up men, that’s all our mama want,’ ” his cousin Abryon Givens said at the service.

Baker’s older brother Devon said their mother called the two of them her “Double Ds.” At an early age, they had decided that meant “dedication and determination.” The boys saw things through to the end, An’namarie said, “whether they liked it or not.”

An’namarie is focused now on ending the gun violence that has taken so many other children from their mothers. “Damion cannot just be some random number of homicide, and we move on to the next number,” she said. “It’s gotta look different.”

Columbus, Ohio

Glenn Clark III, 50

‘He was a proud daddy.’

The family of Glenn Clark III gather in Grove City, Ohio, to commemorate his death.

As a high-schooler in the late 1980s, Glenn Clark III would get out of the shower and head straight outside. The only way to get his hair just right was to speed down the road past his family’s farm on his motorcycle, his family said.

He soon found joy working with his hands while tilling the sod fields at his home outside Columbus, Ohio. That passion led to a career as a mechanic working in factories in Ohio and Kentucky, where he moved with his then-wife, Deana Burke, and his two children.

“He was a proud daddy and a simple guy,” said Desere Adams, 54, his older sister. “He wore T-shirts with holes in them and loved riding his motorcycle. If I needed him, if they needed him, he was there.”After Clark was killed, his parents named their cat Happy, Clark’s nickname.

After he and Burke divorced 20 years ago, he moved back to work in Grove City, Ohio, to live with his parents.

Then, almost seven years ago, he met Rochelle Rice, now 53. On their first date, they spent five hours talking about Vikings — Clark knew everything about the Scandinavian seafarers’ history — and laughing. Two months later, they bought a house near Columbus.

In August, Clark received a promotion. That night, he went to a bar with members of his motorcycle club, the Avengers, to toast his new job. At the bar, a fight broke out. Five people were shot, and at least one bullet hit and killed Clark, one of two Avengers who died.

At least 100 people have been killed so far in Columbus in 2022

Nearly three months later, the police investigation is ongoing.

On what would have been his 51st birthday last month, Adams, Rice and the rest of the family gathered at Clark’s parents’ home to celebrate his life. They all wore their new urn jewelry — necklaces with his photo or Viking symbols and a small place for his ashes — and Adams, Rice and Shadow, now 28, showed the tattoos they had gotten to memorialize Clark.

“He was bigger than Everest in my mind,” Shadow said. “He was my hero.”

New Orleans

Shane Brown, 20

‘He was my little brilliant mind.’

Shane Brown, 20, was murdered in March. His body was found in a canal near this intersection in New Orleans East.

At St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, the Rev. Bill Terry and his team have maintained a somber project. On large boards hung across the church’s facade, they handwrite particulars about each New Orleanian killed by violence. Date. Name. Age. Method.

Among this year’s names: Shane Brown. 20. Shot.

“He was my little brilliant mind,” his mother, Gloria Brown, 56, said.

At least 205 people were killed in the first eight months of 2022 in New Orleans

Nicknamed “the brain” by his family, Shane Brown was an avid reader and honor roll student who enjoyed programming and robotics. He was also socially aware, said E’jaaz Mason, 31, Brown’s digital media teacher at New Orleans Charter Science and Mathematics High School.

“You can tell he internalized a lot of what is going on in this country when it comes to Black boys,” Mason said. “He cared about the state of his people, and I always really respected that about him.”

Gloria Brown holds her phone showing a photo she made of an “S” she saw in the clouds recently. She said since he passed she has seen the shape in the clouds or in water and can feel his presence. Handwritten names, ages and method of death of New Orleanians killed are kept on a memorial on the facade of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church in the Treme neighborhood, including Brown, who was fatally shot. The program from Shane Brown’s funeral sits next to the Louisiana Film Prize he received for his 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” when he was in high school. Brown, 20, was an avid reader and honor roll student.

As a junior, Brown approached Mason with an idea: He wanted to make a film about what Black boys experience in New Orleans.

“Kids used to come to me 10 times a day talking about wanting to make a movie,” Mason said. “But literally the very next day, Shane came with a double-sided sheet of loose-leaf paper, with a skeletal structure of a story.”

The two assembled a small team to bring Brown’s vision to life. The resulting 11-minute short, “Like a Ship Without a Sail,” swept the student awards at the Louisiana Film Prize the following spring.Gloria Brown sits at her kitchen table in Slidell.

A year later, as the covid-19 pandemic ravaged New Orleans, Brown graduated in a drive-through ceremony held at a local park. He turned down offers at engineering programs across the country to instead begin his undergraduate education at a local community college. Brown hoped to someday transfer to one of his dream schools, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Georgia Tech, with the ultimate goal of becoming an aerospace engineer.

By 2022, Brown was balancing his courses with a job at the port and getting around in his first car. Then this March, less than two weeks after his 20th birthday, Brown did not come home from work one day.

Five grueling days would pass before Brown’s body was discovered floating in a New Orleans East canal. Coroners later determined he died of a gunshot wound to the head.

Police made an arrest in the case, but Brown’s loved ones said they still do not know why he was killed. Gloria Brown instead tries to focus on appreciating the 20 years she had with her only child. “He was the person that I had asked for when I became a late mom,” she said.

Mason said Brown’s death signifies a loss of potential.

“You never know what that person would have done to improve and perfect our world,” he said. “And now we’ll never know.”

Memphis

Juanita Washington, 60

Juanita Washington’s photo sits outside the dance studio she loved.

“I just want to feel her presence,” said Ladia Yates, 32, owner of the Memphis dance studio where Washington worked as an administrator. “I don’t want anyone to forget her.”

Washington, 60, was fatally shot around lunchtime on Dec. 29, 2021, while sitting in her car in a Walgreens parking lot. A suspect was arrested in Las Vegas in March.

Homicides hit a record high in 2020 — and 2021 in Memphis

Yates had known Washington for nearly two decades. She and Yates’s grandmother Yvonne Paschal, who also works at the dance studio, had become particularly close.

“She was like our sergeant-at-arms,” said Paschal, 77. It was Washington who made sure everyone paid admission at events. She was loving but firm with the kids, and known for her honesty. “She was very open — you didn’t have to guess where she was coming from,” Paschal said.

“I just really didn’t have a friend like I had with Juanita,” she added. “I don’t have anyone that I can talk to and share things like she and I did.”

Washington was considered family by many employees of the studio where she worked for years before she was shot and killed. Yates, center, with some of her youth dancers, pose for a photo while wearing hoodies honoring the memory of Washington. Yates poses with some of her dancers around a memorial honoring Washington.

Washington’s spot at the front desk, beside Paschal, remains off limits. Yates held a candlelight vigil there in the days after the shooting, and has dedicated performances in Washington’s memory, tributes her studio has carried into performances this year.

The first of those came the day of Washington’s funeral — but took place 1,800 miles away in Los Angeles. Yates had committed to a competition there and did not want to back out. The specially choreographed opener, a swirling portrait of fury and grace set to gospel star Kirk Franklin’s “Don’t Cry,” was devoted to Washington.

Earlier that day in a Facebook post, Yates had written: “These folks don’t understand the beast that’s about to come out of me on this dance floor.”

Birmingham, Ala.

Jaylon Palmore, 13

He told his family he was going to be famous.

Kim Woody-Walker, the mother of Jaylon Palmore, stands next to the overgrown garden she and her son kept together. Since Jaylon was killed by a stray bullet on March 5, Woody-Walker has not been able to bring herself to clear and replant the garden.pper

The quiet 13-year-old stood before his parents in their east Birmingham home and made a bold declaration: “Y’all just watch, I’m gonna be famous.A keepsake card from the funeral of Jaylon, who was killed at his home in east Birmingham by a stray bullet on March 5. Jaylon was an avid gamer and hoped to go pro when he became an adult.

It was the kind of thing kids always say, and Jaylon Palmore had said it before. Like the time he told his mother, Kim Woody-Walker, and her husband, Gregory Walker, that he would be a star football player. “You’re going to have to beef up, son,” they replied, smiling at the lanky teen.

But Jaylon’s real passion was gaming. So when he said it again, and told his parents to remember his gamertag — “You’ll be looking for Jaypop27!”— they were inclined to believe him.

After all, they watched the way he set his mind to something and followed through, like when his grades began to slip and they told him he’d lose the PlayStation if he did not shape up. The report cards that followed made his parents proud.

At least 100 people have been killed since the start of 2022 in Birmingham

Jaylon’s stepdad liked to rib him about all the time he spent in his room, controller in hand, headset on: “Don’t you have a girl you can speak to?” Walker would ask, joking with the son he had helped raise for a decade. But really, his parents did not mind the hobby. He was soft-spoken and introverted, and gaming kept him inside, safe and out of trouble.

“My baby said he was going to be famous,” Woody-Walker said. “But I did not know and I did not want it to be this way.”

On the afternoon of March 5, Jaylon was on the porch with some of his older sister’s friends when two cars drove past the house, and gunmen opened fire. The first bullet hit Jaylon in the back and tore through his internal organs. Another hit an older man in the arm; he would survive, but Jaylon did not. In September, more than six months after the shooting, police arrested a suspect in the case. They believe someone else on the porch that day was the intended target.

Jaylon was killed just weeks before his 14th birthday, just months before the end of eighth grade. At school, his teachers and classmates painted a banner with his name in bright blue script and released a raft of balloons in his honor. The sign at the building’s entrance read “We love you Jaylon.” At graduation, the school held a seat open in his honor, adorned with his photo and a rose.

Woody-Walker is waiting to set up her own space to celebrate Jaylon. The couple decided to sell their house, which was full of reminders of their son.

The family did not take many pictures, but they have a reel of memories: Jaylon stroking his mother’s face and asking, “Momma, why you so soft?”; and the time his dad took him fishing, and Jaylon showed him up, catching bream after bream.

The sound of Jaylon’s music, oldies like Frankie Beverly and Maze and Earth, Wind and Fire. And his eclectic sense of style, an outfit never complete without a colorful pair of sneakers.

On May 27, Woody-Walker visited her son’s grave with a big Happy Birthday sign. She cleaned up around the site, sat down and talked to him. She told him she loved him, she’d never forget him and that she would see him again one day.

“Just rest, baby,” she said. “Just rest.”

Baton Rouge

Leslie Joseph Riley Jr., 66

He said he would die under the tree he loved. He was killed there.

From left, Larry Mack, Mike Walker and Charles Russell hang out at a lot that has been a gathering place for longtime friends in the neighborhood in Baton Rouge. Their friend Leslie Joseph “Jody” Riley Jr. was killed there in the afternoon of July 24th.

His name was Leslie Joseph Riley Jr. But almost everyone knew him as “Jody,” a gregarious man with a teasing smile who could often be found lingering in the shade of the towering oak trees at the corner of Tennessee and East Polk streets in South Baton Rouge.Riley is pictured in a family photo with his grandchildren Jaden Brown, right, Kyson Brown, bottom left, and Kensley Brown of Durham North Carolina.

A small vacant lot, it had for decades been an unofficial park for the locals. There were chairs and a grill, which Riley, a retired chef, often used to cook meals for neighbors who could not afford anything to eat. At 66, he had spent his life in the shadow of those trees, growing from a boy into an old man — recently joking with his family that he’d probably spend his last hours on earth in that very spot.

No one ever imagined that would be true. But on July 24, just after 3 p.m., a crackle of gunfire interrupted a sunny Sunday afternoon. Someone in a passing car had opened fire, spraying a volley of bullets toward the trees. Riley, who is not believed to have been the target, died at the scene. A second man, 20, was also shot but survived.

Gunfire has been the soundtrack of a violent stretch here in a neighborhood known as the Bottom — a nickname tied to its hilly terrain but which to some has also come to define the decline of what used to be the vibrant center of the Black community. Riley had been there through it all here, choosing to stay and raise a family even as businesses shuttered and homes fell into disrepair.

LEFT: A memorial plant was planted near where Riley was killed. RIGHT: Leslie Brown, second from right, and his daughters Jasmin Brown, left, Tonniesha Johnson, and Jada Brown, right, pose for a portrait in Leslie’s neighborhood in Baton Rouge.

Riley dreamed of becoming a chef and got his culinary arts degree. For years, he worked at Louisiana State University, cooking at a fraternity house and then at the student union. But at night, he returned to the Bottom to cook for his family, friends and neighbors.

149 people killed in Baton Rouge in 2021, nearly double the number killed in 2019

“He was always passionate about cooking, and that’s how he gave back to the community that he loved,” said Jasmin Brown, Riley’s granddaughter. “He cooked under that tree, all the time. For people he knew, for total strangers. That’s who he was. A man with a heart of gold.”

Riley was angry to see the neighborhood falling into decline, even as other areas of Baton Rouge were being revitalized. His oldest son, also named Leslie, had recently started a nonprofit aimed at drawing city resources and jobs into the community. Riley had recently played in a charity baseball game to raise money for the group. Now, a photo of him from that game is pasted to one of those towering oaks so central to his life.

In the days after the shooting, the spot sat eerily empty. Police have made no arrests. Nearby a sign waved from one of the trees: “Long live Jody,” it read.

Jackson, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy, 4

She buried her dad. Then the violence came for her.

Treasha Lacy, 55, holds a tribute blanket alongside photos memorializing her deceased son and granddaughter at her home in Carrollton, Miss.

Mariyah Lacy slips in and out of the video frame. The 4-year-old is in a pink tank top and ponytail, blue balloons around her. As the camera shifts toward the ground, Mariyah’s tiny gold sandals fill the screen. She lays flowers on her father’s grave.

The clip is from Father’s Day 2021. Mariyah had told her aunt she wanted to “go see Daddy.”Memorial signs remain outside the home of Treasha Lacy in honor of her deceased son and granddaughter.

A year later, her family would bury Mariyah beside him, both victims of Mississippi’s gun violence epidemic. Mariyah was shot sitting in the back of her mother’s truck on June 12. Her mother’s ex-boyfriend has been charged in the killing.

Jackson had the highest homicide rate per capita in 2021, with 153 killings

The family’s “ball of sunshine,” Mariyah was always telling jokes. She loved to be around people and gave everyone she encountered a hug. She liked to stay up late and watch cartoons; Treasha Lacy, her grandmother, would often make a pallet on the floor for Mariyah and her older sister to spend the night. She loved Ramen noodles and seafood; when her father Cornelius Lacy was alive, he would feed her crab legs.

Treasha wanted to honor her granddaughter’s “princess” spirit at her funeral. Mariyah’s casket was covered in images of mermaids, unicorns and butterflies. The toddler was buried in a blue-and-pink fluffy dress; Treasha knew she would have liked it.

Treasha doesn’t like to think about the moments after Mariyah was shot. Was she in pain? Barely 4 feet tall, Treasha’s afraid she knows the answer. “I try not to think she suffered but I’m pretty sure she did,” she said.

Treasha has suffered too. There are days when she is angry. Days when the house is quiet, and it is all just too much to bear. In those moments, she swears she can hear Mariyah running through the house, pulling on her pants leg, saying, “Nana, Nana, Nana.”

Family photos line every wall in Treasha’s home; Mariyah’s face is in half a dozen. A wall in the living room is dedicated to pictures of Cornelius. After Mariyah’s death, Treasha added three more photos of Mariyah, now hung underneath a portrait of her father.

They had the same eyes. Walking down the hall from her bedroom, Cornelius’s photos would greet Treasha each morning. She used to say “Good morning, Cornelius” aloud. Now she silently says good morning to them both.

“What helps me out so much is I know Mariyah is an angel watching over us,” she said. “She’s an angel, and she’s with her dad in his arms.”

Baltimore

Jesika Tetlow, 18

She always wanted to help.

Susannah Ford gathers with friends and family two months after her daughter Jesika Tetlow’s death.

She stood up for her intellectually disabled older sister, classmates who were bullied and any animal she could find. She convinced her family to rescue five stray kittens during two hurricanes. While walking into a Walmart with her mom near her home outside Baltimore, Jesika Tetlow, then 8, called the police because she saw a dog left by itself in a shopper’s car.

“She had this big huge heart for people and for animals,” said Susannah Tetlow, her mother. “She made people feel special and made them each feel like her best friend.”

In Baltimore, at least 200 people have been killed so far in 2022

In middle school, her friend who was having suicidal thoughts had been in the bathroom for longer than usual, so Tetlow volunteered to go look for her.

She found her friend trying to drown herself in the toilet of the school bathroom. Tetlow called 911 and helped save her friend, but the incident made going into school too painful. So Tetlow was home-schooled instead, her family said.

Ford pets one of the cats that her daughter Jesika Tetlow rescued. She had gathered with friends and family to memorialize Tetlow two months after her death. Ford and her son Josh Tetlow decorate a poster with pictures of Jesika. Tetlow was murdered inside a friend’s home during a home invasion.

But when the pandemic hit, forcing classes online, Tetlow thrived, her mother said. She developed an interest in medicine and decided she would either be a veterinarian or a doctor — or maybe both.

On Aug. 30, Tetlow, now 18, went to her friend’s house to take her online classes — she had continued to take classes online even when in-person learning resumed. That night, five masked people dressed in black raided the house. At least one of them had a gun, and shot Tetlow twice through the head and killed her.

Tetlow’s family found out the next morning. “My brain and my heart just shattered,” Susannah Tetlow said of the moment she found out.Tetlow was killed in a home on this block in Baltimore.

The police investigation is ongoing as the family figures out how to memorialize their daughter. A photo of Tetlow and her sister dressed up for homecoming has taken on a new meaning. Tetlow hated being alone and in the dark, so they all got necklaces with space for her ashes so she will always be with them. The family is also wearing turquoise bracelets that say, “Justice for Jesika,” and is hoping to start a foundation in her name.

Susannah Tetlow has also started attending a Thursday night meeting of grieving families at Roberta’s House in Baltimore. “It’s the kind of camaraderie you would not wish on your worst enemy,” Tetlow said of the group, which includes others who have also lost children.

But still, she has struggled to make sense of what happened.

“This is not normal. This is not normal for a city and a country to have so many shootings every day,” Susannah Tetlow said. “This is a human. This is my child. And now she’s gone.”

Brad Pitt

I actually like Brad Pitt and despite that strange relationship with Angelina I believe he has a good heart and wants to do good, that said at times when celebrities become involved in foundations or non-profits that have no track record or history there is a mass of opportunity for fraud and duplicity and this Make It Right one is just such an example.

Make it Right was a response to the decimated communities in NOLA post Katrina. And with that the foundation was designed to build homes in the vein of Habitat for Humanity, to build sustainable housing for the displaced and to purchase them at below market rates. Right there is a problem, why not align with a well funded and organized one such as Habitat to create the type of housing Brad believed was needed to withstand extensive water damage from Hurricanes and weather related issues. But no instead this was created and not affiliated with any local housing agency or other organization that would be better suited to design and build homes in the region. Celebrity and money always know better I guess.

This article discusses the history of the foundation, its goals and the problems that resulted early on from building, to taxes to upkeep and maintenance; the same issues I have discussed with regards to the quest to build affordable housing. All is well and done but without long term planning and budgeting for those issues built in it all means nothing. Yet this is what the PR stated when the foundation came to be via the Architectural Digest:

The Lower Ninth Ward, a working-class, predominantly African-American neighborhood on the banks of the Mississippi River, was completely submerged by the hurricane. When actor Brad Pitt visited the area two years after the storm, he was alarmed by how little had been done to rebuild. Putting to use his considerable power and wealth, he pulled together 21 of the world’s most famous architects, as well as homeowners and community organizers in the Ward, and launched a project to build houses that were affordable, environmentally friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.

On September 18 2018, Make It Right reportedly filed a lawsuit against John C. Williams, the New Orleans architect they hired to fulfill the plans and blueprints of their star designers. In a statement to People, Make It Right said it “has filed a lawsuit against its former executive architect, John Williams, and his firm for monetary damages to remediate and repair affected homes in the Lower [Ninth] Ward of New Orleans, arising from his engagement with the Foundation.”

They continued, “Make It Right continues to work proactively with homeowners in the Lower [Ninth] Ward, and we will make no further comment on the case at this time.” The Make It Right foundation did not respond to Architectural Digest’s requests for comment.

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For his part, Pitt acknowledged that he and the foundation had no idea how difficult their project would be. “We went into it incredibly naive,” he told the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper in August 2015, on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. “Just thinking we can build homes—how hard is that?—and not understanding forgivable loan structures and family financial counseling and getting the rights to lots and HUD grants and so on and so forth. So it’s been a big learning curve.”

Neal Morris is the principal at Redmellon Restoration and Development, a socially minded development firm in New Orleans, and a veteran of all the complexities Pitt was likely unaware of. While it is indeed complicated, he was able to provide some broad strokes. “As a private developer who develops affordable housing, one has to avail oneself of subsidies in order to make affordable housing work. These subsidies are ultimately tied to a private market, right? You have to have someone willing to purchase that tax credit,” Morris explains.

“Make It Right was in a unique situation, because they had an enormous amount of goodwill from everyone in the country [who] wanted to help New Orleans after the storm,” he continues. “And they had the power of Brad Pitt’s celebrity, with his passion—and by all accounts, he’s a good guy—and with his network of people, with their ability to fundraise. So that project was not constrained by any of the normal things that might constrain, or act as a check, on projects like that.”

In the dazed months and even years after Katrina, when 70 percent of the housing in New Orleans was damaged, there was a deluge of out-of-state developers and contractors as well as plenty of do-gooder types who wanted to help out.

“I would have to say that there was just so much activity that I think it was very, very hard to regulate,” says Oji Alexander, the executive director of Home by Hand, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing in New Orleans. “Because there was this fight between [needing] to move quickly [and] [getting] people back into their homes quickly. But the risk you run there is, some things happen in that context [that] may go unchecked.”

An indication of just how unchecked some processes were: Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans from 2002 to 2010—before,during, and after the hurricane—was indicted in January 2013 on 21 counts of corruption related to kickbacks he received from contractors who came into the city post-Katrina. He was convicted on 20 of the charges in February 2014 and is currently serving 10 years in a federal prison in Texas.

Before Alexander joined Home by Hand, he was a project manager for an effort very similar to Pitt’s. Leonard Riggio, the founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble, was moved by the Katrina devastation and with his wife, Louise, pledged $20 million to build 100 houses through a foundation called Project Home Again. So, when faced with the same complicated community and loan structures, why did their homes, or the ones built by Habitat for Humanity, apparently succeed, when Pitt and Make It Right struggled so spectacularly?

“[The Riggios], they took a different approach […] where they didn’t have necessarily a hard stance on We’re going to have to hit these energy-efficiency measures or We’re going to try to hit these benchmarks. It was Let’s find a builder-friendly house, so we keep the costs down so that our resources, the most possible resources, are actually going to families,” Alexander explains. Structures were simpler, buyers were required to undergo homeownership training, and mortgages would be forgiven after five years via a homeownership swap agreement.

“We did everything we could to make sure that our homeowners would be successful,” he says. “I’ve actually worked with at least one of the architects who worked with Brad Pitt’s project. We’ve worked with some of the builders. I can tell you about the things that I know did work for us, and it was the KISS approach: Keep it simple.”

Another theory for what may have led to the project’s ruin is the excess of ambition. Pitt gathered some of the world’s best architects to create rows of eye-popping, brightly colored designs. “You have designers who were really bright folks from all over the country who were thinking very, very big and maybe in the process lost sight. . . .here are reasons why people build things in a certain way in a certain place,” Morris says. “New Orleans is so special, the way we have to do our buildings. But any place has a local architectural vernacular. Things are done in a certain way with certain materials, because of where they are and what their climate is.”

Architectural Digest reached out to several of the architects who contributed designs and did not receive a response.

Then there are the materials themselves, and the assembly of those materials. “That’s it, construction from start to bottom,” says Austin, the attorney in the residents’ suit. “I think an argument could be made that some of the materials they chose were imprudent [but] efficient materials. So you have bad design on some poor materials.”

In fact, Make It Right has already acknowledged the problems with the materials they chose. While they began construction of their houses in 2008, by 2010 construction crews reportedly noticed that the specialty lumber they had selected for its added silicon and supposed ability to resist rot, TimberSIL, was indeed already mildewing. They sued the manufacturer in 2015 for nearly $500,000, which was the alleged cost of replacing the rotting decks on 39 of the 109 houses they had built by that point. The suit was reportedly settled for an undisclosed amount in 2017.

While the suit was underway at the time of his 2015 interview with the Times-Picayune, Pitt did not appear to reference it in the article. “What we have learned, which was the original premise, is that you do not have to build low-income housing with the cheapest materials that keep families in a poverty trap,” he said instead. “Whether that be running up high utility bills or with toxic materials that run up your doctor bills. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Austin says he suspects that in those years while Make It Right was apparently not responsive to the persistent phone calls from many residents, they could have been potentially prolonging the possibility of getting sued under the New House Warranty Act.

The act covers “a five-year period where basically the builder, the original person who built it, says your home will be free from any major structural damages or major structural defects, and major structural defects that are due to noncompliance with building standards and noncompliance with good building materials,” says Sally Brown Richardson, an associate professor of property law at Tulane University in New Orleans, speculating that the suit would likely pursue a claim of fraud instead.

Indeed, the suit alleges not only breach of contract but also fraud, unfair trade practices, and intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress.

Plus, there’s the issue of the nondisclosure agreements, and the documents that Make It Right staffers allegedly requested residents sign that bounded them to arbitration if they had any issues with the home. Austin plans to argue residents were pressured into signing these documents, rendering them null.

“If you’re sitting there and your house is catching on fire because of electrical issues, you’re like, ‘Sure, I’ll sign whatever!’” Austin says. “It’s not a real bargain. You want your work done.”

While everyone whom Architectural Digest spoke with for this story was quick to emphasize their belief in Make It Right’s good intentions and the quality of Pitt’s character, the alleged distribution of NDAs to residents who were in duress remains a distasteful detail.

Seven weeks after the suit was filed, on October 25, the case was moved to federal court. The request came from three of the defendants, all of whom have served as executives of the foundation, as they argued that the alleged damages would exceed $5 million and thus require federal jurisdiction. On November 20, 2018, Pitt’s lawyers reportedly filed a motion to dismiss claims against Pitt and remove him from the lawsuit, arguing that he can’t be held personally responsible for the buildings’ construction.

The class-action suit has once again shone a spotlight on the Lower Ninth Ward, which has spent the last decade as an attraction for visitors seeking disaster porn. The candy-colored houses from Make It Right stood out among the blight, a tourist site unto themselves. “It’s like, everyone was coming to see them when they first built,” Claiborne says. “Now that they’re falling apart, they’re making the news, everyone’s coming to see the situation.”

________________________________________________________

So you see one rich cat versus another shows that they can have the same idea, the same approach however shows how many efforts to bring change is not as easy as it appears and throwing cash and star power (the Clinton Foundation was another aligning with Pitt’s foundation) means nothing when you don’t have the right people on the ground.

And with this the Make It Right finally came to an end from a beginning that really never was and it has settled with the homeowners for over 20 Million. But the years, the time passed and wasted cannot be measured in dollars and once again NOLA takes a beating of another kind.

Damn, it’s hot.

Today we are having a respite from the relenting heat and humidity but as all things go into fall I am sure that it will be like the seasons that have preceded it, not traditional in any way. Yes folks Global Warming is worse and with the passage of one of the largest bills in which to address this issue, it my friends is not enough. We are in a global crisis that extends well beyond our borders.

As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago with regards to the Newport Jazz Festival and other outdoor concerts I attended at Saratoga Springs and Bridgeport, the evening was marred by the heat and the discomfort it lent to enjoying the music. The closeness of bodies, the movement of them and the lack of either air circulation or some type of coolness makes the body distressed. And with that even last night I was going to Pier 17 to see Franz Ferdinand and decided not. I simply had not enough energy to expend to stand for two to three hours fueled on bottled water, as I pass on liquor although I might have stopped for a cocktail beforehand, I just could not do it. I put the ticket on resale on Ticketmaster for 60 bucks, just a few dollars less than I paid and I knew it would sell. Overall a 20 buck loss was not as it offset the costs of going frankly and with that I felt it was a win, and I missed nothing. I can dance to them anytime I want in the comfort of my own home. Besides the night before I went to see a Cabaret performance by the Designer and commentator, Issac Mizrahi at Below 54. And frankly that would be a hard evening to top, from a gorgeous club, great professional servers, to a great White Burgandy all while listening to a man who has a surprisingly great voice, who is also highly entertaining and backed by stellar musicians, I figured why press my luck.

Instead I watched on Apple TV, Five Days at Memorial. This is about Memorial Hospital during Katrina that had to evacuate and with that made the call to end lives of terminal patients that could not be safely moved. 45 bodies were found and a Doctor and Nurse were tried for murder but not indicted as those were trying days and trying times. I had read the definitive book Katrina: After the Flood by Gary Rivilin and don’t recall this issue but I chose to not revisit that as after going to NOLA for a Christmas or two and talking to the returnees, they have very different recollections and emotions tied to the event; With that I chose to hear this narrative as it came from a ProPublica story and its own book on the subject. And again this is where we are people with regards to Global Warming, a book on every possible scenario with the actual disaster part missing. Watch the story or read the book and it will all become clear. We may have to make decisions in the same way those medical providers had to that week and none of them will be easy.

And with that the New York Times did a cover story on how the weather is affecting varying arts throughout the country. They focused on the outdoor Shakespeare and other Theater Festivals, but Tanglewood is also mentioned as their classical music festival is another larger one that attracts an older more attuned crowd whose idea of roughing it is a long bathroom line at the Metropolitan Opera. But even in Europe they too are seeing the danger of global warming, as Pearl Jam cancelled concerts in France as a result of weather. This is not the time to be swinging a jam frankly outdoors and the reality is that we are not dealing with it the same way Memorial did during those five days. Expect more health crisis from skin cancer to mental health breakdowns. It may explain the rising violence in cities to the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie or just that religion poisons all it touches, like Global Warming it is a danger in and of itself.

And within these last five days can you name a place not affected by bizarre weather fronts, from Death Valley to St Louis, rains have caused immense damages and dangers for the residents and travelers in the region. Heat across the country and Europe also leave a trail of tears akin to floods as the too are feeling the burn and with it a drought that will affect us for years if not decades into the future. Bringing with it more catastrophic fires and damage. And the irony of the rainfall and floods that result from this crisis will not solve it.

As we move into the hysteria over the FBI seizure of Trump documents and what that will do as we move into the elections I urge everyone to get a copy of the New Yorker for this week and read Jane Mayer’s piece on what it means to be a majority ruled by a minority: State Legislatures are Torching Democracy. Again all politics are local and few understand how the national ones became so divisive, well it did not start there it will however end there if we move forward with electing more of these extreme idiots on either side of the aisle. And for the record Ihlan Omar only one by 1,500 votes in Minnesota over her moderate Democratic opponent, Don Samuels. It shows that in November this may be a race to watch. And no I don’t like her for many reasons, being Muslim, being Black or being a Woman are not the reasons (and in that order) I find her annoying. She is the MTG of the left who says outrageous things, does little but shit stir and how is that helping? But we see little when we see only the color of our politics and not how to bond and connect on those issues that do not divide us and the article explains much of this and how it is playing out in Ohio.

We are in a crisis. So when I read this article about a raging idiot, Steven Pinker, my only thought, “Well at least he is optimistic. Bonkers, yes, but an optimistic one.” I will let you read it to form your own conclusions.

Despite climate, war and Covid, is everything actually … getting better?

The psychologist Steven Pinker has long believed we should be more optimistic – and even current crises do not dissuade him

David Robson The UK Guardian Sun 14 Aug 2022

Reading and watching the media over the past year, you might be forgiven for thinking that we are facing the collapse of civilisation. We have a shrinking economy, a fuel crisis that may bring on energy rationing and forced blackouts, extreme weather events, the increased chance of nuclear war, and risk of the growth of a new pandemic riding on the back of the last. The Doomsday Clock – a symbol created by scientists to represent the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe – places us at just 100 seconds before midnight, the closest we’ve been to Armageddon in the project’s 75-year history.

In the face of these threats, it may be hard to maintain a rose-tinted view of the future – unless, that is, you are the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In 2018, his book Enlightenment Now argued that our interpretations of news events make us far too gloomy. There has never been a better time to be alive, he said, thanks to the social, economic, political, technological, and medical advances of the past 300 years.

At the time of its publication, Pinker’s book attracted as much scorn as praise. One common criticism was that he had oversimplified complex subjects and neglected any phenomena that might suggest a lack of progress. Pinker has, however, attempted to address many of the criticisms, and the recent challenges facing the world do not appear to have changed his opinion.

On Radio 4’s Today programme last week, he revisited the arguments of Enlightenment Now to explain why he believes there are still reasons to remain optimistic in 2022. “We have to remember that there’s no law of nature that spaces bad things apart,” he said. “Bad things happen, and they will appear to come in clusters – but it doesn’t mean that we’re being punished for our collective sins or that we’re in a uniquely dangerous moment.” He maintains humanity has the tools to deal with the challenges we face.

There is certainly something comforting about seeing cause for hope in crises. But do we really have good grounds for optimism? To find out, the Observer examines four indices of progress and the ways they have been affected by recent events.

Health in the time of Covid

The Covid-19 pandemic is the obvious place to start. According to the World Health Organization, more than 6.4 million have so far died of the infection, since the virus emerged. In a sample of 37 countries, the British Medical Journal found all but six had experienced a reduction in life expectancy as a result. That’s not to mention the burden of long Covid, which is thought to affect around two million people in the UK alone.

This is certainly a step backwards for global health. But it is worth noting that Pinker has never claimed that we will see continuous progress without any setbacks. His argument is more concerned with the ways we cope with problems and find potential solutions. Did we deal with the threat better than we would have been able to in years gone by?

The jury is still out on the UK government’s initial response to the crisis. But the rapid development of Covid vaccines is undoubtedly a triumph of scientific progress. According to a recent study from Imperial College’s Centre for Global InfectiouDisease Analysis, the vaccination programme saved at least 14 million people – and potentially as many as 19.8 million – in its first year.

This simply wouldn’t have been possible in years gone by; all previous vaccines had taken at least five years to develop, and at the start of the pandemic many scientists believed the possibility of creating a new one from scratch was naively optimistic. That may be some cause of optimism for our ability to deal with future health threats.

Wealth and happiness

One of Enlightenment Now’s core arguments is that people today are far wealthier than people in previous decades – and that this has resulted in higher life satisfaction, through greater comfort, more free time and better education. Pinker dismisses the idea that inequality is a driver of unrest – it is each person’s absolute wealth that matters, he says, which means we do not need to worry too much if much of a country’s gains in GDP go disproportionately to the richest echelons of society.

The evidence for this is not quite as clearcut as Pinker would claim, however. Recent research by veteran economist Richard Easterlin found that China’s and India’s recent economic growth have done very little for the population’s overall happiness. More comprehensively, a study by Małgorzata Mikucka at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium analysed life satisfaction in 46 countries from 1981 to 2012. It found that an increase in GDP only brought about greater happiness if it was accompanied by reduced inequality and increased social capital.

None of this bodes well for our lives over the next few months and years. The Office for National Statistics has just reported that the UK’s GDP has shrunk in the second quarter of 2022, suggesting that we are on the brink of a recession, while the average salary is set to fall behind inflation by 8% this year – the biggest drop in real wages in over 100 years. And according to the International Monetary Fund, the cost of living crisis is likely to widen inequality by hitting the poorest homes hardest.

It’s worth remembering that, by the start of this year, real wages had not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis – suggesting that this is more than a momentary blip in our living standards.

War and peace

One of Pinker’s most controversial claims concerns our propensity to kill each other. He first made the case that human violence is at an all-time low inThe Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, and then revisited the idea seven years later in Enlightenment Now.

Much of Pinker’s argument concerns warfare. Using data concerning the sheer number of conflicts, their length, the proportion of lives lost, and the level of military investment, Pinker notes a downward trend across the centuries. Clearly, there are exceptions – the huge numbers of lives lost in both world wars, for one; you can only reach his conclusion by looking at average numbers across the globe over large time periods.

Pinker argues that various forces – such as the increasing importance of international trade, the rise of democracy, and the actions of institutions such as the UN – have made war much less desirable for most leaders, pushing us into the period known by some historians as the “long peace”.

But many other scholars have questioned these conclusions. One analysis by Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado in Boulder, for example, concluded that the “long peace” may just be a statistical fluke. It is possible for any probabilistic events to cluster in certain periods and to disappear in others. For an analogy, consider how many times you can throw a coin and it lands on tails, despite the probability being 50:50. You might conclude that the coin is biased – but with more throws the overall frequencies will tend to balance out. According to Clauset’s paper, the “long peace” may be similarly ephemeral.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and growing tensions over Taiwan, have of course placed the thought of global war at the front of everyone’s minds. We can hope that diplomacy will prevent disaster, but optimistic historical analyses provide cold comfort when our fate can depend on the erratic decisions of dictators such as Vladimir Putin.

The environment

With the record-breaking heatwaves this year, and the threat of wildfires sweeping across the UK, it feels like we are already witnessing the start of the climate emergency – and unless we take drastic action, it is only set to worsen.

Pinker certainly doesn’t deny climate change, which he acknowledges is a “gargantuan problem”, but he has criticised “eco-pessimism” and the prevalence of what he considers to be alarmist green messaging. In Enlightenment Now, he describes many environmental successes, such as the reduction of water pollution, the elimination of acid rain and a recent deceleration in deforestation. He points to data showing that many countries’ CO₂ emissions are now plateauing. For an escape route from disaster, he points to ideas such as carbon taxing, combined with a reliance on nuclear power and technologies such as carbon capture, which involves scrubbing CO₂ from power stations before it is released and locking it underground.

Needless to say, the “eco-pessimists” are unimpressed. Technologies such as carbon capture do offer some promise, but their efficacy is unproven. And we will also require strong political will, which has been far from obvious in the years since Pinker’s book was published. A UN report from 2021 found most governments were “nowhere close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5C and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement”, though it is possible that a drive to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas could galvanise efforts to switch to renewables.

Pinker’s optimism relies on the fact that we – and our governments – will act rationally, according to the Enlightenment principles of reason, science and humanism. Our combined brainpower may certainly have the capacity to solve the climate crisis, but to believe that our politicians will take action in time – that may require a leap of faith.

Home Again

After spending the holidays in New Orleans I was curious as to what happened with the displaced and those returning after being away over a decade from what was their home.  I found only one person who was hostile about my queries but he was overall a douche to everyone around so I took that as part of the problem when you are an outsider who is not but still feels that way as that is what it is like for anyone who returns to their “home” and wonders who has changed more.

One of the issues I was curious about was the Brad Pitt’s Make it Right homes that were once so acclaimed and recognized as solutions to the housing issues particularly in the 9th Ward the area most devastated by Katrina.   I found this article from The New Republic regarding one residents experience in coming home to his new house and the long range issues facing the area when it comes to the idea of rebuilding.  Funny how that has never been followed up in the same journals that once praised him. 

Well since that the Make It Right Foundation has closed up shop.  The foundation has faced civil lawsuits over the construction and design of the homes that have now been moved to federal courts due to the complex way the foundation was established – in other words the incorporation papers that enable ways to avoid taxes.  Ah its great to be rich.

What has been revealed was that Brad Pitt has and wants nothing to do with the charity affixed to his name.   Brad Pitt’s lawyers claim that even if the plaintiffs’ complaints against the foundation have merit, Pitt shouldn’t be included in the lawsuit. While Pitt founded and fund raised for the charity, he claims his involvement didn’t extend to anything approaching the actual design of the buildings. Notably, Pitt is only asking that he be excused from the lawsuit, not that the case not proceed.

 As Nola noted, this is the first time Pitt has spoken publicly about Make It Right since the 2015 Katrina anniversary. Funny how I read of the dissolution of this charity on all places the New York Post Page Six.

I recall when the foundation began it was a different story.    I recall when Pitt’s charity began I was still active in the Green Build community and many were lauding the construction and design as solid, guess not.  This is from their website:

Founded by Brad Pitt in 2007, Make It Right builds homes, buildings and communities for people in need. All Make It Right projects are Cradle to Cradle inspired – meeting the highest standards of green building.

Through innovative partnerships and community-led design sessions, we are working in neighborhoods across the country and educating others to change the way buildings are designed and built.

 I once again reminded myself of Sean Penn pretending to be the Cajun Army to demonstrate his activism.  It is always nice to plan while in the Four Seasons lobby bar, it is where I do my best planning too!  Funny how looking at that the writer Matt Taibbi and the Rolling Stone have imploded since then as well due to a disaster of their own making.  Remember that El Chapo interview?  Will he be at the trial to testify?  And where was Sean Penn in Houston or in Puerto Rico?   Oh like all good celebrity charities his is undergoing a rebranding. But then again so many disasters so little time. I may agree with the NOLA residents that there is no such thing as bad publicity and any is better than nothing.  I often think it was an attempt to do right at a politically adrift time, as one cannot forget the infamous Kanye remark about George Bush not liking Black people.  Hmm times have certainly changed.  And today when we look to those stepping it up in what seems to be consistently one disaster after another the faces offering assistance are just normal small business owners without the fame or money in which to do so.  I will say the exception is Chef Jose Andreas and his World Kitchen who is just doing right by providing the immediate – food.   And the rest with Altruism tourism to the Real Housewife of New York I am sure there is good intention but as I wonder if cameras were not present would Bethenny Frankel be?

The mainstream media was covering bs Manuel Linn Miranda last week in Puerto Rico when he brought his Broadway musical, Hamilton, to fund raise for the country.  Well $500 tickets to Hamilton is shocking or not given the crime and murder rate  which of course will be ignored by the fans being shuttled under guard to performance which once that run is done they will go home and leave the residents to figure out how to end their own long running drama. 

It is easy to pose and posture and want to do good and the idea should be a part of all our dialogs but the reality is that the community knows its needs and they have the right people and knowledge in which to do so.  It is why I am relieved that at least Microsoft made a monetary effort versus actually building housing in Seattle. But even they are facing a steep climb.   But this is not just about housing it is about being home and finding one’s way there.  Some are not so lucky and I suspect those in New Orleans may have to bear and prepare for the worse, now and in the future.

New Orleans under water: 12 years after Katrina, officials can’t get it right

The city has seen rain almost every day since April – but pumps continue to malfunction as water board administrators offer wrong information

Jim Gabour
The Guardian
Tue 15 Aug 2017

It is true: New Orleans lives and dies by its water. We eat from the Gulf, lake and wetlands and we breathe deeply of a sweltering, airborne humidity. We get our drinking water from the muddy Mississippi river, which carries the effluvia of half the country. Thousands upon thousands of rainy years have amplified the continuing decay in wetlands surrounding the city, creating vast pockets of valuable petroleum and natural gas which generate a major portion of our economy. The same rainfall and river provide continual growth in one of the lushest plant environments in America.

But we occasionally have our homes ruined, and we occasionally drown, in water.

In the last big lesson, involving the loss of 134,000 homes and 1,500 lives in New Orleans, a hurricane overwhelmed the manmade walls meant to keep the water at bay. Since then, hundreds of miles of new and reinforced levees have been built, over the last dozen years, to make sure that a ruinous intrusion does not happen again. The army corps of engineers built three huge new multimillion-dollar pumps on the Lakefront, so that when the engineers close the floodgates to keep the lake waters out, the pumps can be activated to keep excessive water from overwhelming the system.

Now all the city needs to do is be able to remove water that falls from the sky throughout every single year. And in 2017, that rain has fallen almost every day since 1 April.

The water is indeed rising down here. A lesser but integral part of the problem is loss of trees and foliage that absorb water before it goes into the drainage system. The city had an enormous saltwater intrusion during Katrina. Many plants and trees, like magnolias, that were exposed to the long-term saltwater were killed outright.

In 2012, a US Forest Service study of 20 major American cities reported:

The greatest percentage of annual loss in tree cover occurred in New Orleans, Houston and Albuquerque. Researchers expected to find a dramatic loss of trees in New Orleans and said that it is most likely due to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In fact, almost 10% of the city’s trees died in the four years after Katrina.

Even without the trees, we supposedly have manmade protection. But last week, in the wake of the previous two weekends’ floods, the recently retired sewerage and water board executive director (S&WB) Cedric Grant again repeated the oft-cited fact that “the pumps can only drain 1in of rain the first hour that they’re turned on and half an inch every subsequent hour”.

By most reports, the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, where I live, received almost 10in of rain in three hours on Saturday 5 August. Marigny Street itself was completely full and overflowing. Our neighbors moved their cars from the street to park up on higher sidewalks. The water quickly rose over the curbs, and into my own yard and drive. I was pulling my shallow draft Mudbug pirogue out of storage when the water finally stopped rising. My house is on a high lot four blocks from the river, and the main structure is built up on piers, so in the end, the water did not get to the floorboards.

The meteorological bottom line is that even if the entire pumping system had been operating at maximum capacity, as Grant and the S&WB general superintendent, Joseph Becker, had earlier claimed, the rain would still have overwhelmed the system.

However, when pressed by an angry public and a media swarm that sensed something amiss, Becker first admitted eight of the city’s pumps had been out of service before a drop of rain fell on Saturday.

Subsequent investigation found that of 67 pumps on the East Bank of the city, just 58 were “functional in some form”. But the board’s dedicated power system also failed, so that only 38 pumps could be used at one time. Half capacity. And according to the board’s own logs, one crucial pumping station, No 12 on the Lakefront, had not even been manned until four hours after the 3.30pm storm, and not actually turned on until 8.49pm. Which is exactly when residents say they first saw waters starting to recede.

So, we are in the midst of this monster rainstorm season, with hurricanes coming up in the Gulf. What do the ever-alert Nola civil service employees do in this circumstance? Well, of course, they take half the pumps we do have offline for maintenance. Most of these pumps work on antiquated 25-cycle electricity, instead of the prevalent 60-cycle system, and need power produced by the city’s turbine system to function.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who also serves as S&WB president, essentially fired all the top administrative personnel at the board on 8 August.

But his friend Cedric Grant was allowed to resign. For allowing the city to flood twice in two weeks, Grant will receive free health benefits and $175,400 a year in pension for the rest of his life.

And you can bet Mr Grant’s car did not get flooded or stolen.

On 13 August, Landrieu announced that the rainwater removal system was nowhere near up to speed, and that the city was “vulnerable” for the next two weeks, as the height of hurricane season approaches. He also reported that only two of the S&WB’s five electrical turbines, which power the pumps, were operational, and that a total of 26 mobile generators had been moved into place or were being transported into the city to provide additional electricity for the pumping system.

The immediate prospect is grim, even without a hurricane. Forecasts for the next week call for a 40-60% chance of “downpours” every day.

Twelve years after Katrina, things have not changed one iota at the New Orleans sewerage and water board. Still using tap, glue, and spit.

Check to Check

The reality of America is that most people live paycheck to paycheck, regardless of class, education and race.  It is as if America is on fire and we are just hoping the wind turns another direction, the fire fighters make it on time to save us and some of us end up running for our lives.  And the rich are no different, they just have assets to use to sell, to move to or simply stash if that time comes.  They are by far more paranoid as they are by far more over extended in which to prove they are the Joneses.

I am White Trash with money.  I am lucky as I have no ownership, no commitments or obligations in which requires me to ensure that all of those under my  care are provided for.  I am funding my dental reconstruction on credit, then selling Antiques to pay that off and I am just old enough that if I did default it would not harm me in ways that would affect me in a serious way.  Finally a perk of being 60.  But that is not the case for my peers as they struggle with the obligations of declining age, health and resources which they must also provide for family who are not in any better shape.

I do worry and rightfully should about finances but as I see myself as one with no obligations it frees me and how I do choose to live and it allows me to be flexible and I know how lucky and privileged I am.   When I meet most Americans they are not and it is hard to pretend they are not the Jonses nor even close but they do and I see it everywhere I have been this summer and fall.

I began in Pittsburgh and found it proudly working class in a city working forward, then to Louisville where everyone is betting on a winner but you realize there as you cross Kentucky how neglected it has been and that neglect is not being resolved in ways that clearly are fast enough nor even enough to make a difference.  But I found kind people, genuine people and with good humor that even with their faith they had no problem being open to those not like them.   The same with Cleveland and it is funny I cannot say the same for here in Nashville as the process of gentrification has thrown the city off course and they are not handling change well in the least. 

I was in New Orelans for a week.  I normally don’t stay that long anywhere but recovering from being ill and getting ready to enter isolation starting next month I wanted to extend my stay and just explore and again that proved the best way to find New Orleans by accident as you turn down one street and find another that opens doors to a history and culture that always reminds you that this oldest city in America is still alive and well, well that is another story.  The gentrification is odd and the city has never restored its population pre-Katrina and the reality of corruption and race has not been resolved nor even addressed but there are some returnees that are now of an age to realize they have more power and voice then they were led to believe. The Tour Guide who despite having a degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a desire to be a Teacher decided that Charters were not an option so he takes tourists around the city and wants to be voice of change if not a reminder that the people of NOLA are more than refugees or poor souls that need guidance.  The same with my Lyft driver Franklin who was so engaging, intellectually curious that I only wanted it to be the best for him in the New Year.   Funny leaving Nashville on Christmas Eve I met the Unicorn here, the educated, travelled intelligent individual and wait for it – Gay.  He stays here and he and his Brazillian boyfriend remain with the idea that they can be models to teach others about how they are not a threat and are normal but he is here driving Lyft and yet I felt he was the best Christmas gift I could have ever received. And here in Nashville this is a rare gift.

But here I am talking to Lyft drivers to get a sense of place and finally a young couple, transplants for New York (he is originally from NOLA) have moved there as they got an opportunity for better work.  He was highly educated, well traveled and uber sophisticated and she was charming and intelligent they were a well matched pair but their insight and observations about what was transpiring in NOLA enabled me to compare it to what is transpiring here in Nashville and the rise is always followed by a fall and I truly feel it is coming.  It is no Katrina but it is not good.

My discussion with Franklin centered on the rise of interest rates, the tax cuts that failed to raise wages across the board although some companies did share they followed it with layoffs. Can you hear me Verizon?  GM?  The idea that much of the money seems to be out of state and in turn when the payoffs don’t arrive or the interest rates rise further and in turn return on investment is delayed this is 2008 only less residential more commercial which is not a good thing.  There is something in the air and that is not the delightful taste of a quality roux.

Nashville has endless money pouring in and yet salaries are not in line with costs and that is a problem that will not change in this red state.   GE promised major jobs in NOLA that may never pan out and they are finding the same with Harrah’s casino.   The same goes for Amazon, Alliance Bernstein and the rest here in Nashville.  We don’t have the educated trained populace and could not in the time required (two years) in which to do so.  And in turn I have never believed the job numbers nor the salary range so out of proportion to the median that exists, so it is all absurd.  And the new Google office, the Amazon offices, the Apple offices are all being located in areas that are coastal and well established cities with infrastructure that exists and is expanding to meet demand.  Housing costs are off the chain but in reality the costs in Nashville and NOLA are parallel so go figure.  I pay the same rent for less here than I did in Seattle and the couple from New York pay the same living in NOLA.  Less for more I call it.

And let me frank Americans on average are not well educated.  The reality is that with or without college, Americans are highly uniformed and confuse the bullshit on social media as information and fact.  Not.  The young man I met getting coffee one day in NOLA had lived in Seattle briefly and lived in his car for a small period till he got a job and then was a desk clerk at a shitty Day’s Inn. He did make $20/Hr which is 3 times what he makes no.  Then he lived in a cell pod at $800/month and felt the culture shock was too much so he came home.  I know how he feels in reverse.  And he expressed a desire to move to Ventura California.  Really?  The region hit by severe floods and fires and a housing shortage? That Ventura.  He said the Manager there told him there was tons of cheap housing and jobs so he should do it.  Really? Then why is he there then?  The lad said he wanted to change places and I then I showed him an article from the New York Times where it negated that version of events.  He was shocked and while I think it is great to want to move try somewhere less away, try Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Kansas City where the jobs are the same but the place is different.  He was truly dumb.  He did not know their major newspaper was published only three days a week and had never read a newspaper.  Okay then.    He also called himself privileged as he was only displaced during Katrina to a family home in Alabama and their home was not flooded.   Meeting the young men displaced his story is rare.  Franklin did not return until two years ago and the same with the tour guide.  They are America’s refugees and some of them are angry as shit.  The Bartender at Balise was perhaps the one asshole I met in NOLA and he was in the same peer group but he clearly has never recovered and his rage showed.  I will never set foot in that restaurant again he should move to Nashville he would fit right it.  Our flood was only 10 years ago and no one ever talks about it so he should think about it. 

And many Americans as I stood in line at the airport had no idea that TSA and Airport Traffic Control are federal employees and that after January 1st they are working with no paychecks so while the line may be long think about it if they were not here.  People were shocked and admitted they had not thought about it.  Of course many could not manage the line leading a Southwest employee to explain how to expedite it.  I laughed and said out loud, “This is the South” leading the man in front of me to reprimand me and said I should do his job as everyone could hear me.  I said, “Really as you seem to be the only one who turned around and clearly I need to project louder as I have lost my touch as both a Teacher and New Yorker.”  He then said well that explains it and he had never been to New York.  I told him to not bother as we could not offer the same hospitality as Southerners extend and all the women are Bitches like me…. he turned away.  Ah that honor code is something I have found in Southwest lines consistently exhibited by men in the South. Same airport same line last year when a man felt compelled to scream at me for moving ahead of him in the line (I honestly did not see them and thought they were just standing there is that weird Southern way they do here) then he went and got a Southwest employee to remove me.  I just went outside to the curb check checked my bag an waved at him going through TSA pre check as he waited in the longer line.  I have never met any men like Southern men who are such assholes.  So much for hospitality. 

Americans are not making it work tell that to Tim Gunn.  Income is not raising and costs are rising despite the fed’s efforts to offset inflation hence the rise in interest is doing nothing more than rising our interest rates on credit cards and mortgages, which is how the great unwashed live.

Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common: ‘I see no way out.’
The struggle is everywhere.

By Danielle Paquette
The Washington Post
December 29 2018

“Inescapable.”

“It’s a constant stressor.”

“I see no way out.”

What do professors, real estate agents, farmers, business executives, computer programmers and store clerks have in common?

They’re not immune to the harsh reality of living paycheck to paycheck, according to dozens of people who responded to a Washington Post inquiry on Twitter.

They’re millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers. They work in big cities and rural towns. They’ve tried to save — but rent, child care, student loans and medical bills get in the way.

National data on the paycheck-to-paycheck experience is flimsy, but a recent report from the Federal Reserve spotlights the prevalence of extra-tight budgets: Four in 10 adults say they couldn’t produce $400 in an emergency without sliding into debt or selling something, according to the 2017 figures.

The partial government shutdown, which began last Friday and is temporarily halting pay for some 800,000 federal workers, has touched off a heated discussion on Twitter about what it means to get by in the United States. (President Trump warned this closure could “last a very long time” if Congress doesn’t meet his demands for billions of dollars for a border wall.)

Even brief income lapses can spell disaster for some households.

“My husband is a Park Ranger in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and he had to sign his furlough papers,” one woman tweeted. ”We have a 4 yr. old and a 4-month-old, and we don’t know when his next check will come. Mortgage is due, Christmas 2 days away.”

“Broke my lease to accept new fed job for which I have to attend 7 months of training in another state,” another Twitter user said. (He later deleted the tweet). “Training canceled with shutdown. Homeless. Can’t afford short(?)-term housing/have to work full-time for no pay/returning Christmas presents.”

These and other #ShutdownStories took off online after U.S. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) suggested last week that a gap in wages wouldn’t be so bad.

“Who’s living that they’re not going to make it to the next paycheck?” he asked reporters, adding that most of those impacted would qualify for back pay.

According to economists: A lot of people.

“It’s astronomical what people need just to make it month to month,” said Heidi Shierholz, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor who now studies how middle-class families spend their wages at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that is funded by foundations and unions. “Given the high cost of transportation, housing, health care … There is often no wiggle room.”

About 2,000 custodians, security guards, housekeepers and other federal building workers are losing money this holiday season because of the shutdown, according to 32BJ SEIU, an East Coast labor union — and because such staffers are employed by contractors, they won’t be eligible for makeup checks.

“My supervisor told me we won’t be getting paid,” one State Department cleaner told The Post last week, “so my bills won’t be getting paid.”

Beyond the federal labor sphere, workers across a variety of professions struggle to make ends meet.

Sol Smith, chair of liberal arts at a Southern California college, said he landed his job after earning three degrees. But with four daughters and mounting health care costs, he said, saving just isn’t possible.

“I see no way out,” he wrote in an email to The Post. “I am 40, have built a strong career, have 17 years experience, and if something were to happen to me, my wife and kids would be homeless within a year when my life insurance ran out.”

Lani Harrison, 43, said she and her software engineer husband have trouble buying groceries after paying the $2,249 rent on their two-bedroom Los Angeles apartment. They’re raising three young kids and rely on her husband’s income, she said. Her work as a certified car seat installer earns her $40 per appointment, but the work isn’t steady.

“Each month, we have to stretch his paycheck to make things work,” she said. “We really don’t have any savings. Many months we go under.”

Sometimes, she confides in trusted friends.

“I’m often surprised that their stories are so similar to ours,” she said.

Dillon Holt, a housekeeping assistant at a Nashville hotel, said he’s down to one piece of chicken in his freezer. His checking account often hovers around zero, and he is unable to put away any money for the future or an emergency.

“I make $12.50, work 40-50 hours a week,” he said. “I still don’t have a savings account.”

Emily Webb, 38, said she works full time as an arts administrator in Columbus, Ohio, and waits tables on the side. Staying afloat each month, she said, is a precarious dance.

“It’s a scramble at the end of a paycheck to deposit my tips and make sure none of my automatic payments bounce,” said Webb, who has master’s degree but cannot make her student loan payments.

She’s grateful to work in her field, though, and loves her job. One big financial boost, she said, awaits her at the end of 2019.

“I can finally pay off my 9-year-old car,” Webb said. “The plastic part of the back bumper was slowly sliding off the back of it. I got rear-ended by an uninsured driver 2 years ago, so I reattached it with zip ties.”

The Year Anew

I intentionally took some time away from the Blog to enjoy a trip to New Orleans for Christmas and experience the city for the first time as both a tourist and a local.

Christmas Eve was my trip to the Papa Noel bonfires and to say revelatory would be insufficient. If you are unfamiliar with the tradition I urge you to go and see this or glance at this via my favorite Southern Magazine, Garden & Gun in their note about Bonfire on the Levees.

I had the fortunate good luck to stay at the Seattle original, Ace Hotel, in the Arts District and arrived to 60 degree plus weather that enabled me to sit at the pool and enjoy a summer themed drink and later a glass of wine on my own deck from a glorious room that included a full refrigerator where I stashed treats from the local Rousse Market.

Christmas Day continued my tradition of pancakes only again on my deck and the air was redolent of the spices and flavors of the bayou that was yet to fully reveal itself to me over the course of the next few days. 

I then discovered the displays of Christmas lights at varying hotels, concluding at the Roosevelt Hotel the most infamous of all and a required Sazerac at their Sazerac bar.  This was followed by my Christmas night trip to the Celebration of Oaks, via a cable car ride up canal to the furthest and last stop to the Botanical Gardens annual light display. To say it was amazing, beautiful and delightful are only some of the adjectives that could describe the fest of lights that decorated the acre and half of the park grounds.    The little train that could ended at the marshmallow roasting pit with full on fake snow.    I cannot say how much in that moment I felt that same way awakening on Christmas day to find a tree resplendent with Santa’s bounties.

The next day a cooking class a the New Orleans School of Cooking with the most delightful Chef to teach me the creole of flavoring that lends to the food culture of this mutt of a city. A city that is approaching 300 years and not looking a day over 150. I never appreciated the city more as a I wandered among a place that was ripe with history and fluid with endless  and ongoing change. Gentrification via Katrina is still happening and in turn the issues that it brings with it very much evident in NOLA.  At this time there is a current city wide art exhibit b4 that extended among the Ogden Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts and the galleries with themes that reflected the culture of the bayou and  the affect on those from the south in both modern and historical concepts.  They were amazing and worth the walk. 

Walking among legendary streets (including Bourbon, wisely done on Christmas Day where even this largely Catholic city closes) and finding my way to the only and not ironically, Madame Lavande shop to wish for positive energy in the town where voodoo and magic is notoriously acclaimed, I found it amusing that just the day before I left BBC radio discussed the history of “Black” magic and Witches in the appropriate historical concept.   The truth behind this was that while yes it was largely introduced into the culture by women who were in turn enslaved it was a religion of positivity and one of womanhood, hence the name Goddess.  It was a reflection of the leaders of the faith that were women and in turn also black and that is why it was also labeled the “dark” arts and often associated with danger, negativity and had to be stopped as it threatened the dominant faith of patriarchy.

Ah yes that dominant trait of masculinity and place of power and authority.  Even I could not escape that while on my walking and wandering tour of the Crescent City.

I read the papers daily and for one brief moment enabled myself to disconnect from the endless drumbeat of crazy that comes daily from the White House and the papers reminding me of another man who seemed destined for expulsion and later absolution.  As where are these men actually going? Wyoming? And then what? As Schwartznegger warned us more than once – “I’ll be back” And that was not just a promise but a threat.

So to come home to spend the New Years at home was one planned and expected – alone and in thought.  I in turn found that Dave Chappelle had dropped his last two specials on Netflix so I planned to at least laugh if not cry while I reflected on this past year and in turn cast my spell for positivity for the year to come.  It was two shows that reflected upon the current state of events in a way that showed he was not only out of touch but out of depth with regards to the state of anger and rage that Americans are throwing about with Tiki Torches, Hashtags and endless investigations, resignations and threats.   I am exhausted when one who seemed to have his pulse on the social mores of his time is still stuck in that time and I laughed at some of his observations but his humor leaves on less amused and more dismayed that Chappelle just doesn’t get it.  But his warning that the worst is yet to come was not lost on me.

I am afraid that the backlash has begun.  We have now confirmation that the man in the Big House is crazy and in turn that button may be bigger but is it better?   But let’s face it we all are going to read this new book, Fire and Fury, and actually laugh as who cares what is true or not?  We all have alternative truths when it comes to the current state of America.   (GOP victims or enablers?)

But in reality when it comes to gender and equality I don’t expect any change in the new year or those to follow.  We are not Iceland despite the weather.

I read this editorial in the New York Times yesterday and it was too another warning that the sea tide that broke #MeToo is going back out to see and given global warming we all know how the sea always wins.   The author reiterates much of what Chappelle said in his monologue, that this is largely the fault of the individual.  Note I did not use the word “victim” as in turn that implies a sense of weakness and in turn a place of lesser awareness.  I never use the word victim when I speak of my own horror stories, I use the word exploited.  I was exploited for being a woman, for allowing myself to say yes to the drink and in turn complicit in my own exploitation and assaults by consenting to being in their company.  I am not a victim, I am an idiot and in turn fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.  I learned the hard way and no man will ever touch me again. 

I have very strong opinions about the word victim.  That raging fire in the Bronx apartment that killed 9 people was horrific.  The victims were those who did nothing to lead nor contribute to that.  The Mother of the the three year old who was playing with the oven was complicit and in turn the reason the fire swept out of control. From her decision to leave the child unattended and with access to the oven knowing full well he had problems with fire, and in turn leaving the door open as she raced out to protect her family at the expense of others.  They are victims.  Victims are those who do not know or have any prior familiarity or exposure to the predator who takes their lives, rights and homes from them.  We are not victims when we willingly or knowingly invite, attend or elect those whose intent is to do harm.  We are either complicit, lucky or arrogant to think that it “won’t happen to me.”  Whoops!

Tonight is the Golden Globes my favorite award show and hosted by my favorite talk show host, Seth Myers.  The whole we are wearing black and in turn calling attention to the issue of harassment and inequality is all well and good insulated from the reality of what takes place on the less stellar streets be those of Main or Wall, throughout America.  Sorry but I will not be wearing black nor giving one flying fuck.  Part of me agrees with Chappelle about why are you going to  a meeting in a hotel room or staying on the phone while one is masturbating on the other end.  To be so frail that it affected your ability to work in the profession you have ambition, dedication and training in.  As the article in the Times noted:

Perhaps even more troubling is that we seem to be returning to a victimology paradigm for young women, in particular, in which they are perceived to be — and perceive themselves to be — as frail as Victorian housewives.

But I also know that I am a strong woman but I became that way because of abuse.  I saw it in my home at the hand of my Father,  I saw it in the homes of others, the movies I loved as a child and the history books I absorbed as a child/youth and woman.  When Chappelle launched into a diatribe about how these complainers have nothing to complain about as they go back into the worlds of fame and wealth but his ancestors were beaten, abused, raped and taken from families and sold into servitude, I went:  “Bitch, please we women have been doing that for years!” 

Women are pushed/encouraged/arranged into marriage; we take a man’s name, we are verbally or physically abused by our own children, husbands, families and other women for failures we can not anticipate.  In some places we cannot drive, leave our homes, wear clothes we want to wear.  We are killed, we are raped by men we know and men we think we don’t know.  We are told to lean in, be strong, be smart be fair and we do our best to fuck or be fucked or fuck over in the same way men do it to us.  I see that too in the culture of the churches that encourage the same and yes the largest participants in that are black families.  So bitch, take a knee.

We are only as good as those who lead us.  I see a large failure on that everywhere. 

Summer of Hell

And yes that could apply to the Trump Dynasty but it also comes after our Il Douchebag-in-Chief to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord.  For those of the Evangelical set who love to say God is punishing those who withdraw from the “right” thing (vague and usually about something that is an intrinsic fault of the individual and nothing extrinsic what.so.ever) I find that a coincidence.  Gee God doesn’t want us to protect and preserve our planet?

We are at a dangerous road here not just in America but across the planet and we have a leader intent on suppressing information and denying facts. Oh yeah, I forgot fake news, fake science, alternative facts. 

In my old hometown of Seattle they have been fighting smoke from Canada.  If they are not trying to cross the border those Canadians they trying to kill us via air toxicity from the burning woods just across the Washington State border.  And in turn excessive heat that has run along the Pacific Northwest and including excessive heat in the Southwest causing air delays and health warnings as a result.  In turn this means massive use of air conditioning which affects the body’s ability to handle heat  and in turn affects the environment which occurs from the use of electricity and the waste that results from the units. 

Then we have the Tornadoes in the Midwest with massive damage and in turn floods that follow such high winds.   And that goes for the flash floods in Texas and in New Orleans  that has not seen this much water damage since Katrina.  And yes and it can happen anywhere and we mean you New York New York.

Then lastly the sinkholes of Florida.  Well it will be the first State to likely be the most affected by Global Warming and in turn that means bye bye Mar-a-Lago.  

The last few weeks here in Nashville we had heat warnings and are now cooling down to below normal temps and rain warnings almost daily.  And I am not complaining as the heat index had us over 100 for almost 13 days and I recall my first Summer here last year and this one I can handle. 

Funny coming from a place of rain as normal to a place where rain is abnormal is an oddity that I suspect has more to do with the lack of infrastructure and the composition of terrain and how they never thought of waste water as two kinds as that would be thinking and stuff!! And this is the place that gave America a revolution with regards to water and power in the Tennessee Valley Authority.  Well different times, different President and all that.

Welcome to the Summer of Hell. The Devil is doing this clearly as God doesn’t punish Americans for electing Donald Trump.

It’s Not Your Imagination.
Summers Are Getting Hotter.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By NADJA POPOVICH and ADAM PEARCE
JULY 28, 2017

Extraordinarily hot summers — the kind that were virtually unheard-of in the 1950s — have become commonplace.

This year’s scorching summer events, like heat waves rolling through southern Europe and temperatures nearing 130 degrees Fahrenheit in Pakistan, are part of this broader trend.

The chart above, based on data from James Hansen, a retired NASA climate scientist and professor at Columbia University, shows how summer temperatures have shifted toward more extreme heat over the past several decades.

To create the bell curves, Dr. Hansen and two colleagues compared actual summer temperatures for each decade since the 1980s to a fixed baseline average. During the base period, 1951 to 1980, about a third of local summer temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere were in what they called a “near average” or normal range. A third were considered cold; a third were hot.

Since then, summer temperatures have shifted drastically, the researchers found. Between 2005 and 2015, two-thirds of values were in the hot category, and nearly 15 percent were in a new category: extremely hot.

Practically, that means most summers are now either hot or extremely hot compared with the mid-20th century.

The big increase in summer temperatures under the dark red category of extreme heat is “right in line” with what scientists expect to see as the climate warms over all, said Todd Sanford, director of research at Climate Central, a nonprofit science and news organization.

For each time period above, the distribution of summer temperatures forms what is known as a bell curve because most measurements fall near the average, forming the bump – or bell – in the middle. More extreme temperatures, which happen less frequently, fall in the wings, with heat waves on the right and cold-snaps on the left.

As the curve’s average – the top of the peak – shifts rightward over time, more temperatures in more places end up in the hot and extremely hot categories and fewer end up in the cold category.

Dr. Hansen’s curves also flatten out, which some have suggested is an indication of greater temperature variability. But other climate scientists, including Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the University of California, Berkeley, have pointed out that this effect is mainly a reflection that some parts of the world are warming faster than others. There is no evidence that temperatures are becoming more variable in most parts of the world after warming has been accounted for.

Dr. Hansen’s data “really highlight that changes in the average, while they may seem modest, have big implications for the extremes. And that’s what’s going to affect society and ecosystems,” Dr. Sanford said. The findings reveal what has happened so far, and also provide “a glimpse to what’s in our future.”

Get A Lawyer

It does not surprise me in the capital of medical tourism for America we have more ambulance chasing Attorney’s than possibly Doctors which is ironic as Tennessee is the prototype for the current legislation in Congress with regards to Medical Malpractice. You pretty much have to be dead in order to file and then what is the point. However, the drivers here are so appalling and seem to have two speeds – full on gas or full on brake – there are more than enough accidents on any given day to file and negotiate settlements with auto insurers. I rent cars here every weekend and take out two policies just to cover my ass, literally.

So while we seem to have many Lawyers, most are personal injury ones and that means that basic civil protections fall to another class of Attorney and they too fall into two categories – litigators and negotiators. The big money falls into the former over the latter and you better have a great case in which to draw their interest and that interest is the kind the banks used to give over money. Their bottom line is not about your ass or covering it in anyway should you be in need of legal support.

Last night 60 Minutes covered the increasing and serious matter of Legal Defense in New Orleans. They are one city (of many) where their public defense Attorney’s are so overwhelmed that the Director of that department is declining to take on more accounts until they can clear their desks of the hundreds they have. The idea of getting defended in the same manner and attention that a private Attorney can when you are charged with a crime is near to next to impossible when you work with a public defender. The many current and past PD’s admitted they did not give any clients near the attention they should and were sure that they had clients convicted of crimes they did not commit. By the way that admission was quite courageous as it put all of them in violation of their legal oath and obligation. But I doubt their clients could sue. Why there are a shortage of those civil attorney’s as well.

What Will Happen to Americans Who Can’t Afford an Attorney?

President Trump’s budget would eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, which helps low-income individuals obtain representation in civil proceedings.

On the campaign trail, President Trump pledged “to bring hope to every forgotten stretch of this country.” But his new budget has critics questioning whether that pledge can be reconciled with his plan to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation, a move whose impact would be severe for low-income Americans living in impoverished rural and urban communities.

Established by Congress in 1974 as a public nonprofit corporation, it funds more than a hundred civil legal-aid programs throughout the country. In most states, those funds account for between one-third and one-half of the organization’s budget; in some poorer states, like Alabama, LSC provides about 80 percent of the funding.

“If you look at the states that have the lowest ranking when it comes to access to help from a civil legal-aid program, nine out of 10 of them supported Trump,” said Martha Bergmark, a former LSC president. “It’s very hard to square the president’s promise to help ‘the forgotten America’ by eliminating this program. It just doesn’t add up.”

In many ways, legal-aid organizations fill the same role in civil proceedings that public defenders perform in the criminal-justice system: providing legal representation for those unable to afford it themselves. The Sixth Amendment requires the existence of public-defender systems, which often have their own budgetary woes, but civil legal-aid programs have no such constitutional mandate. Instead, they rely on support from both parties and funding from federal and state governments, private foundations, and other nonprofit groups to exist.

“Most Americans don’t really have an idea of what civil legal aid is, but the Legal Services Corporation is absolutely the backbone of our nation’s commitment to justice for all,” Bergmark said. “It’s just a devastating prospect to think that after such a long history of bipartisan support and commitment, that we would be at this stage.”

The services those organizations provide can be life-changing. Legal-aid lawyers in multiple states told me their offices help low-income Americans fight foreclosures and avoid evictions, protect domestic-violence survivors by filing restraining orders and navigating the family-court system, work with veterans and families to obtain public benefits, represent victims of consumer scams, and provide a variety of other services. Their assistance can range from educational programs to direct legal representation in state, federal, and tribal courts.

The LSC’s most recent annual budget amounted to $375 million, a decline from its $420 million peak during Obama’s first term. Bergmark described it as no more than a “rounding error” in the sprawling federal budget. And legal-aid lawyers in rural and low-income areas were skeptical that the cuts would produce real savings, overall; they described civil legal aid as a cost-saving measure for communities in the long run.

“When we’re able to help in a domestic-violence situation and get someone safe and protected, that reduces costs to the police officers in the future, to the court system, to hospitals for medical care,” said Gary Housepian, the executive director of Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. “When we’re able to stop a foreclosure, that keeps the property values up in that community. When we’re able to keep someone in housing and keep individuals and families from being homeless, that saves expenses to that community too.”

Housepian’s organization covers 48 counties in central Tennessee, including the city of Nashville. But a large share of its work is done in deeply impoverished rural communities, where poverty rates in some counties can reach as high as 25 percent. About 450,000 people in the region are eligible for his organization’s services, Housepian told me, while he only has 32 lawyers on staff to help them.

Legal-aid lawyers who work for federally funded organizations avoided speaking directly with me about the Trump administration’s budget proposal, citing federal rules that bar their organizations from lobbying either for or against legislation. Instead, they described the services they currently provide, the challenges they face, and their role in the community.

Trump’s proposal isn’t the first time the Legal Services Corporation has faced an existential threat. Ronald Reagan, an avowed opponent of legal-aid services, saw his bid to abolish the program in 1981 thwarted by a bipartisan coalition of Democratic and Republican legislators. He eventually relented in exchange for new restrictions on what kinds of services it could provide, including bars on class-action lawsuits and providing help to undocumented immigrants. Another attempt to gut its funding in the mid-1990s by then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich after Republicans retook both houses of Congress failed, but the program’s funding has remained roughly flat since then.

Anna-Marie Johnson, the executive director of Nevada Legal Services, said her organization receives about 52 percent of its budget from federal funding. The state’s size and geography pose their own challenges. Most Nevadans reside in the two urban centers of Reno and Las Vegas, where a few other organizations can pick up some—but not all—of the slack. But those living in Nevada’s vast rural interior often rely exclusively on NLS for legal aid.

“It may be different in other states, but the largest portion of the population out in the rural areas of Nevada are seniors,” Johnson said. Older Americans often face a broader range of legal issues than their younger counterparts, and Nevadans are no exception. “There are a lot of housing issues, and there’s a lot of need for end-of-life planning like estate planning, wills, guardianships, and other things like that,” she added.

Other services NLS provides include helping domestic-violence survivors—Nevada ranks among the worst states for abuse—and fighting evictions and foreclosures in a state still recovering from the housing crisis. The organization also runs an Indian law project to serve the 23 tribal reservations throughout the state. Overall, Johnson said, NLS directly represents about 8,000 low-income Nevadans a year; another 80,000 attend clinics and classes that educate them about steps they can take on their own.

Nevada isn’t the only state where rural communities would face a vacuum of legal-aid services without federally funded organizations. Tom Weeks, the executive director of the Ohio State Legal Services Association, which covers central and southeastern Ohio, noted that there was a sharp divide between the programs available in Columbus and those in the rural counties bordering Appalachia.

“In the cities, you’re more likely to have some other organizations, for example, that are doing domestic-violence protection work,” Weeks told me, “In southeastern Ohio, we’re basically pretty much the only lawyers who are representing poor people in domestic-violence and other family cases.”

Another problem Weeks described in his region was a “flood” of Ohioans in recent years who attempted to represent themselves in court, which his office was trying to reduce. “Not only is that bad for them, it’s also really hard on the courts. It just slows things down and really makes it much more difficult for our justice system to do its job,” he said.

Budget cuts affect the width and breadth of the services legal-aid organizations can provide, multiple legal-aid lawyers said. A smaller corps of lawyers, for example, means the staff must both spend less time with each client and help fewer potential clients overall. Accordingly, the loss of federal funding could mean the difference between representing a client in court and giving them advice before they represent themselves.

To close those gaps, legal-aid organizations often supplement their ranks by working alongside private law firms looking for pro bono work. And the threat of disrupting those efforts has already drawn criticism from private lawyers around the country: Partners from more than 150 major law firms signed a letter earlier this month urging Michael Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, not to defund the LSC.

“Eliminating the Legal Services Corporation will not only imperil the ability of civil legal aid organizations to serve Americans in need, it will also vastly diminish the private bar’s capacity to help these individuals,” the letter read. “The pro bono activity facilitated by LSC funding is exactly the kind of public-private partnership the government should encourage, not eliminate.”

In addition to his lawyers on staff, Housepian said he coordinates more than 800 private lawyers to provide services for those 48 counties in central Tennessee. He added that he’d toured every single one of the counties under his purview in February, and told me at length about meeting with judges, lawyers, and low-income Tennesseans about legal aid’s place in the “fabric and tapestry” of their towns.

“We’re confident that people know the value of our services,” he told me. “And certainly the hardest part when traveling around was, you want do more in these communities.”

The Public in Education

I wrote in the post Hedge Your Bets about why the push to privatize Education has been an ongoing issue and that the fake guise of ed reform is little to do with Teacher’s Unions or tenure it is about money.

Then I read today that Mark Zuckerberg in his push to continue to join the big boys in ed reform after his first disaster in Newark has hired a former deputy of Education to lead his “think tank.” Another technocrat with undoubtedly the same agenda as all the others only even a bigger check to bounce off those whom he just left behind in the Government offices. 

And after I wrote that post I found the article below with regards to returning school control to New Orleans after a long slog as a charter incubator and varying horror stories that came out of it; along with some positives that led to schools unionizing and in turn creating home grown schools with home grown control so it is only a natural attrition to finally allow the community a chance to be involved and engaged, although I suspect as that article from the Prospect mentioned, boards will have undoubtedly a push for their own to be the loudest voice in the room.  I don’t think this means anytime soon school in NOLA will be public as they once were but one never knows when you mess with a Teacher who you are messing with.

New Orleans Plan: Charter Schools, With a Return to Local Control

By KATE ZERNIKE 

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

MAY 9, 2016

An 11th grade English class at KIPP Renaissance Charter High School in New Orleans. In the city’s school district, 93 percent of students are in charter schools, the highest percentage in the country. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS — Nothing has defined and even driven the fractious national debate over education quite like this city and the transformation of its school system in the decade since Hurricane Katrina.

Reformers say its successes as an almost all-charter, state-controlled district make it a model for other failing urban school systems. Charter school opponents and unions point to what has happened here as proof that the reformers’ goal is just to privatize education and strip families of their voice in local schools across the country.

Now comes another big moment in the New Orleans story: In the next few weeks, the governor is expected to sign legislation returning the city’s schools to the locally elected school board for the first time since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Strikingly, that return is being driven by someone squarely in the pro-charter camp, the state superintendent, John White. A veteran of touchstone organizations behind the efforts to remake public schools — Teach for America and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and its superintendent training program — as well as the hard-charging charter school efforts in New York City, Mr. White represents the wave of largely white, young idealists who rushed to this city post-Katrina to be part of the Big Thing in education.

To Mr. White, the move to local control is not the retreat it may seem. He argues that it will make New Orleans a new model, radically redefining the role of central school boards just as many urban school districts are shifting increasingly large portions of their students to independently run but publicly funded charter schools.

“The mission was to recover the schools, not to maintain a group of white bureaucrats not from New Orleans,” said Mr. White, 41, an alumnus of the elite St. Albans School in Washington and the University of Virginia. “The mission has to be completed, and you can’t call it completed when the central offices aren’t serving all the schools.”

John White, the Louisiana state superintendent, described the New Orleans school system when he arrived in 2011 as one of “autonomy, choice and chaos.” Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times

“At some point, you’re going to need to rely on the will of the people locally,” he added.

This new model essentially splits the difference: The schools will keep the flexibility and autonomy, particularly over hiring and teaching, that have made charters most unlike traditional public schools. But the board becomes manager and regulator, making sure schools abide by policies meant to ensure equity and provide broad services, like managing the cost of particularly expensive special education students, that individual schools might not have the capacity or desire to do.

Cities from Boston to Los Angeles are locked in fierce fights over charter schools, which critics say siphon off money and the most engaged families from local districts, creaming the best students and steering away the most challenging — not always with better results. Families in districts with majorities of poor black and Latino children are increasingly pushing back against educator recruitment groups like Teach for America, scorning their efforts as education tourism for privileged Ivy Leaguers.

People here say the national debate does not fit some of the nuances of the divide in New Orleans. For one thing, the local board itself runs its own share of charter schools. But what has resonated broadly here is the sense that changes to the schools were done to the city’s residents, not with them.

This is a place where “Where did you go to school?” refers to high school, so the move to erase neighborhood schools and replace them with charters after Katrina angered powerful alumni groups. About 7,500 teachers were fired — most of them black — damaging the city’s black middle class, economically and politically.

“This wasn’t just a loss of control over education, this was loss on a massive scale,” said Erika McConduit-Diggs, the president of the Urban League of Greater New Orleans. “This very much feels like ‘finally.’ It will take things like this to heal those wounds.”

But the healing is far from complete.

Nearly every school building in New Orleans has been rebuilt or refurbished, and students have made impressive academic gains. Yet they were starting from the bottom; New Orleans was the second-worst school district in the nation’s second lowest-ranked state. The schools have a long way to go before anyone considers them good, or even good enough.

Photo

Cornish Hicks and Reginae Preston worked on an assignment in a seventh grade science class at Andrew Wilson K-8 Charter School in New Orleans. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times

Some worry that with return to local control, and without the state’s prodding, the schools will lose momentum and urgency. They hear “return” and recall a school board that was notoriously corrupt and dysfunctional before the storm, its televised meetings were bring-your-popcorn events. “Like watching Jerry Springer,” said Joey LaRoche, the principal of the KIPP charter high school here, who graduated from the city’s schools before Katrina.

“If this is not done well, we will go backwards as a city,” said Leslie Jacobs, a local insurance executive and philanthropist who led the creation of the state district that took over the schools as a member of the state board of education. “We cannot go backwards,” she said.

On the other side, the legislation has done nothing to placate those who associate state control with charter schools — and want the charters gone as well.

“Don’t Be Fooled by a Trojan Horse,” The New Orleans Tribune, a black newsmagazine, editorialized, calling the legislation passed by the Louisiana House on Thursday “just a ploy to maintain the status quo.”

“It is written to serve the needs and desires of the charter school movement and the predators and profiteers that have unapologetically gained from this experiment,” The Tribune said, “not the people, parents, students, voters and taxpayers of school systems that have been decimated by a so-called reform movement that has done far more harm than good.”

Mr. White acknowledges that the bill will largely preserve the status quo.

In detailed language, it forbids the local board to interfere with charter schools’ autonomy on decisions like whom to hire, what to teach, how to spend their money and how long to make the school day. Pre-Katrina, those decisions rested, as they do in most school districts, with the elected board, which hires the superintendents who hire the principals.

But the bill also gives the school board far more powers over the charter schools than boards in other cities have. The board will be the regulator requiring that all schools participate in universal systems for enrolling and expelling students. It will decide where new schools get to open or expand, and have the power to shut down failing or undersubscribed schools.

Louisiana created the state-run Recovery School District to take over failing schools shortly before Katrina. But only after the catastrophic levee breaches — which made schools unusable even if most students had not fled the city — did it move to take over most of the schools.

By the time Mr. White arrived, in 2011, half the city’s public school students were in charter schools. It was a system, as he describes it now, of “autonomy, choice and chaos.”

Schools had different enrollment procedures and policies on expulsion. The parish school board itself was running about a dozen charter schools, along with a half dozen traditional schools, mostly the schools that had been higher performing before the storm. Those schools served lower rates of poor and special education students, leading to complaints from state-run schools that the parish schools were pushing out students who were harder to educate.

Mr. White turned more schools over to charter school operators. And now 93 percent of the city’s 48,000 public school students are in charter schools, the highest percentage in the country.

But he also moved to establish the unified enrollment system across all schools, local or state run, and a central expulsion procedure, so that schools would have to follow the same rules on the students they took and those they let go.

Another new policy required all schools to provide transportation, so that they could not weed out poorer students by making it impossible for those without cars to attend. The city’s charter school boards mobilized politically to force the parish school board to agree to a citywide system of funding so that all schools receive and spend the same amount of money for various categories of students, like English learners and special education students.

With these changes, a return to local control seemed possible. “We’re talking to each other, which we didn’t do before,” said Alexina Medley, the principal at Warren Easton, an Orleans parish charter high school. “We’re one city, we should be one school system.”

With the 10th anniversary of the hurricane last fall, the missionary zeal of young reformers coming to the city has waned, and philanthropies have some “reform fatigue,” said Rhonda Kalifey-Aluise, a New Orleans native who is the executive director of the KIPP New Orleans Schools, one of the biggest charter school operators in the city.

“The decade mark was crystallizing,” Ms. Kalifey-Aluise said. “It was like, ‘Yikes, this wave is coming to an end.’” The election of a Democratic governor with strong teachers’ union support last year raised the pressure for return. “We thought, let’s get on top of this and make it work the way we want,” she said.

It is hard to understate the presence of the state in the city’s schools. As Mr. White scooted out of his state-owned Prius to return a football that had been tossed from a schoolyard last week, an elementary school student recognized him, seizing the chance to suggest that dictionaries be allowed during state tests. (“I think I did O.K.,” the student said.)

Doubters worry that the timeline is too fast to create the same kind of robust power in the central office, where staff has been depleted since Katrina. School board elections are this fall, and the legislation calls for schools to be returned within two years.

An even bigger question is whether the elected board will have the nerve to close failing schools and resist the city’s tradition of crony politics and malfeasance.

Even those who have in the past resisted a return to local control say they now believe the changes here cannot be sustained without greater involvement from people who actually live here.

“It would be a shame,” said Ben Kleban, the founder of New Orleans College Prep, a charter network, “if our message to the rest of the country was that the only way to reform a school system is to seize control from local people.”

Run for your life

I laugh at the idea of the Justice Department and their consent degrees as they are utterly useless. In Seattle we have done some to none of the orders; there is now Newark also under the gun (pun intended);  Ferguson initially refused to comply due to costs but are moving toward what that is unclear and of course Chicago has done zero so why would New Orleans be different? Louisiana is perhaps the most corrupt state in our country and the story below seems to confirm, affirm and support the idea that nothing will or can ever change that.  

And no I don’t think it is just a matter of voting it is finding appropriate Candidates and the oversight needed to ensure that accountability is measured, then there is education and information and with no true way of communication we have what we have right now – biased and discriminatory information being peddled as news.

To reform is to not punish to this extent.  Say whatever you want but this turns men into animals and then what when they are released do they become?  The long term picture is just as frighting as the current one. 

This jail is so troubled that prisoners are hurting themselves to get away from it

The Washington Post

Matt Zapotosky, Mark Berman 

April 26, 2016

The way the Justice Department tells it, conditions at the jail in Orleans Parish, La., are so bad that inmates are hurting themselves in hopes of getting transferred. Violence has spiraled “out of control” — in just the first 11 weeks of this year, there were 114 prisoner-on-prisoner fights and 12 assaults on staff — and there are no suicide-resistant cells or other necessary safeguards for those on suicide watch.

In one particularly egregious incident, a 61-year-old boxing instructor who never saw a mental health provider — even though an intake screening showed he probably should — hanged himself in a shower stall. He was able to lock the stall from the inside, and a nurse had to crawl under the door and remove the noose with a pair of scissors because the jail’s tool to cut down inmates did not work.
The Orleans Parish jail system has long been troubled: In 2013, a judge ordered widespread reforms as part of a consent decree. But the Justice Department alleges now that the sheriff is not holding up his end of the bargain, and conditions in the jail are not improving. They want a judge to take the “extraordinary” step of appointing a receiver to fully take over jail operations.

“Prisoners at the Orleans Parish Jail,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in a court filing Monday, “are in grave danger.”

In a statement, Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin N. Gusman said the Justice Department’s filing “contains numerous inaccuracies and misleading statements,” and he looked forward to demonstrating in court he was “making substantial strides towards consent decree compliance.”
“We recognize there is more work to be done but will not allow this move by the Plaintiffs to undermine the accomplishments and sacrifices of the hard working deputies and staff at the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office,” the sheriff said.

Orleans Parish recently opened a new $145 million jail, but by the Justice Department’s telling, the building did not alleviate some of the ingrained problems. In a 61-page page filing, Justice Department lawyers alleged prisoners there are “largely unsupervised,” and youthful prisoners are simply locked in punitive isolation because the jail lacks adequate housing for them.

The use of forced isolation for young people at the jail comes as states across the country have sought to reform and, in some cases, end the use of solitary confinement for young and mentally ill inmates.
President Obama announced earlier this year that he was banning solitary for juveniles in federal prisons, calling it “a measure of last resort.” He pointed to the potentially devastating psychological impact of solitary, a practice that experts say can have catastrophic effects on young people and those with mental illnesses. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry has said that juveniles “are at particular risk” for suffering psychologically from time in solitary, owing to where they are in their development.

Justice Department lawyers alleged inmates in Orleans Parish are “engaging in self-harm in order to get transferred away from the harsh conditions and unacceptable level of violence.”

In the first 11 weeks of 2016, the jail recorded 50 suicide attempts, and Justice Department lawyers alleged there remain “no suicide resistant cells, inadequate supervision for suicide watch, no final suicide prevention policies, no staff suicide prevention training, no adequate mental health step down unit, and insufficient mental health leadership and treatment.” Monitors also found food was not always stored at appropriate temperatures, and a lack of cleaning in the shower areas sometimes led to standing water, according to the Justice Department’s filing.

The Justice Department wrote that the sheriff was aware of the problems but had not taken steps to fix them.

About a dozen people in local jails and state prisons die each day, according to a report released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics last year. This report said that in 2013, the year for which the most recent data is available, suicide remained the leading cause of death in local jails, while an illness was the typical cause in a state prison.