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Rationing health care in a disaster
If you read one article health care-related this week, make it this extraordinary Sheri Fink/NY Times Magazine article on the impossible choices that the heroic doctors -- including Dr. Anna Pou -- faced at the former Memorial Medical Center...
Progress in the aftermath of Ike
Wednesday was a good day. Large areas of Houston -- including the area that includes my family's home -- had power restored. Our land phone lines were also restored on Wednesday after they had survived Hurricane Ike only to be...
Surviving Ike
Yes, although you haven't heard from me for awhile, I'm still here. My family and I survived Hurricane Ike just fine. Although not an intense hurricane (it came ashore as a category 2), the enormity of the storm was...
Waiting on Ike
When I started this blog back in early 2004, it never occurred to me that hurricanes would end up being a frequent topic. Then, on August 27, 2005, many folks discovered this little corner of the blogosphere when this...
The best Gulf Coast hurricane information source
Hurricane Gustav is another powerful hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, so I wanted to recommend Chron science reporter Eric Berger's SciGuy blog as the best source of hurricane information for the Gulf Coast region. Eric and I...
Dr. Pou's fog of Katrina
This Dr. Susan Okie/New England Journal of Medicine article (H/T Kolahun) provides the most extensive analysis to date of the circumstances surrounding the tragic deaths of the nine New Orleans area hospital patients during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that...
A real insurance fraud
I've been meaning to pass along this James Q. Wilson/WSJ ($) op-ed that lucidly describes the crisis that has developed in property insurance markets along the Gulf Coast as a result of the litigation risk and attendant cost of clearly...
The Katrina legacy
The "News-Hurricane" category of this blog began with Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The second post in that blog was this one in the early afternoon of Saturday, August 27, 2005, which was one of the first in the blogosphere warning...
In Dr. Pou's words
Dr. Anna Pou (previous posts here), the former faculty member of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, performed heroically in the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For her heroism, she became the main subject of one of the...
What does the investment of a billion dollars in New Orleans generate?
According to this NY Times article, apparently not much: Six inches. After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water...
Good news for Dr. Pou
An old saying in criminal defense circles is that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if the prosecutor is inclined to do so. Fortunately, that was not the case in regard to former Houston...
Dr. Pou's defense goes on the offensive
The state's threat to prosecute Dr. Anna M. Pou for murder is a sad reflection of the incompetence in the Louisiana state government that permeated the preparations for and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. After almost two years now of...
Katrina evacuees and the enduring nature of poverty
In the summer of 2005, tens of thousands of citizens from the New Orleans area relocated to Houston and other cities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, most of whom never returned to their former home. A substantial number of...
Legal investment banking on climate change
The Dallas Morning News' Eric Torbenson examines a potential growth area for business plaintiffs' lawyers and another burgeoning risk for business -- lawsuits asserting responsibility for damagres caused by climate change. And guess who's right in the middle of it?...
Act of God or Man?
It's hurricane season in the Gulf Coast region, which always generates some interesting issues involving insurance markets and liability (see also here). Along those lines, this Tim Haab post discusses an interesting case arising from the floods of Hurricane Katrina...
"Superstar historian"?
Please excuse three straight posts bashing various Chronicle articles, but this Chronicle/Allan Turner reads like a press release from Rice University regarding the institution's hiring of former Tulane University history professor, Douglas Brinkley: The man who once took a busload...
A case study in governmental incompetence
Just about the time that you think that the bureaucratic bungling of allocating governmental relief funds for New Orleans cannot be topped, another story appears to top the previous one: In a hurricane-ravaged city desperately lacking health services for the...
Update on the case of Dr. Pou
Speaking of prosecutorial excess, the case of Dr. Anna Pou -- the former University of Texas Health Science Center professor and physician who was arrested last year in Louisiana on wrongful death charges for her actions in attempting to save...
New Orleans may still be a mess, but at least fraud is under control
This Christopher Cooper/Wall Street Journal ($) article on the inability of the federal, state and local governments to administer the vast amounts of aid appropriated to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region was published over this past weekend,...
The struggle of recovery made worse
Although the Bush Administration's troubles in devising and implementing a workable strategy for bringing civil order to Baghdad receives most of the mainstream's media attention, the failure of government to facilitate order in New Orleans and rebuilding throughout the Hurricane...
Taking stock in New Orleans
The NY Times continues today with another installment in its excellent The Katrina Year series focusing on the status of the rebuilding of New Orleans. To the surprise of no one who has ever been involved in the interplay of...
The best local source for hurricane info and analysis
Last August, the Chronicle's fine science writer, Eric Berger, began his popular SciGuy blog shortly before Hurricane Katrina hammered the central Gulf Coast. On the Saturday morning before Katrina hit, Eric and I were two of the earliest bloggers to...
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Several posts from last year (here, here and here) addressed one of the constants of my 27-year legal career in Houston -- the chronically abysmal condition of the Harris County Jail. With this article, the Chronicle's Steve McViker continues the...
The story behind the arrest of Dr. Pou
As noted in this previous post, the arrest in Louisiana of former University of Texas Health Science Center professor and physician Dr. Anna Pou on wrongful death charges for her actions in attempting to save lives during the chaotic aftermath...
The doctor at the center of the Hurricane Katrina wrongful death prosecution
Dr. Anna Pou, the New Orleans doctor who heroically served severely-ill patients during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last summer, is at the center of the highly-publicized and controversial decision of Louisiana criminal authorities earlier this week to arrest...
The shrinking supply of disaster insurance
This Liam Pleven-Ian McDonald-Karen Richardson WSJ ($) article reports on an interesting market condition in the disaster insurance business that has been reverberating in business circles around Houston since the storms of last summer -- despite robust demand for disaster...
An unintended consequence of Hurricane Katrina
Of all the consequences of Hurricane Katrina on the state of Louisiana, this NY Times article reports on one that I never expected: State officials assumed that Louisiana's tax base had been battered by last year's hurricanes, but the latest...
Regulating the regulation
Houston-based -- er, . . I mean Bermuda-based, or is that Barbados-based? . . . -- Nabors Industries, Inc. is one of the world's largest drilling contractors. The company has nearly 600 land drilling rigs and more than 900 land...
The city that time forgot
On the heels of articles noted in earlier posts here and here, the New York Times continues its excellent series on the enormous difficulties involved in the rebuilding of New Orleans with this article that reports on the city's strained...
The sad state of New Orleans
On the heels of this report that New Orleans has lost over 60% of its population since Hurricane Katrina last summer, this NY Times article reports that, despite billions of dollars in federal aid that is available, local New Orleans...
Checking in on the MARS platform
One of the enduring images of the catastrophic damage that last summer's hurricanes inflicted on Gulf Coast oil and gas production facilities was the picture to the left of Royal Dutch Shell PLC's MARS floating production platform (previous posts here...
Hey FEMA, can you spare a dime?
So, you thought that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to the damage from Hurricane Katrina last year left much to be desired? Well, this NY Times article reports that a recent Congressional investigation has determined that the agency's relief...
More on the ripples of the 2005 hurricane season
This NY Times article reports on two recently-published Census Bureau reports that constitute the findings of the bureau's first study on the social, financial and demographic impact of the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita last summer on the Gulf Coast region:...
The storms of Katrina
With hurricane season officially starting tomorrow, this NY Times article about the research that has been done over the past year into Hurricane Katrina provides some interesting information, including the stages of the storm on the New Orleans metro area:...
Remember those high prices for natural gas?
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that we were enduring demagogues' calls for governmental intervention in regard to increasing oil and gas prices? Well, continuing a trend noted in this post from a week ago, the natural-gas contract for...
Bowl game reading
My old friend Coach Mac is in town this week with his Iowa State Cyclone football team to play the TCU Horned Frogs tomorrow afternoon in the EV1.net Houston Bowl at Reliant Stadium. As a result, blogging will be a...
O'Reilly's appalling ignorance of markets
Bill O'Reilly is a popular Fox News show host and author, but he is really nothing more than a fleetingly entertaining demagogue. Case in point is the following exchange between O'Reilly and Neil Cavuto, another Fox News host: CAVUTO: Okay....
Repairing the MARS platform
This earlier post noted the extensive damage that Hurricane Katrina caused to the MARS floating production platform in the Gulf of Mexico, which generates about 220,000 barrels of oil and 220 million cubic feet of natural gas daily when operational....
Fifth Circuit schedules return to New Orleans
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which relocated temporarily to Houston in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (earlier posts here and here), issued this press release yesterday in which it made public its plans for returning to New Orleans next...
Need a job? Try New Orleans
Two and a half months after Hurricane Katrina and the resulting flood hammered New Orleans, this NY Times article notes that the rebuilding of the city is being hampered by a scarcity of labor, a condition that was noted in...
The effect of failed urban economics on the French riots
Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, the author of The City: A Global History (Modern Library, 2005) and a friend of Houston Strategies' Tory Gattis. Mr. Kotkin came to my attention recently for his...
Riots spreading in suburban France
This story has been flying a big under the radar screen (at least outside the blogosphere) over the past week, but France's government is coming under increasing political pressure to find a solution for civil unrest in suburban France that...
Hurricane Katrina's real economic impact becoming clearer
The damage from Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas production facilities has had a huge impact on national and international oil and gas markets over the past two months. However, from a regional standpoint, the biggest...
Wilma!
This is getting very monotonous. Hurricane Wilma moved toward Mexico's popular Cancun resort Wednesday as an extremely dangerous category 4 storm that has already become the most intense hurricane to form in the Americas since such storms began being recorded...
Addressing the real problem in New Orleans
Edmund Phelps is the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Professor Phelps makes the remarkably simple but adroit insight that much of the political debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans...
The Katrina and Rita ripples on the natural gas market
Following on this thread of posts over the past month, natural gas for November delivery rose 20.7 cents to a record $14.224 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange Tuesday afternoon after Interior Secretary Gale Norton...
Texas Genco turns power generating assets for huge profit
Less than a year after a group of four private equity funds banded together to acquire Texas Genco Holdings, Inc. from CenterPoint Energy for $3.7 billion, the buyers are proposing to sell Texas Genco to NRG Energy Inc. for $5.8...
Assessing the hurricane damage to Gulf production facilities
Following on this post from yesterday, the markets continued to react to more information that indicates that damage to Gulf of Mexico offshore production and drilling facilities from the recent hurricanes is going to reduce production and exploration from that...
An interesting perspective
It is becoming clearer each day now that at least a substantial amount of the initial information coming out of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was either exaggerated or misinformation. One such piece of misinformation was that...
Rita hammers offshore production facilities
This Financial Times article reports that preliminary assessments of the damage that Hurricane Rita caused to offshore oil and gas drilling and production facilities reflect that the damage is greater any other storm in history. Rita's path -- which was...
Comparing planning for impending Gulf Coast threats
Joel Kotkin is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and is the author of The City: A Global History (Modern Library, 2005). In this Opinion Journal op-ed, he compares the disparate preparations of New Orleans and Houston...
Rita damage taxes power grid
On the heels of Entergy Corp.'s decision to place its New Orleans subsidiary in bankruptcy last week on the day that Hurricane Rita barreled into the Gulf Coast at the Texas-Louisiana border, the utility is now dealing with serious damage...
Throwing money at All the King's Men
John Fund explores in this OpinionJournal piece the risk that long-standing Louisiana elements of corruption are likely to hijack a good part of the extraordinary amount of federal aid that will be flowing into the state in the wake of...
Mississippi's AG increases the cost of rebuilding
This previous post explored the role of federally-subsidized flood insurance in attracting capital investment in New Orleans that probably would not have occurred had the owners of the capital been faced with paying the cost of private flood insurance. Until...
Rita's expected economic waves turn into ripples
It's been a helluva past month in Houston. First, the Houston community responded to the worst natural disaster in America in decades by taking in tens of thousands of evacuees (posts here, here and here) from New Orleans and the...
Entergy's New Orleans unit files chapter 11
Following up on this post from earlier this week, Entergy Corporation's New Orleans subsidiary filed a chapter 11 case on Friday in New Orleans (that filing location will certainly cut down on the number of lawyers attending the first round...
A cautionary observation
After the jolting early morning news that Hurricane Rita was heading directly toward Galveston Bay, the track models have been trending further eastward for most of the day. The current most likely projection is that the storm will make landfall...
Thank goodness for the Onion
Hand it to the Onion to provide some levity during Houston's preparations for Hurricane Rita: WASHINGTON, DC—A bill introduced by Sen. George Allen (R-VA) as "just a goof" several weeks ago was signed into law by President Bush Tuesday. "I...
Economic waves of Rita
With the eastern shift of the projected path of Hurricane Rita directly into the part of the Houston metro area that contains a huge number of some of the nation's largest oil refineries and petrochemical facilities, Rita's economic ripples have...
Buzzard's luck
In the midst of pre-hurricane gasoline and bottled water shortages -- and in anticipation of probable power outages resulting from Hurricane Rita -- this report is not giving me warm and fuzzy feelings: Facing huge costs for rebuilding its Hurricane...
Economic ripples of Rita
Crude-oil prices surged on Monday as it became clear that Tropical Storm Rita would threaten the Gulf Coast, then prices fell on Tuesday morning when the National Hurricane Center forecast a more southerly path for Rita that might spare the...
Handy hurricane information links
Given that those of us living in the Houston and south Texas area are in for a wild ride over the next few days, I am passing along the hurricane information sites that I am reviewing frequently for up-to-the-minute information...
Oil and gas markets react to Rita
Whoa, Nellie! Oil prices surged yesterday in anticipation of Hurricane Rita plowing through the Gulf of Mexico as OPEC ministers meeting in Vienna conceded they have no real means to cool red-hot petroleum markets that have become roiled by successive...
We don't really need this
Tropical Storm Rita is preparing to enter the Gulf of Mexico, and current predictions have it headed toward the Texas Gulf Coast by the end of the week. This is not good news, particularly for the oil and gas industry's...
Close Encounter of the Human Kind
Abraham Verghese, M.D., is the Joaquin Cigarroa Jr. Chair and Marvin Forland Distinguished Professor at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio. After volunteering at the Houston shelters during the relief effort for the Hurricane Katrina evacuees,...
Markets at work
A funny thing happened in response to the recent run-up in gasoline prices resulting from Hurricane Katrina -- demand for gasoline dropped dramatically. Clear Thinkers favorite James Hamilton puts it all into perspective....
Tom DeLay said what?
This Washington Times article refers to House Majority Leager Tom DeLay's recent comments regarding the Bush Administration's record on government spending: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said yesterday that Republicans have done so well in cutting spending that he declared...
Good news from the Port of New Orleans
The Port of New Orleans re-opened on a limited basis yesterday and plans to be at 80% of capacity within three months. Moreover, the nearby Port of South Louisiana and Port Fourchon on the Gulf Coast have also partially restored...
Update on Katrina's economic ripples
Petroleum futures fell to pre-Hurricane Katrina levels for the first time since the storm yesterday on news of heavy losses in refined products and market concern that that high gasoline prices have depressed demand for product. Earlier posts on the...
Will the NY Times blame Enron for the delay in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort?
My sense is that the New York Times editors need a little psychiatric help in letting their "Enron-thing" go. In this article, the Times reports on a working paper by a couple of East Coast economists who propose the rather...
Katrina's economic ripples on Houston
Following on this post from earlier in the week regarding the economic impact to Houston of the arrival of thousands of former New Orleans residents, Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution provides his typically insightful analysis on the issue. Tyler...
Spellman and McGilbra sentenced
Almost overlooked in the Hurricane Katrina news is this Chronicle article regarding the sentencings of two former Houston officials -- Lee Brown Administration chief of staff Oliver Spellman and building services director Monique McGilbra -- who entered into plea bargains...
More on Katrina's economic ripples
As noted in this earlier post, the closing of the credit-card issuer Capital One Financial Corp.'s purchase of New Orleans-based Hibernia Corp. had been delayed by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Today, the parties to that transaction announced that Hibernia...
The Katrina business boom
This NY Times article provides a good summary of the response of the Houston business community to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the business opportunity that it represents. The article focuses on the short term business opportunities, although the...
An example of failed local leadership
Following on this earlier post and Joe Carter's post noted in the post below regarding the failures of the federal government in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, former state legislator Bob Williams -- whose district was the most impacted by the...
Not a good progress report
Although one whould caution against jumping to conclusions before facts are established, tongues will nevertheless be wagging across the United States today in the face of this devastating Wall Street Journal ($) article that lists the incidents reflecting lack of...
A terrific hurricane relief information resource
The Librarians' Index to the Internet has put together a terrific web resource center for Hurricane Katrina-related information, including information on volunteer opportunities, legal matters, displaced students, charitable giving, animal rescue, missing persons, temporary housing, flood control, levee management, gas...
One of the effects of mass transit choices in New Orleans
Awhile back, I participated with local bloggers Tory Gattis, Anne Linehan and Kevin Whited, Laurence Simon, Owen Courr�ges and several others on a lively thread regarding the causes and effect of the public policy choices that Houston is making in...
Greg Norman steps up
It's not everyone who can make this type of contribution to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort: Greg Norman is lending his personal helicopter to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, just as he did after last year's destructive hurricane season. Norman...
2005 Weekly local football review
Amidst the chaos resulting from Hurricane Katrina, at least a small amount of normalcy returned this past weekend as the local college football season kicked off. As with last season, I will pass along a brief summary of the local...
Ramping up the blame game
As noted here earlier, I don't think it's the time to point fingers at each other while there are still people to be saved inside New Orleans, although I do think the question of why troops were not used earlier...
A massive relief effort that you do not see
As Americans are still attempting to absorb the shock of the largest exodus of citizens during our nation's modern history, the Chronicle's Steve Campbell's great photo of the inside of Houston's Astrodome provides the backdrop to a huge part of...
Updating Katrina's economic ripples
Six days after Hurricane Katrina hammered a main conduit of the U.S. energy and shipping industries, much of the crucial infrastructure on the energy industry in the Gulf Coast region those remains shut down. Although a full assessment of the...
A remarkable city responds as Katrina's economic ripples ease a bit
In the chaos of the worst natural disaster of our time, the remarkable Houston community provided extraordinary relief for tens of thousands of New Orleans area evacuees and, in so doing, provided a substantial part of the calming effect that...
Katrina's economic ripples
As state and federal officials grappled with the massive human toll that Hurricane Katrina exacted on the Gulf Coast region, further assessment of the damage is indicating that the storm has wreaked havoc to key business properties along the Gulf...
Resources for Houston's Hurricane Katrina relief effort
Be sure to check out blogHouston.net where Anne Linehan and Kevin Whited are doing an excellent job of chronicling the local resources in support of Houston's extraordinary Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Anne and Kevin have several posts relating to the...
Fifth Circuit emergency operations
Several friends and fellow bloggers have asked over the past several days how the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (website currently down) is dealing with the destruction that has resulted from Hurricane Katrina, so I made a couple...
Houston takes in New Orleans' weary
As the effects of the worst natural disaster of our time continued to become more apparent with each passing hour, Houston opened its arms to tens of thousands of New Orleans citizens who lost virtually everything but their lives. Houston's...
Further assessment of Katrina's economic impact
As companies involved in the U.S. oil and gas industry continue to assess the damage that Hurricane Katrina has caused to Gulf of Mexico and Gulf Coast production facilities, Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced on Tuesday that its Mars floating...
Situation in New Orleans deteriorating
The already dire situation in New Orleans has taken a turn for the worse this morning as the breach in the 17th Street Canal Levee is now 200 feet wide and slowly flooding the entire city. In short, the worst-case...
Evaluating Katrina's damage to oil and gas production facilities
Officials of oil and gas companies and refineries with facilities in the path of Hurricane Katrina were scurrying around yesterday somewhat helplessly attempting to evaluate the extent of the storm's damage on key oil and natural-gas production facilities that rattled...
The betting on the effect of Katrina
The early bets on the effect of Hurricane Katrina are rising rapidly this morning as traders are reacting to what is turning out to be the worst-case scenario for the U.S. energy industry In overnight electronic trading on the New...
A potential disaster may be developing along the Gulf Coast
For years, experts have been warning that a potential disaster looms if a major hurricane hits the New Orleans metropolitan area, much of which sits beneath sea level. It is beginning to look as if those predictions may come true...
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