Stay safe

that looks similar to the article in the October 2001 Scientific American... i dont imagine a 200 foot gap in a levee is particularly easy thing to patch... especially with water flowing through....
 
Hello,

I don't know if anyone here has any loved ones in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, but here's a list of some sites I found that are trying to reconnect people. My heart goes out to those still at ground zero.

Craigslist
CNN.com
WWLTV New Orleans
BBC News
The Salvation Army

The American Red Cross is also providing some survivor-finding assistance, which you can contact at (866) GET-INFO

I am worried about an old friend of mine, an LSU resident living in Metairie. I hope she got out okay.

Oh, and Melissa? Good idea about the disaster preparedness kit. I live in prime earthquake country, and its so easy for us to get cut off from supply lines and such. Stay safe, everyone.

John
 
If they had been more prepared for emergency relief I think there would have been less looting IMHO. When you are starving and thirsty and you can get food and water by looting, it is a powerful incentive to break the law. Once you start to break the law or see others doing so, a taboo is broken - more lawlessness follows. The norms of society erode like the edges of the levee.

Having a high proportion of the population armed probably doesn't help much.

Gave to the Red Cross yesterday. Hopefully the charities will remember me when the Pacific Northwest has an earthquake and the dykes here is the Fraser Valley liquify and collapse :frown:
 
I think it's still a pretty big step from looting to things like rape and shooting at hospitals. Some of those folks need to be put down.

Speaking of preparedness, how ready is the US to deal with another big storm or two, given that there are still months left in the hurricane season?
 
The BBC reported that some looters were distributing food and water to people at the Convention Center (not the Superdome) and that gun shops were looted. It sounds like hell.

Interview with NO's mayor: http://www.atypical.net/mm/nagin.mp3

The fool who planned an evacuation relying on private transport (i.e. people's cars) - thereby damning a fifth of the city's residents - needs put down, too.

Melissa
 
Re: the emergency preparedness plan, that's absolutely the bare minimum. As we all know, 3 days worth of water per person wouldn't be enough, a week is probably more realistic. Also, if you have pets you need to be prepared for their needs too. The food that won't spoil is great, but if it's canned don't forget a manual can opener, if it's in dry form it needs to be in a waterproof container. If you want hot food a small sterno stove & a small pan plus waterproof matches should also be included. If you live anywhere near a nuclear power plant, or near military installations that might have radioactive materials on site you should also have iodine tablets. The thin survival blankets are great, don't take up much space, and when turned with the shiny side out will reflect the sun away from you, in cold weather they will also do a good job of keeping you warm, and they are waterproof. There are some crankable radios and flashlights available so if the battery charge wears out you can crank to get enough power to listen for a few minutes to know what's going on, or to get 10 minutes worth of light. If you live in tornado country you should definitely have a battery operated NOAA radio. The idea of having all your important papers in a water proof box ( and it should also be fireproof) is great, but for maximum protection, if you have trustworthy family living in other parts of the country you should make copies of all important papers for them to keep for you. When you live in earth quake country, don't forget to strap your water heater to the wall, as well as any tall, heavy furniture that could topple over. Having a wrench near your gas cut off lines sounds great, but having one chained to the pipe is even better. You won't have to look for it. Also in earthquake country, always have hard soled shoes by your bed, turned upside down so broken glass won't get into them. Everybody should also keep a flashlight with good batteries next to the bed, most bad disastors leave you in pitch black if they happen at night, and you'll be disoriented at best if awakened by one. Don't bother with a first aid kit that you buy at a store, they are essentially worthless. Get a cheap plastic toolbox and put your own together. It should include all the things that come in the commercial ones, except more of it, one or two triangular bandages, (easy and cheap to make), hydrogen peroxide, disposable gloves, sanitary napkins which are larger and much more absorbent for severe lacerations. 4x4s, and good quality tape, roller gauze, or better yet, cling. Scissors, good tweezers, If there's room a small flashlight. I'm sure I'm forgetting something....
 
Oh yeah, if you have kids, get up in the middle of the night and test the smoke detector. If they respond the way they are supposed to, great, but it's best to find out what they'll do before it's a matter of live and death.

Another point....really try to never let your gas gauge go below the halfway mark. When the power is out gas pumps can't run.
 
These Folk Seem to be Angry...

People are angry. People are very, very angry. Sure this was an act of nature, but when you listen to the condemnations by the former head of FEMA, and you learn about cuts in the budget to storm defenses carried out under both the Clinton and then Bush administrations, well, this was going to be bad, but did it have to be quite this bad? Where did the money that was cut from these vital protections go, exactly?

Here's the opinion of the Times-Picayune, in an open letter to the President:
From the Times-Picayune, dated September 3rd, 2005

OUR OPINIONS: An open letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:

We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."

Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.

Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.

How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.

Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.

Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.

Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.

Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.

We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.

Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.

It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?

State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.

In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."

Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.

Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."

That’s unbelievable.

There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.

We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.

No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.

Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.

When you do, we will be the first to applaud.




**
 
A Daughter of the Crescent City Speaks:
Body: Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
By ANNE RICE

WHAT do people really know about New Orleans?

Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land?

The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.

This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.

Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.

Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day.

The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.

Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs.

And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.

Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii.


I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?"

Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.

Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another?

Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn.

What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.

And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.

And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.

I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.

They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.

But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs.

Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.
 

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