Hurricane Devastates New Orleans, Miss. & Alabama

[DudeAsInCool]

The Wall Street Journal Keeps An Updated News Tracker on Katrina and its aftermath. YOu can find it here:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB....html?mod=blogs

[DudeAsInCool]

Stone Phillips and Dateline/MSNBC On What Went Wrong:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9269337/

[slum_goddess]

horrible first person story by volunteer doctor here: We had an optometrist with prescriptive lenses but no glasses or readers and no idea when he'd ever see any. We had a deaf booth but no deaf helpers. In the midst of all this chaos, thousands and thousands of the walking wounded mixing with the powerless well-intentioned came the whispered word, pandemic. Lots of people are suddenly getting sick, and we have to have precautions. Don't eat or drink or touch the patients.

We only have one bottle of disinfectant in the mental health section, so have to come back here--the length of the Convention Center--after each patient.

"What of the people who are being cycled out of here?" "What are we sending into the population?" If people are sick and contagious, where are the precautions to separate the vulnerable? What of precautions such as masks and gloves to keep the medical professionals and first

responders safe? All the here and now is suspended in the hope that maybe tomorrow will take care of itself and the worst won't happen.

Those are the question we asked on the first day. NO ONE IS IN CHARGE!!!...

...Finally, to hell with this "no blame game." The stories that I know to be true are enough to make me boil. The compassionate foreign doctors who can't find anyone to validate their credentials, the expensive mobile hospital still sitting parked waiting for federal paperwork to move into Louisiana, the five C130s sitting on the Tarmac in San Diego since the night of Katrina, still waiting for orders to move. Where the hell are the beds? We have some old people sleeping on hot plastic pool floats with no sheets. They are still no showers for people who have walked for hours through fetid waters. Their skin is breaking out in rashes. Still no showers. Where the hell are the DeCon showers bought with Homeland Security money that can shower 30 people at a time? ... (more at above link)

[Kooperman]

Stone Phillips and Dateline/MSNBC On What Went Wrong:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9269337/

A show that had no balls...never mentioned that the president and all his high cabinet members were on vacation, seemingly forever. A real disappointment...no courage to confront the man who put all these unqualified bozos into management of FEMA, then let them torture New Orleans and Mississippi with their incompetence.

[DudeAsInCool]

Via Slum Goddess:

hitting the wall, Billmon

'There are still a lot of things I want to say about Hurricane Katrina and the savage, apocalyptic vision of America that she revealed, floating face down in the water. But last night I came across an account of the search for real bodies -- not metaphorical ones -- in the stinking ruins of New Orleans. It's like something out of the charnel houses of World War II:

Volunteer rescuer Gregg Silverman, part of a 14-boat contingent from Columbus, Ohio, said he expected to find many more survivors in his excursion through the city's flooded streets. Instead, he found mostly bodies.

"They had me climb up on a roof, and I did bring an ax up to where a guy had tried to stick a pipe up through a vent,'' Silverman said. "Unfortunately, he had probably just recently perished. His dog was still there, barking. The dog wouldn't come. We had to leave the dog just up there in the attic.''

As for other bodies his group encountered: "Obviously we are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof.''

It is reported that the state of Louisiana has placed an order for 25,000 body bags.

For some reason, it wasn't until I read that story that the full horror of what happened in New Orleans finally hit home for me...' read the rest--excellent stuff.

--------------------

'Drugs usually enhance or strengthen my perceptions and reactions, for good or ill. They've given me the resilience to withstand repeated shocks to my innocence gland. The brutal reality of politics alone would probably be intolerable without drugs.' - Hunter S Thompson

*~the venereal Presleyterians are real happy to be here~*

[DudeAsInCool]

Former Bush Homeland Security Adviser: Katrina Exposed "False Advertising" About How The Government Has Been Transformed Four Years After The Sept. 11 Terrorist Attacks…The NY Times on What Went Wrong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/national...agewanted=print

[DudeAsInCool]

The Gulf Coast

Coastal Cities of Mississippi in the Shadows

...If the levees had held in New Orleans, the destruction wrought on the MississippiGulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina would have been the most astonishing storm story of a generation. Whole towns have been laid flat, thousands of houses washed away and, statewide, the storm has been blamed for the deaths of 211 people, a toll far higher than those from Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.

But as it is, Mississippi - like the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 - is coping with an almost unimaginable catastrophe, largely overshadowed in the news media's attention and the national consciousness, in this case by the disaster in New Orleans.

http://nytimes.com/2005/09/12/national/nat...artner=homepage

[DudeAsInCool]

Pa. City Battled Floods 116 Years Ago

As it rumbled toward the city, the 35-foot wave of rain-swollen water churned over and onto itself like a giant snowball, swallowing trees, boulders, homes and anything else in its path.

In minutes, the powerful rush flattened homes, uprooted trees and moved buildings hundreds of feet. It left behind 2,209 people dead _ including 99 entire families _ and 1,600 homes destroyed.

More than 116 years before Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, a flood in Johnstown exposed the rift between rich and poor, the kindness of strangers and, in the end, the power of the human spirit to rebuild.

"It's more than just a disaster. It was the biggest story of the late 19th century," said Richard Burkert, executive director of the Johnstown Flood Museum.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/14/D8CK2HRO1.html

My grandmother escaped this flood when she was a little girl...

[DudeAsInCool]

washingtonpost.com

As City Dries, Residents Plan Return

Repopulation Dependent on Neighborhoods Having Utilities, Access to Emergency Services

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 14 -- Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents could begin returning to their homes as early as Monday as city and federal authorities have set out an accelerated plan to repopulate the city, reversing earlier estimates that the metropolis could be closed for months.

The plan would reopen a portion of New Orleans that was home to about 170,000 people, or one-third of the city's population, federal officials said, and be rolled out over the next two weeks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1402502_pf.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Katrina Makes Top 10 Deadliest Disasters

-- Hurricane Katrina already has become the seventh deadliest natural disaster to strike this country, a tragic footnote that comes even as some of the dead are still uncounted.

So far, the official toll across five states is at 710, with New Orleans accounting for most of the dead. Those numbers, while horrific, raised the possibility that earlier fears of fatalities reaching 10,000 or more might not prove true.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1401877_pf.html

[DudeAsInCool]

FEMA, Slow to the Rescue, Now Stumbles in Aid Effort

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept 16 - Nearly three weeks after Hurricane Katrina cut its devastating path, FEMA - the same federal agency that botched the rescue mission - is faltering in its effort to aid hundreds of thousands of storm victims, local officials, evacuees and top federal relief officials say. The federal aid hot line mentioned by President Bush in his address to the nation on Thursday cannot handle the flood of calls, leaving thousands of people unable to get through for help, day after day.

Federal officials are often unable to give local governments permission to proceed with fundamental tasks to get their towns running again. Most areas in the region still lack federal help centers, the one-stop shopping sites for residents in need of aid for their homes or families. Officials say that they are uncertain whether they can meet the president's goal of providing housing for 100,000 people who are now in shelters by the middle of next month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/national...artner=homepage

[DudeAsInCool]

Military May Play Bigger Relief Role

President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil.

...At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement _ stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/17/D8CM6FB00.html

[DudeAsInCool]

Guardsmen Spooked by SuperNatural Presence in New Orleans

http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_25