Riding Out Katrina

[Steve]

I was talking to a coworker of mine who is very much into politics, very anti-Bush and spends half his day on the blogs network. I was surprised he said that even if FEMA provided the money, the levees and all that would still be in construction possibly. Like a lot of federal programs, the cities and states that get the money sometimes take a long time to use it so that they can keep getting money. If the 2004 money had came in, there is no guarantee all would have been completed by 2005. No one could see something this big coming.

 

It also appears that the city and the state were ill prepared. The federal government has to share some blame.

 

I think what they all should be doing now is telling the troops, cops who ever, not to worry about things taken out of stores, etc. Just quelch any violence. If a guy is taking a TV set instead of food, so be it. That TV set from WalMart won't be sold to the public anyway. The primary thing is to stop violence. There should be massive food drops. There are tons of food that the dept. of agriculture have (remember the free cheese give outs in the '80s and '90s) that could be airlifed there. Loads of food the military has as well. It will take a few days to organize and assess the situation, right now, just get the people food and medicines. Anything. It will at least show that something is done. Its now all gotten too big for the city and state and its a federal size problem. The city and the state should be partners but the money and resources will have to be federal at this point.

[Guest]

New Orleans is devastated, but so are Mississippi and some parts of Alabama.

 

If it were only New Orleans, there would have been a lot more help in one little area. The fact that 3 states were damaged heavily seems to be a lot more than predicted. This has left EVERYONE spread thin.

 

Biloxi is a disaster. I was there not long ago. The buildings that were moved around are immense. The bridges are gone.

 

New Orleans flooded. The levees would have taken a lot longer than 6-15 months to fix. If they were in the middle of repair, could have gotten worse quicker?

 

Federal governement might could have reacted faster, but no one could have competely been prepared for the destruction of almost the whole Gulf Coast.

 

It also might have taken time to clear the road to get to New Orleans for the convoy of trucks with supplies.

 

I don't think any government in the world is ready to move food in to feed over 100,000 people in a flooded city within 24 hours. The food was there in the US, but I am sure it was a little more spread out. It just takes time. The first 24 hours was a lot about making sure it was safe just to begin moving in to save people.

 

Government might have been ready for just New Orleans? Everyone on TV for 2 days was only talking about New Orleans. Biloxi and Gulfport were virtually wiped off the map. Alabama suffered a lot of damage for the second year in a row. I just think there was more damage than predicted. No way to prepare.

[yfs]

It seems from the perspective of Bush haters, all the problems the Katrina victims are experiencing is George Bush's fault. Personally, I blame the hurricane for the misery and destruction. However some of the whoremongers on this board seem to think they know better.

 

When you start to lay blame on rescue efforts and recovery response, start with the local governments and work your way up.

[krml]

Well according to one of the Kennedy's the hurricane is Bush's fault too because he did not sign the Kyoto Accord.

 

The thing that pisses me off is that this is a TRAGEDY in epic proportions. Yet so many people are starting to turn this into a political issue. There are people suffering and dying in this area and the finger pointing and the blame game has started.

 

You have a fucking idiot like Kanye West stating that Bush hates black people. What did they think, the federal government would snap their fingers and everything would be cleaned up and the world would be a perfect place?

 

This thing is huge. It took several days to assess the situation and get everyone moving on the relief effort. They seem to forget that millions of people have been affected by this.

 

No matter who was president of the United States, this relief effort would still take a long time.

[Guest lazyphil]

People not affected who twist this into a political issue make me puke ::

[Steve]

The sad thing is that others with an agenda are turning it into a political and race issue. That is the sad part.

The more I'm learning about it, the more its just a tragedy. Yes, things could have been better which would have resulted in less deaths but the devastation would still have happened and there still would have been thousands of deaths.

 

What some of us don't understand as well is that its the middle of summer there. Summer in New Orleans is sweltering, oppressing humidity. With no usable water and food, it makes the situation all the more troubling.

[Guest lazyphil]

Dont forget Aligators ::....sea snakes?

[Steve]

BOTH parties reward their campaign staff and supporters with crony, cushy jobs. Be balanced. One of the things I dislike about BOTH parties is that they do things like that. How many of Clinton's appointments were people he knew from his Arkansas days? His FEMA head was James DeWitt, from Arkansas and Clinton's friend. To be fair, although he was in the construction business, he did have emergency services experience. Hurricane Andrew which devasted Florida in 1992 prompted Clinton to put more money into it. This event will do the same.

My point however is they ALL do appoint cronies. Too many times we make something that is a problem in the politics in general to be as if one party is evil , the other saints. I'm sure in England the Labour have cronyism as much as the Tories.

What we need to do as voters is demand that our elected leaders select qualified people.

Even if he is a crony, the bureaucracy is still there, just like all other agencies, the people below him who were always at FEMA know what to do.

Take into account the general economy. In good times most budgets of most agencies are increased, in bad times they are mostly cut.

Yes, FEMA may be one of those areas that shouldn't be but the economy was crap for most of the new millenium.

Clinton increased FEMA overall (due to natural disasters that were occuring), but he had cut it in prior years. 1996 it was cut 17.4% for example and that was in a boom economy.

I'm not a fan of Bush as well, but the authorities are rarely able to handle natural disasters. I can't think of one that was handled well, which is tragic.

[chuckwoww]

"BOTH parties reward their campaign staff and supporters with crony, cushy jobs."

 

Cronies? Nepotism? Kickbacks? Gee I thought only third world countries worked like that.

 

Houston Chronicle, Sept. 1, 2005, 8:30PM

 

Halliburton hired for storm cleanup

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

 

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/3335685

 

Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' miserable shelter

Fri Sep 2, 2005 11:44 PM ET Reuters.

 

By Mark Egan

 

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - With the rotors of President George W. Bush's helicopter sounding overhead, New Orleans' poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.

 

http://tinyurl.com/a3jl5

 

meanwhile ordinary folks don't have private helicopters but they do what they can..

 

Americans Open Wallets, Homes to Refugees

 

By ANGIE WAGNER, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 11 minutes ago

 

For Steve Smith, it was the radio story about a family staying at Reunion Arena in Dallas with a 1-month-old infant. A father himself, he couldn't imagine living in an arena with a newborn.

 

Smith, 34, fired off an e-mail to friends and co-workers and raised almost $4,000 in two days to put up families in a Dallas hotel. He also got his company to donate food for a month and negotiated a cheaper hotel rate.

 

http://tinyurl.com/ca6zc

[Flashermac]

The New York Times

September 4, 2005

Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?

By ANNE RICE

 

La Jolla, Calif.

 

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.