What has happened down here is the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain
Rained real hard and rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through cleard down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tyrin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

President Coolidge came down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The President say, “Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has

done

To this poor crackers land.

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tyrin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Even more difficult to understand is, since New Orleans has got to be one of the largest termini of barges and towboats in the world, why were they not used, indeed, why are they not being used today, to transport huge numbers of people upriver far beyond the reach of the storm surge? The barges could have been brought alongside the levees from which people could embark easily and simply. A raft of barges a quarter of a mile long and over a hundred feet wide could move the equivalency of the entire population of a small town. The military could have used their helicopters to drop the components of field kitchens for food handling and distribution in one of the barges, sanitary facilities in the way of “portapotty” latrines, washing facilities and holding tanks for gargage and wastes in another, a first aid station and/or field hospital in another, and cots, bedding and other comfort and shelter facilities in the rest of the barges to serve as temporary dormitories. The barges could then be transported out of the untenable circumstances and conditions in New Orleans and taken upriver to other municipalities or smaller towns and moored alongshore where other provisions could be attainable for longer durations till the people could be provided with places around the area on land where they could live more normally.

Regarding the rescue operations going on presently in New Orleans, where are the hovercraft landing craft which the military have? The US Coast Guard is trying to extricate people from flooded areas, areas littered with demolished buildings and where roads are unusable. This operation is involved with plucking people, several at a time at the most, with helicopters which can hold not many before needing to return to a safe place to unload the rescued people and then search for more people. The hovercraft can go over a skim of water or deep water, even with a sea running, and overland, roads or no roads, and can probably even climb over piles of debris (they can negotiate pressure ridges in the arctic ice, after all) to get to the people. It can then take in many dozen people before, at high speed, finding a safe place to deposit them. And the government, we know, has them, but we don’t see much evidence in the news that they are using them elsewhere presently for any reason more important than rescuing people in the devastation of hurrican Katrina.

I grew up in Gulfport, Mississippi. Since I was a kid, I was aware of hurricanes. We used to get our hurricane maps at the end of each school year and we would track them only with the weathermen. When I lived there, the memory of Hurricane Camille was quite strong. As I mentioned in the group, Hurricane Camille came ashore late on my mother’s birthday. She rode out the storm in Gulfport and experienced the horrors. She decided that if she had the means she would never stay for another hurricane. Consequently, as kids, we never really stayed through the hurricane, but would travel to Jackson, MS and wait them out there. I moved to Virginia during high school and have spent time in Mississippi and California since. However, many of my friends and family members still live on the coast. My brother lives there with his family. Once I was sure that they left, I just followed the storm. It was much worse than I could have ever imagined especially in New Orleans, which IMHO was not psychologically or politically prepared to deal with it. The coast has a history of dealing with this. Once some order is restored and basic needs are met, I’m sure that they will find ways to rebuild. We always have before.

Be Well,

Kenya

This piece below I lifted from Daily Kos. I don’t think Osama Bin Laden could have done more than this to us. Our sensibilities and priorities have been hijacked. I mean how loud do the wake up calls have to get?

Paul Krugman was good today in the NYTimes “A Can’t Do Government” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02krugman.html

Yahoo news story “New Orleans Doctors Plead for Help” http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050902/ap_on_re_us/katrina_hospitals_hk1 puts an exclamation point on how unprepared we are.

This piece reprinted in today’s Daily Kos from National Geographic is from October 2004:

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV “storm teams” warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.

But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however–the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level–more than eight feet below in places–so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn’t–yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City.

- National Geographic, October, 2004

Tragically, I do not foresee federal action as vigorous as that coming because of Katrina. As much as it is desirable, it seems far-fetched that the destruction of New Orleans will be used to rally people in this country or even in the world to address the effects of global warming/climate change and to address our relationship to the land we live upon. On a more local scale, will the personal and financial resources needed for life to be reinvested in the city, the home of so many? New Orleans is our American Holland.

‘Mandatory Evacuation’ of the city should mean that public transportation should have been made available to residents who were too poor to leave. If the governer expects the superdome to be evacuated in two days that begs the question of why she couldn’t have arranged that two days before the storm hit ???

Plans should have been in place for this. New Orleans is too important for this to be put together on the fly.

This is the ‘Titanic’ story of our time.

The rich got out – The poor got screwed – and will continue to get screwed for months. Apparently no one in our federal government reads anything anymore.

If the chaos of New Orleans doesn’t end in this unschooled, neo-con era of ignorance I’ll be surprised.

It is sad.

Are these vehicles not SAFE?

I suggested that the government should take on the liability and the response was again that “the government couldn’t handle this liability either.”

Amazing.

And yet as I think about all the work that’s been done, I’m somewhat surprised that we haven’t seen the Katrina equivalent of TsunamiHelp rise to the top. For those of you who may not remember, bloggers from around the world formed an alliance to publish an international blog and clearinghouse of tsunami-related information. Far and away, it was the best resource out there as the horror of the tsunami unfolded. (Full disclosure – I was a contributing blogger on the site, but I joined rather late. All the credit goes to them.)

Why haven’t we see a Katrina-related blog of TsunamiHelp-like proportions? You would think that the US, the birthplace of blogging, would have been able to catalyze a who’s who of bloggers to coordinate information sharing, just as TsunamiHelp did. Instead, we’ve seen a scattering of blogs pop up here and there, doing their best to share information. But it’s distributed and dispersed, with no coordination between them.

Meanwhile, I’ve also noticed that many blogs have gone on with their daily lives as if Katrina never happened. Sure, they may have mentioned it once or twice, but have they posted any Katrina resources? Have they linked to the Red Cross? Have they encouraged people to donate blood? Some, yes. Most, no. Anti-Bush blogs continue to bash Bush, while pro-Bush blogs continue to praise him. Travel blogs continue to talk about travel. Tech blogs talk tech, pet blogs talk pets. Can’t we all just take a break and focus on helping disaster victims for just a moment?

We now live in an age of tagging, RSS and distributed computing. Perhaps we don’t need to have all of these great bloggers posting to one site, or have bloggers focused full-time on the disaster. All we really need is to get as many people as possible using the blogging tools available of them, posting whatever Katrina-related information they’re comfortable with, then use tags and RSS feeds to bring it all together.

Therefore, I’d like to unilaterally declare tomorrow, Friday September 2, as International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day.

If you have a blog, here’s what you can do. Sometime tomorrow, take a break from whatever it is you usually blog about, and post something constructive related to disaster relief. You can keep it topical to your blog: for example, if you usually blog about pets, blog about Noah’s Wish or another entity working to rescue and reunite hurricane-affected pets with their families. Or, you can just dedicate blog space to listing websites where people can donate money (maybe even challenge people to match your donation), or share a story of a hurricane survivor. This goes for photo bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers as well – there’s no reason why this should be text-only.

For those of you outside of the US, you could post about a disaster relevant to your community. Post lists of supplies needed for victims of yesterday’s stampede in Baghdad. Post an update on how your family is recovering from the tsunami. Post multi-lingual resources for African families in Paris displaced by the recent apartment fires. Blog about whatever you choose, as long as it supports some kind of disaster assistance in a constructive way.

One thing I’d discourage you from doing, though, is making this political. There will be plenty of time for recriminations about who’s to blame, if anyone, for Katrina, and the political ramifications. No doubt this will be a major topic of conversation in the blogosphere, but it can wait. People need help now.

When you’ve posted to your blog, be sure to include a link to this Technorati tag: International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. That way, when people follow that link, they’ll be able to find a collection of all relevant postings published throughout the blogosphere. There will also be an RSS feed on that page, which can be used to aggregate all of the postings and display them on a single webpage. I plan to aggregate them on my Katrina Aftermath blog; you can do the same. (Later, I’ll post a javascript to make it easy for anyone to do this – more soon.) One collection of disaster relief resources, countless bloggers. That’s the power of the blogosphere.

So please join me tomorrow and participate in International Blogging for Disaster Relief Day. Take a break from whatever it is you normally blog about – even if it’s just for one post – and give back to the Net. -andy

Also, to your last point, indeed. Obviously, we’re a rich country. And also, hurricanes are a regular occurence for North America, just as floods are for the Indian subcontinent– whereas last December’s multi-national earthquake/tsunami was almost unprecedented.