Oh, and another thing?

[kyburg]

I can't imagine anything being much more terrifying that being told you have to sit inside a covered arena in the near-dark after the power is lost, during the strongest hurricane in forty years - and you can't leave, go anywhere or do anything about it because you can't afford it.

And then multiply that by multitudes if you are too elderly and frail, as well as broke.

You want suckage, that's about pegs the meter in my book.

Katrina, huh.

If she had a face, she'd look like Ann Coulter.

Comments

[loveanddarkness.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking of this last night and I said to myself "Self, New Orleans has a buttload of boats." Couldn't they have put some people on boats and gone upriver? I mean, even the tourist boats could have ferried people out of there. The city should be empty right now. I mean, if it can't be saved in the face of the storm, then the only thing that can be saved is lives.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I gave that a moment this morning after Jim proposed that the government commandeer the Greyhound fleet to get the flock out of Dodge.

Greyhound is probably running at capacity already - full of people who could pay to use them. All of the available transportation services are probably full to bursting being used by people who could pay to leave.

Another liability to being less than greedy. You can get left behind if you can't pay to keep up.

I'm of two minds about the poor, indigent, sick and elderly being left behind like this. One, being Christian (and a student of a number of other belief systems), I've been taught that you don't do this. It's one of the things you have to remember not to do - because the World is like that. It leaves the lesser of our society in the dust -

And the other mind is that our conventional wisdom, which claims to be Christian - isn't - and this is the proof of it. People are going to be left behind - and the justification is that it was their own fault.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have to speak up about this, and defend New Orleans about their handling of the situation. There are 1.3 M people living in the NO metropolitan area. When the storm finally made landfall, maybe 200,000 were left, and they were all rushed to shelters such as the Superdome. And yes, the city took it upon themselves to reserve most busing facilities for the elderly and sick, because if they left it up to private companies to help bus people out, the companies would have gone for the "quick buck built on panic" angle. Moreover, from what I understand, most of the people who stayed behind were too old and sick to survive being bussed out, which means that the Superdome was their best shot at survival.

The problem isn't so much that there are people who are too poor, too old, and who nobody cares about. The problems, as I see them, with evacuating New Orleans, no matter, what are:
1. There are very few ways out of New Orleans by car. The backups on the highways that you folks have seen plastered all over the news happen even when people are leaving the city for a Category 2 storm. Hell, getting to the I-10/I-55 exchange on a normal day outside of rush hour can still be pretty tedious. But there is nothing that can be done about that, because to literally build more highways out of New Orleans, the only place to build them would be around the town, on the gulf itself, which would render them useless before a hurricane hit anyway (to mention only the most practical reason).
2. Besides, some long time residents of New Orleans are really proud of their homes, and are deeply attached to them. We know of a few people who had the means, the ability, and plenty of opportunity to leave, and still decided not leave their homes behind. We're worried about them, but there's nothing we or anyone could have done to convince them to leave. For better or for worse, telling them to leave while admonishing that they couldn't come back to help clear out their homes for days was asking too much, at least to them.
3. Not everyone can leave, period. My husband's sister has childhood friends who are now in the medical professions and in the armed forces. Both groups had to stay behind no matter what because of the aforementioned people who were too sick or stubborn to leave. So a lot of those people who were left behind: they had no choice, and were staying for the most noble reason of all, to care for others. So anyone saying "it was their own fault for waiting too long" are not so much lacking conventional wisdom, as they are rather ignorant about the situation itself.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

That said, do you know if they moved patients out of the hospitals to the Superdome? My mind can't get around that. It just can't. Anyone too sick to move, even by ambulance, has no business in a shelter situation like that one. Head just won't process the data. That's nothing short of heinous.

Leaving by car is one thing - I'm with kimonthejourney - boats? Upstream? Possible?

And people in the rescue services are there for a reason, and by choice. Having to stay because you can't leave by your own choice? Those are the cases I hate seeing labeled "it was their own fault for being lazy/stupid/broke/etc." You understand.

I wonder if we'll ever know much about how good a shelter the Superdome was, after all. Crisis is over, if you're watching the national news....

[ersatzinsomnia.livejournal.com]

do you know if they moved patients out of the hospitals to the Superdome?

A google of "New Orelans hospital Katrina" gets you here:

http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/

Just do a search for "hospital" and you'll find that they did not evacuate patients (or not all of them, it's unclear) from the hospital to the superdome, as the doctors and nurses were still watching over them. The hospitals would have made for terrible shelters for any large number of people, though, as it notes the windows blowing out in five floors.

[turandot.livejournal.com]

Well... From what I understand, there's at least two hospitals in downtown NO that are only steps from the superdome, so it stands to reason that some patients were moved to the highest floors of those buildings, and others might have been moved to the Superdome.

Even as NO is pretty much built on the gulf, it's not, structurally speaking, the same as Venice, or Amsterdam: most of the waterways or canals that existed in it originally have since been filled, paved, or built over. They're hardly navigable. The NO port on the Mississippi is actually not near the city's downtown, but about 20 miles west of the city, connected by it by causeways (i.e., tall bridges going over swamp land)

So that's where structures such as the Superdome that can compensate for the fact that NO is on average 7 feet under the sea level become emergency shelters.

The Superdome is pretty sound, structurally speaking, and it's very wide, so to afford a lot of room per person, not to mention the fact that aside for a couple of five star hotels in the area, it is the only building over 25 stories or so, being one of the newer buildings in town. New Orleans is a very old town, with very old buildings, most of them historically relevant enough where one can't necessarily get a permit to demolish them, and put more high rises in place. Sure, pieces of the Superdome's roof roof fell off because it got dumped on by waves of water making their way inland, rain, and winds that were out of the norm, but most any buildings in the area other than the Superdome would and probably have imploded on themselves under the same pressure it managed to withstand for several hours.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the choice of the Superdome as one of the 10 or so shelters within New Orleans and Jefferson Parishes makes a lot more sense than national newscasters are probably conveying on TV, based on their own half assed impressions of what the town is and is not like (the only reason I am pretty sure gathering in the Superdome makes a lot more sense than to stay in most hotels or office/hospital buildings is because I've been to visit several parts of town over the last five years, so I've got a pretty good idea of where I'd want to be, were I there and unable to leave).

As for rescue services, paramedics and doctors, a friend of my husband's sister was on call on Sunday, and told her on the phone Sunday afternoon that she couldn't possibly leave in the middle of her shift, and she was unlikely to be able to pack up and leave safely on Monday morning with the storm so closeby, so she might as well stay and help. I would hardly call that having a choice (i.e., their reason to stay is also what makes the choice to stay unavoidable).

[sliderkta.livejournal.com]

In my experience with floods, when the govt says get out, the police and the military are both sent door-to-door to get everyone out and evacuated(even if it was risky for them to be moved!). I've even seen resistant people get temporarily arrested and carried out while screaming and yelling.

I was shocked when the mayor AND the govornor of Louisianna didn't do that. Ditto for Mississippi and Alabama. Pres. Bush could of enacted martial law with his executive order privilage that he loves so much.

There was a week notice that Katrina was coming. The Hurricane center announced via media that a CATAGORY 5 hurricane was coming. Plus, the leaders of these three states know the physical conditions of these areas better than anyone else. For instance, the leaders of Lousianna knew about that New Orleans was a below sea level city. It doesn't take a meteorologist to figure out what could happen in a Catagory 5 storm.

Plus, they could of looked at the history of another city with a simillar problem in the past: Seattle, WA. A hundred years ago, that place (a gold rush town then) was below sea level and was occasionally flooded by the Puget Sound. With the help of the natives, the people knew when to run to the hills. Eventually, old Seattle was covered in concrete and the current Seattle we know, was raised above sea level and built on top of the old ruins.

As for the private companies argument, Pres. Bush hired mercenaries and private companies when he started the Iraq War. He's plenty comfy with hiring private companies and corporations, and he's got tons of connections due to his upbringing. His family is one of money and influence in the rich circles. He's officially got no excuse and God knows it. My family knows how the Bushie dynasty works.

Looking back at the New Orleans history, this isn't the first time the black people have been attacked like this. In 1927, the black people here were put in concetration camps to build a giant dam for rich white people. After the 1960s' hurricane, more black were forced by military to plug up the levies because it was too dangerous for the soldiers. Lots of black people died in these instances. And it explains the desperate acts seen on the news too. I don't condone looting, but I understand why these people felt so desperate to steal and fight each other.

And let me add on too that the US govt. responded faster to the 2004 Asian Tsunami than to this event. I have family who work at WorldVision and a roommate who was in Thailand when the waves hit. They can confirm that. The US military dropped packages to impossible to get to areas that were hard hit a couple days after the tsunami.

I could go on and on. However, I shall end it here... for now.

--Kadiya

Well

[turandot.livejournal.com]

I generally agree with you on most of that (especially re: the left behind and forgotten just being pissed at being let down once again), with two small caveats:

1. My in-laws are from there. From what I understand, New Orleans is a very poor town, with very many special needs, run on a shoestring budget. While I'm beginning to think that Blanco had her head up her ass some of the time, I'm loathe to blame the mayor for what happened because, simply put, local government did use all the resources they had on hand (minus the defection of some police officers who, as I understand, bolted out of town as fast as could be, and should be ashamed of themselves). Besides, it had gotten to the point where so many suggested evacuations were called over the past two years for storms that hit nowhere near the town that the only fault I could find with Nagin is that he upgraded evacuations orders from suggested to mandatory a day too late, perhaps wanting to avoid looking foolish to his constituents (or as my mother in law told us the Friday before Katrina hit: "they always say to evacuate, and then it passes right over us"), and

2. That is because Katrina was not upgraded to a Category 4 until Friday night, at which point my husband and I started telling our relatives who are in the area to please leave there and then (and they still didn't until the mayor called for a mandatory evacuation on Sunday morning - see above). Believe you me, I remember this because given said relatives, my husband actually checks the National Hurricane Center's website for hourly bulletins whenever any hurricane above Category 2 is set to hit the gulf coast.