I'm so, so sad about this.

[jabberwocky]

I loved New Orleans Can't imagine what's going to happen....

Aid seems to be very patchy. Those who could not leave town were given the option of the convention center or the superdome. Those who went to the superdome (fottball stadium) are now being transferred to a similar venue in Texas, 350 miles away.

Those who chose the convention center seem to be up the creek without a paddle tbh. They aren't getting any help so far, according to news reports. No-one seemed to expect them when they got there.

There have been broadcasts from other centres where people have slept for days on the floor but are now getting 'cots' to sleep in (like camp beds), local church groups are cooking up food and they are getting regular hot meals.

One hospital has been featured a lot. It still had some people in who couldn't be evacuated and food, water ,etc have run out.

One woman phoned into CNN - she and her DH arrived at an hotel in New Orleans to celebrate their wedding anniversay last weekend. They arrived on thursday and stayed at the hotel. They are stil lthere and wanted to let their family know they are still alive but don't know what the next few days will bring as they are waiting to be rescued.

I think lots of people expected to be iaway for a ocuple of days then go home.

DH and I were talking today and said that one thing we've learnt is not to laugh at those 'Be prepared' warnings and if we are ever evacuated, stuff the clean clothes/personal possessoins and carry water and food and something to sterilise water with if possible.

finding vs looting

scary but informative article below - sorry long

September 01, 2005
Hurricane Katrina washed away more than homes and buildings; it also exposed race and class inequities and media bias toward blacks. After the hurricane, news reports showed many New Orleans residents going into closed stores and running away with food, clothes, appliances and guns.
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Here's the million-dollar question: Are white people "finding" something to eat while black people are "looting" for lunch in New Orleans and other flooded areas? Yes, if you look at the mainstream media. Then again, the majority of low-income people in New Orleans are black and many are starving.
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For the world to see, there were too many images, but two stand out-one shot by an AFP/Getty Images photographer and another by The Associated Press (AP)-and each had a different caption when published on Yahoo.com. In the AP photograph, the photo shows a black person with some food. The caption below the picture says he's just finished "looting" a grocery store. The other photo showed two white people with the caption describing how they were "finding" bread and soda from a grocery store, BoingBoing.Net reports. In both pictures, the subjects are swimming, holding food, with no stores in sight.
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The difference in words may be indicative of racial bias in the mainstream media. Christina Pazzanese wrote in a Poynter.org forum for the media-studies organization that in the national "crisis-mode" coverage of the aftermath of Katrina, there have been a number of professional challenges for everyone in the media around racial and economic sensitivity. "I am curious how one photographer knew the food was looted by one but not the other ... Should editors in a rush to publish poignant or startling images relax their standards or allow personal or regional biases to creep into captions and stories?" Pazzanese asks. We all should be asking that question too.
Yes, most of those left behind in that flooded city are poor, black people. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that New Orleans is 67.3 percent black and 28.1 percent white. Columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson on BlackNews.com said the looting, though deplorable, put an ugly face on the millions of Americans who grow poorer and more desperate. While criminal gangs, who always take advantage of chaos and misery to snatch and grab whatever they can, did much of the looting, many desperately poor, mostly black residents, saw a chance to take items and food they can't afford. New Orleans, Ofari Hutchinson writes, has one of the highest poverty rates of any of America's big cities, and many people live in the most dilapidated, deteriorated housing in the nation.

Many are criticizing the decision to have troops focus on capturing looters instead of helping to rescue thousands of refugees who soon will die of hunger and thirst. The looters may as well take advantage of the food that would rot anyway, they say, as people who are starving and left with no other option but to take the food.
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Dante Lee of BlackNews.com comments, "As for the stealing of TVs and DVD players, I would agree that this is inexcusable. However, food and drinks are critical to their survival. But these aren't the only necessities in life - What about baby diapers, toilet tissue, shoes, dry clothes? People have to do what they can to survive."

The floods wash away the surface of society and expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the inequalities.
In 1900, another great storm hit the United States, killing more than 6,000 people in Galveston, Texas. The storm exposed racial animosities, and there were (false) stories of blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas's leading port.
Then in 1927, the Mississippi flood rumbled down on New Orleans. During that time. blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north, Brooks writes.

I feel terrible when I see and hear the news about New Orleans.

expat, I wanted to say about your post lower down that I found New Orleans to be a magical place too. I visited and stayed in the French Quarter about 9 years ago, went to a fantastic concert featuring the Neville Brothers' sister (can't remember her name); visited the cemetery where the "witch of New Orleans" is buried (all the marble graves above ground because of the water just below ground level); ate at the Pelican Club; saw Anne Rice's house on Charles Avenue, etc etc. We also travelled around Lousisiana to Lafayette, Baton Rouge and Cajun Country (ate the crawfish). It was one of the best experiences I've had. Everyone was really kind to us, love that Southern humour.

Have just gotten word from my alumni association that over 100 optometrists have lost everything. Dh and I are offering our guest room but it just seems so small, everything is starting to hit home with me now. I've been able to function better than dh this week but can feel my reserve starting to crumble.

/link{http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03dowd.html?th&emc=th\New york Times}

New York Times piece

sorry, but it is to a considerable extent mr bush's fault that so many people are sufferring. unlike clinton and his dad he has allowed building and development on wetlands, which will have exacerbated this problem and despite NO being hit by a huge hurricane being an inevitability, in fact being predicted as one of the most likely events to happen in the US in 2001, he cut funding for flood defences.

media bias against black people 'looters' is awful but totally predictable and typical.

i'm afraid that this is a case of chickens coming home to roost (vis the above and also deployment of thousands of national guard to iraq).

however, none of that means that the victims of this are not worthy of our aid...in America the gulf between rich and poor is far far bigger than in this country as opposed to what someone wrote below, and the government, and in particular this government do not take care of the poorest people. some would argue that they do the opposite (see kanye west's outraged diatribe against govt orders to shoot to kill looters in NO yesterday).

sorry jaberwocky, the maureen o'dowd piece says it all really...except that i'm more cynical than she is and would call it incompetence underpinned by greed, arrogance and evil.

alux, similar black/white comparison piece by Darryl Pinckney in the Guardian.

The slant is so obvious.

State government, people. The vast majority of ALL governing in America is the responsibility of the individual states. Federal monies - drawn from taxes mostly - is allocated to states annually for them to carry out a variety of functions. Including things like levee and road maitenance and state guards. Monies are allocated on basis of population and a variety of other factors.

When you commit a crime, you stand trial in a state court and go to a state prison if convicted, unless it's a federal crime - which is basically a crime that occurred across state borders - such a postal fraud.

Disaster relief monies were approved by Congress BEFORE the storm hit so that the states affected by the hurricane could access funds, obstensibly for things like evactuation, mobilising the national guard, beefing up generators, etc.

But this obviously wasn't done in Louisiana. And now a lot of neighbouring states, particularly Texas, which is taking on a lot of the refugees and having to use funding allocated for use on its occupants, are wondering why. This is first and foremost a state's responsibility. 'The feds' - the US government -only comes in where necessary when a state has failed in its duty to serve its residents, as has happened here.

I grew up in Texas myself. Louisiana has a long history of corruption, crime, poverty, and indifference. Leave the French Quarter and watch out! b/c it's been 'lawless' for a long, long time, and anyone who knew anything about the place was aware of that.

They had no plans. And where'd the monies go? No one can figure that out. And you're hearing next to nil from state officials in the press just now. I'm surprised the governor was located, considering none of the casinos is statnding anymore.

Many of the comments on these various threads are about how much of the suffering following the hurricane has happened to the poorest people (mainly African American) in the most deprived circumstances. The following anecdote may or may not be relevant here, but I thought I would share it anyway.

About a month before the hurricane, I took an internal flight in America (to California) and sat next to an African American woman on the airplane. Initially we spoke about our children. She then went on to tell me the purpose for her trip. She had moved away from her southern rural hometown (Tennessee/Mississippi border) about 12 years earlier. She went to university, had her own career, married an army doctor and lives a very different type of life to the way she was brought up.

Part of her life change was the establishing of a very active political life. She strongly feels that the way to create opportunity/affect change for the citizens of her dead end southern American hometown was to motivate them to be active politically. By using the power of their political "voices", she felt perhaps she could help them begin to rid themselves of the feelings of hopelessness, and begin to plant the seeds of real change in their lives/community.

Off her own back (and using her own finances), she organised an event in her small west Tennessee hometown. She rented out the town hall, brought in catered food, provided entertainment - all with the purpose of registering voters in a community that has historically not participated in local/national politics.

There was quite a bit of advance publicity and interviews, flyers around town, etc for the event. She was shattered to tell me that on the day of the event, only 10 people showed up. (She was incredulous that even the offer of free food and entertainment had failed to motivate people to turn up for a worthy cause.) When she asked old friends, family members, acquaintances why they hadn't bothered, and didn't want to be empowered through votes to aim for a different sort of life - they looked at her blankly and said "It doesn't matter. Why do you care?"

Yes, I think many of the poor in the southern states have been badly let down by the politicians who are accustomed to catering to a different sort of voter. There is no justification or excuse for how the poor have been treated in the aftermath of the hurricane.

But, at least in this one example (my acquaintance on the airplane), the hopelessness/apathy/resignation from large numbers of the rural African American community does not serve them in any way when it comes to having a voice in the American political landscape. When there is a tragedy of this magnitude, it becomes even more evident that they can far too easily be the "forgotten" citizens.

Have just heard that the area of devastation is roughly equal to the UK!