Posted on 09/02/2005 3:25:22 AM PDT by jimbo123
A great city has descended into chaos. In much of New Orleans yesterday, food and water remained in short supply. Medical help was nowhere to be found. And answers were impossible to come by.
Then hope ran out and it was the biggest loss of all.
At the city's convention center, a frustrated and angry mob rioted, furious that they had been dumped at a place where there was no food, no water and no one in charge.
At the Superdome, fights broke out in the huge crowd that assembled on an upper parking deck. The crowd jostled for position and hoped eventually to get on a bus to somewhere - anywhere.
Children cried.
Women fainted.
A man who asked for a cigarette got beaten with a pipe.
"People are hysterical. I'm scared. I'm upset," said Gloria Charles, 53, a school custodian.
Charles had walked to the Superdome in waist-high water with her five daughters, six grandkids, six nieces and nephews. They took turns keeping her mother, a 72-year-old amputee, afloat on an air mattress.
Her mother was taken away a day earlier for medical treatment.
"Now we're going to Houston" to the Astrodome, said Charles. "Where will she be?"
As if things weren't bad enough, a rumor soon shot through the crowd that another hurricane was brewing in the Atlantic. It even had a name: Hurricane Leo.
The anxious lines of people pushed against a National Guard barricade, sweaty and screaming and wishing it was all a bad dream.
But compared to the convention center, the Superdome was at least controlled chaos.
Daily News photographer Mike Appleton and I heard there was a riot under way at the convention center and headed over there.
As we walked past the Windsor Court hotel, we were stopped by a female state trooper. "Y'all came over here without guns? Don't go there. Don't go there unless you have a machine gun around your neck. We pulled our troops out because the civilians have taken over. We don't have the manpower to deal with them," she said.
But Mike and I decided to press on. This is a story the world needs to hear.
We passed a family next - three women and two men - frying chicken on a street corner. One of the men, wearing a 9-inch knife on his belt, wished us luck.
"Y'all better be strapped," he said as we walked by - strapped being slang for armed. The scene at the convention center was wild; the fury palpable. The people looked far more desperate and far more desolate than those at the Superdome.
"There's nobody of authority here," said A.G. Norton, 48. "They left us here under the impression that they weren't going to put us in the Dome because of the conditions there. But what about the conditions here?"
There was no food or water and not a cop or a soldier to be seen. And overnight, I was told, 10 people had died.
I was skeptical of the claim and a man took me to a massive refrigerator in the center's kitchen.
Eight bodies were inside, though there was no power to keep the refrigerator on. I found the other two corpses around the back, on a loading dock.
The body of an elderly woman sat in a wheelchair covered with a red-and-blue checkered cloth. Her feet stuck out and had blood on them. Next to her was a woman wrapped in a white sheet.
A little while later, we heard the thump-thump-thump of a helicopter and a Black Hawk dropped from the gray sky into the parking lot. The mob rushed the copter, swarming it before it even had a chance to land.
The soldiers inside opened the doors and pushed out cases of water and boxes of MREs - meals ready to eat. People pushed. People yelled. The old folks and kids grabbed what they could. The young men made out best, though some were willing to share their bounty. Others just kept what they had claimed and shouldered their way through the crowd.
Claudia Sims, 54, watched from the side, her six grandkids all around her. They hadn't eaten in 24 hours.
"I can't compete with these people," she said.
One of her little granddaughters waded into the throng and came back with a smile on her face.
"Grandma, I got food!"
In her tiny hand was her bounty - a single MRE.
Three minutes after landing, the copter lifted off and rose into the air.
I have seen such scenes before, but always on television and always from faraway places. In Third World nations, but not here.
As I watched the copter go, I thought to myself:
Can this really be happening in America?
Boy, you got that right. It is sickening.
find later bump
They probably are turning them around at gunpoint now that the situation has spiralled out of control, but was that happening last week - even on Friday, Saturday?
Anyway, if that was me and mine, I hope I'd be able to leave the main roads and try to use back roads. "Adapt, improvise, overcome" and all that.
BTW, what is the gas situation in Orlando? I'm supposed to drive there next Thursday!! Here in the Atlanta area it was blind panic on Wednesday, some stations ran out. This morning I heard second-hand that distributors are on allocation but that the pipelines expect to be back in full operation early next week.
Put a real general in charge
Why aren't these people being organized to work and help instead of being allowed to layabout and terrorize women and children.
How were they to evacuate without cars? How? In cities with public transportation many people don't own cars, particularly poor people. So tell me how were they supposed to get out? How? You also assume that if all of these people had cars that it would have been possible to leave. Traffic in every direction was stopped in the day before the hurricane.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is in charge of disaster relief. A significant portion of the state's equipment and guardsmen which could have been used in the immediate aftermath was in Iraq.
From the Department of Homeland Security Webpage:
"Emphasis on Local Response
All incidents are handled at the lowest possible organizational and jurisdictional level. Police, fire, public health and medical, emergency management, and other personnel are responsible for incident management at the local level. For those events that rise to the level of an Incident of National Significance, the Department of Homeland Security provides operational and/or resource coordination for Federal support to on-scene incident command structures."
From reading this, and this has always been my understanding, emergency plans are formulated at the local city and state level.
The City of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana were responsible for having a plan in place to evacuate. Given that they live in the path of Hurricanes, and are below sea level, with levees that are only rated to withstand CAT5 hurricanes, why they did not have a plan is a good question.
The US Government is not well suited to formulating customized evacuation and emergency plans for every single locality around the United States. The local governments know best how to do that, and the document at the Department of Homeland Security seems to make clear that sentiment.
DHS gets involved when an emergency is declared, according to this statement from DHS quoted above. Now, does each locality have a responsibility to FEMA to have a plan in place? Do they have a requirement for a "plan" in order to receive certain kinds of Federal funding for anything from road construction to school money?
By the way, I hadn't heard a "significant" portion was in Iraq, but I haven't glued myself to the television, either. How is "significant" defined? Do you know how much of the Louisiana National Guard was in Iraq and Afghanistan? How much of their equipment is over there? Is it all of it, 50%, what? Does that provide an excuse for whatever personnel who remained in Louisiana not doing their job? Did the local leadership just forget to ask?
I meant to say, levees that are only rated to handle CAT3 hurricanes...
The National Guard is commanded by the Governor. The mayor was the person responsible for evacuating everybody and he didn't do a very good job. The city police could have been used to clear a route for public buses to pick up the poor, elderly, and infirmed. The local authorities failed miserably to plan for something that has been forseen for decades. Yes, FEMA is in charge of disaster relief, but there are state agencies that serve the same purpose and should have been in charge of the situation first. From what I have heard, the LA Nat'l Guard units that are deployed to Iraq are infantry units. I don't think they have much equipment that would be very useful for this situation.
Actually, a comentary by Robert D Raiford on the Big Show, John Boy and Billy morning radio show, was what reminded me of the saying.
However, I did like Natasha......
Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for Louisiana
The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.
The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in the parishes of Allen, Avoyelles, Beauregard, Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Caldwell, Claiborne, Catahoula, Concordia, De Soto, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Evangeline, Franklin, Grant, Jackson, LaSalle, Lincoln, Livingston, Madison, Morehouse, Natchitoches, Pointe Coupee, Ouachita, Rapides, Red River, Richland, Sabine, St. Helena, St. Landry, Tensas, Union, Vernon, Webster, West Carroll, West Feliciana, and Winn. Specifically, FEMA is authorized to identify, mobilize, and provide at its discretion, equipment and resources necessary to alleviate the impacts of the emergency.
Debris removal and emergency protective measures, including direct Federal assistance, will be provided at 75 percent Federal funding.
Representing FEMA, Michael D. Brown, Under Secretary for Emergency Preparedness and Response, Department of Homeland Security, named William Lokey as the Federal Coordinating Officer for Federal recovery operations in the affected area.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: FEMA (202) 646-4600.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/08/20050827-1.html
The governor declared a state of emergency on August 26th, that triggered the presidential declaration the next day putting FEMA in charge.
I heard a horrible, horrible liberal down the hall from me saying "if we can put a man on the moon why can't we..." and I thought to myself, the country that put a man on the moon died a long time ago.
We had mayor Lee P. Brown who was just as weak and ineffectual as Nagin, but we sidelined him early, let him give press conferences, and the grownups took over.
Texas is different somehow. It's as if we LIKE a challenge. We APPRECIATE an opportunity to rise to the occasion and show what we're made of.
Especially here in Houston. Don't know what that's all about. But, for example, when we won the basketball championships there was no rioting. None. In fact, crime went to ZERO for a couple of days as people celebrated. It was the strangest thing compared to other cities.
Houston is a better place to live than people give it credit for.
The great flood of 1927 led to a huge wave of migration of poor blacks to the big cities of the north.
I keep hearing they could have walked out but I have to disagree with that. You don't start walking out in the open when there's a Cat 4 hurricane blowing in. Not without somewhere to go. Superdome is better than getting caught out in that. Next day maybe when the water started to rist.
Yes, it did. And it was to leave the poor, the elderly and the infirm where they were and to rely on churches to coordinate rides out of town for them.
The very same people that said we should be spending all that space program money on social issues are.........
Spinelsss politicians and their supporters, the people sitting on their roofs waiting on the gubmint to rescue them.
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