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?
And a NO police station has been attack all night, Fort Apache!
EXACTLY!
They should be shot down without an ounce of mercy and then disposed of in the swamps...after all, gators need food too.
Amen!
And why don't you 'have any bootstraps'? BECAUSE WHITEY DIDN'T GIVE YOU ANY.
I remember hearing that my great-grandfather, who came over from Germany to Winnipeg, said that not only were the streets not paved with gold, they were not even paved and he had to do the paving. I don't think anybody who came over with the pioneers lasted long by sitting on the bank of the river and whining for goodies.
Thinking about it, this is one city that desperately needed an evacuation plan. Did it have one?
Once these folks are re-located to another city they won't be leaving. When December rolls around, the Houston Astro Dome will still be full of people. These are not people who are used to taking care of themselves. They are the chronically un-employed. They are uneducated, unskilled and lack motivation. They have lived on government assistance for generations. The small checks that they receive are supplemented with food stamps, free housing, WIC, Medicaid, food pantries, and I could go on and on. Those people who can take care of themselves either evacuated before the storm or have made other arrangements for their long term needs. I'm not sure that Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas have enough government housing available for the long term. The residents of these cities who are already taking advantage of government housing and programs are now going to have to compete with the N.O. people and they won't be happy. Other cities have to step up to the plate now and take some of these people.
,,,and Amen! The looters were shown before conditions reached the level they have now sunk too. With smiles on their faces only too happy to join in the mardi gras like festivities. My comment to the TV, is where the heck are they gonna take this stuff, on the bus out of town? Before this is over I'm thinking everyone is going to have to leave.
LOL..perhaps the ULTIMATE Freudian slip of the week..congrats
There were reports that many/most of the city's busses (not counting the school busses) were under water now, not having been used to assist in the "mandatory evacuation" prior to the storm. Those reports have stopped now, but I wonder how many people would still be alive if the city's evacuation plan had used the busses to convey people out of town - or at least to the railroad station.
There's a lot of politicians crying about what hasn't happened in order to cover up for what should have happened, IMO.
Bingo. The most common cause of poverty is the unwillingness to plan ahead.
We don't. But, we'll manage.
There certainly are a host of poverty causes, not the least of which is the willingness of government to keep contributing through welfare. What a choice of words to describe what this disaster isn't. We don't hear about the self sufficient who haven't lost the ability to work, think, prepare, and take care of their own, REGARDLESS OF FINANCIAL CONDITION. Poor is a condition levied by government, not by the mind of the individual.
I thought the same thing. Permanent refugee camps in the USA? Isn't that what the ghettos are anyway?
They should have put their stores up in the attic with them - of course many lost their attics.
People in the Superdome were told to bring five days of food and water - a family of six would have needed to carry fifteen gallons, minimum. And a family so prepared would have to give it up to the unprepared or have it taken.
The government should have been in their with water right after the storm. Their is a swimming pool on the roof of a tall building near the Dome - it would be a source of drinkable water.
Don't they have anyone one looking at the satellite photos, surveying what their is to work with?
With the looking, mayhem, rape and murder escalating, how much you want to bet the liberal media stops portraying this as a race issue?
As many times as I have denigrated New Yorkers for their politics, I don't for a minute think they would stand to live under the conditions you describe, they would do something about it and sooner rather than later. I'm quite sure they would leave the city, before conditions caused them to succumb to lawlessness.
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