Posted on 09/08/2005 7:59:09 PM PDT by Crackingham
Here at the edge of the disaster area, anger competes fiercely with incalculable sadness for preeminence in my psyche. I may live in Mobile now; I may live, someday, in — who knows? — Timbuktu; but New Orleans will always be home.
It was in New Orleans, and nearby Pass Christian, Miss., that I spent joyous, endless weeks, summer after summer. Pass Christian was Ground Zero for Hurricane Camille in 1969, the strongest (in terms of sustained wind speeds) hurricane in American history, a storm that left nothing of my grandparents’ house but the brick front steps and a couple of silver forks — and yet what Camille did to The Pass (as we New Orleanians call it) was almost nothing compared to what Katrina did to it. At least two-thirds of the town has been wiped from the face of the Earth. Not just damaged homes: nonexistent homes. In some places, the only thing left is the slabs of concrete that served as foundations. Most places don’t even offer rubble — everything is gone, probably five miles out in the Gulf. I tried to pick through what rubble remained, but found nothing personal, nothing identifiable, where once stood the homes of friends and family where I had spent so many weeks, so many Thanksgivings, so many Fourths of July, so many days amid wondrous live oak trees and sea breezes and an easy, unhurried atmosphere. In terms of actual storm damage — wind, storm surge, etc. — The Pass got Katrina worst of all; and what remains is covered with muck and stink and sadness.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
I just had what is probably a very unoriginal thought reading this--a thought that I have neither read nor heard in the coverage.
He mentions much of the "stuff" washed 5 miles out to sea. If stuff was washed out, what about bodies? And if they did, will they wash back in again or start surfacing? Horrible thoughts.
Has anyone heard anything on this?
vaudine
fish eat.
fish probably getting fat about now.
horrible, but that's the way of things.
Well, it starts out well, and then he starts to lash out at Bush and everyone else. Sadness at losing your home and your childhood memories is one thing; throwing political blame at people who don't deserve it is something else.
No doubt irrational anger is one of the stages in dealing with loss. But why was this Bush-bashing rant published in National Review?
anybody, anybody at all, who defends the response of FEMA and of President Bush in my presence or the presence of any New Orleanian is likely to get punched
Grow up. And if you think that Ray Nagin is a "good Mayor," you are mentally ill in the first place.
They need to know that pundits across the country who asked why New Orleans and Louisiana didn’t themselves prepare for such a storm have no idea what they’re talking about, for the city and state have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into coastal wetland restoration and water-pumping stations and complicated engineering — but the feds have repeatedly failed to deliver promised matching funds,
The Bush administration has given far more federal dollars to Louisiana than your hero Clinton did. Maybe if Louisiana didn't spend the money on casinos and bike paths, it might have had better levees.
and have consistently ignored problems (replacing levee funds, for example, which are a life-saving responsibility of the Corps of Engineers, with channel-dredging funds for pork projects for waterways with almost no barge traffic).
Very simply: Congress spends federal money. If it's such a priority, then Louisiana's Congressional representatives should have budgeted for it. Period.
They're saying that the Titanic sank because the Carpathia was too slow.
What is wrong with all of these people? Don't they understand "natural disaster"? I can't believe they are all blaming the federal government (read President Bush personally) for a STORM that did more damage than any in our history! What has happened to this country? No sense left obviously.
my daughter's friend in the MS national guard did say that
bodies are washing up on the beach..he has been all over the
coast since the storm
This is an excellent article. Thanks for sharing NO from a long-term resident's slant. I understand the historical growth of New Orleans much better after reading it. These were things that puzzled me.
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