What about the following words? Are they to be taken with a grain of salt also?
- "We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International, adding that his jurisdiction had been "a closed and secure location" since before the storm hit.
- "All our people had evacuated and we locked the city down," he said.
- "There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people.
- "If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."
- "Evidently, someone on the ground (in New Orleans) was telling people there was transport here, or food or shelter," said Lawson. "There wasn't."
- "We were not contacted by anyone" about the instructions being given to survivors to use the bridge to get out of town, he said.
- "We commandeered public transit buses and we took them to higher and safer ground" at the junction of Interstate-10 and Causeway Boulevard where "there was food and shelter," he said.
Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.
I just don't buy the 'stealing our food, using a helicopter to destroy our shelter stuff.'