Posted on 08/30/2005 10:10:45 PM PDT by My Favorite Headache
It is with heavy heart I write this...
I have finally reconnected with my best friend who is a paramedic who was sent from Georgia 2 days ago to Gulf Port, Mississippi before the hurricane hit.
He just reached me within the last 10 mins via emergency cell phone to tell me he was alive.
Thousands of bodies have been discovered throughout Mississippi in Gulf Port, Waveland,Hancock County,Bay of St.Louis.
They are hanging in trees and they are pulling them out 30 at a time. Entire families found drowned in their homes and washing up on shore.
The stories he could tell me were brief. National Guard is on the scene and arresting anyone seen on the streets.
The numbers are staggering and what I have been told tonight will shake people to their foundation as the numbers will be coming out in the next 24-hours of just how many people have actually perished in these and 3 other beach communities.
More to follow....
Prayers. I hope it isn't true that so many thousands may have lost their lives, but I fear that it is true.
Dear Heavenly Father, all praise, glory and honor to Thy Holy and Matchless Name. Please bless, and have mercy on the ones waiting to be rescued, please bless the sick, afflicted, orphaned, and widowed, bless the loved ones waiting for news of those in harm's way. Please grant wisdom and guidance to those in positions of authority as decisions are made about how to handle this tragedy, please bless those, in whatever capacity, who are coming to the aid of the victims of this disaster. Help us to be the instruments of Thy goodness to our fellow man. Please bless the good, and thwart the evil, and bless us, as a nation, to seek Thy face and do Thy will, for in Christ's precious and Holy Name I pray, Amen
Thank you for posting the Slidell thread. I just left it and am sickened.
I trust your message but I really don't want to believe this.
I wonder if the same thing has happened in New Orleans and the mandatory evacuation is to somehow prevent people (and camera crews) from seeing this.
Sad ping for later.
I was amazed by that myself. I've been in an evacuation where the opposite lanes were reversed and opened.
See post 460. Seems ~2/3 stayed along the MS coast. Once the storm hit, it was dark. They thought they were safe inside. Then the pounding waters came and rose up and the buildings fell apart. THose bodies in the trees weren't blown there. They were caught like fish by a net out of the water.
This should have been made clear to the folks along the coast. I don't think they appreciated what this surge is.
Re: Slidell - On another thread, I read where the Lake had claimed everything south of Gause Blvd in Slidell. If you were south of Gause, you're underwater. Gause to Old Spanish Trail, a little better. Old Spanish Trail to I-12, better. North of I-12, some got through it okay. All in all, not a good prognosis for the city which is mostly south of I-12. There was a picture of the I-10 bridge near an overpass that was "Big Isle" south or something like that south of Slidell and the interstate bridge was in sections.
Yah, this idiot was really whacked. It was amazing.
Read what ARCADIA wrote in post #268 and relay that to your friends. It captures the "why" very well.
I agree. If this was divine vengeance for Mardi Gras titty-flashing, the storm would have made landfall thirty miles more to the west, hitting New Orleans with the 30-foot storm surge from the onshore winds of its northeastern eyewall.
As it was, the Sodom of the South got off comparatively easily, and it was the god-shouters of Mississippi, the buckle on the Bible Belt, that got the brunt of it.
It's pointless to speculate further on the motives of the Almighty. These things can be soothed, but not explained, by faith.
-ccm
Right up until mere hours before the hit, virtually all of the attention was focused on New Orleans. I'm afraid a large percentage of people in Gulfport/Biloxi/Pascagoula were watching the news with a feeling of sympathy for New Orleans, not seriously aware of the fact that they too were in great peril. Plus, a lot of people in that area survived Camille. Along with that came an attitude of "if I survived that, I'll survive anything." Sadly, not so. I think the numbers are gonna be horrendous.
MM
Not to cast aspersions at your friend, Headache, but I ain't buying into his story. While the toll will surely go up sharply when efforts turn from rescue to recovery, his observations sound way out of line. Such numbers would certainly have to come from storm surge area, and there are enough reporters pestering enough people that there would be at least a few who would do their damndest to emulate Gunga Dan, and scream the story to the world, after pumping up the figures by a factor of at least 3 of course.
Time to suspend United States foreign aid until further notice.
is there a precedent for this?
What, exactly, do you expect from "the media?" Reliable numbers of deaths simply do not exist, because the governments involved are, rightly, more involved in rescuing the living than accounting for the dead.
Remember now long it took to get an accurate accounting of the dead from the 9/11 attacks? Weeks. This is a few orders of magnitude past that, hundreds of times as many potential victims and survivors spread over millions of times as much area.
If you don't have the full picture reported to you in the first two days, you'll just have to learn to live with that. This is a cataclysm, and it wil take governments at every level time to sort it out. Don't blame the media for not reporting what nobody knows.
How did you make out?
agreed Russian has made ovatures of help ealier today, but that has been the only one that I have heard.
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