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I am wondering what percentage if the population of the New Orleans area will actually want to go back or stay in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, etc. I am thinking 30-40% set up their lives elsewhere.
True.
But in situations like that I have no problem with people taking things that are essential to survival...which doesn't include plasma TV's. That's my opinion and I'm en led to it whether it's legally acceptable or not.
And those captions weren't about whether looting for essentials was right or wrong, it was the racial aspect of it...and how quick people are to put 2 different captions together by 2 completely different photographers and automatically assume that it's racial and not even consider that there might be any other explaination.
I am wondering what percentage if the population of the New Orleans area will actually want to go back or stay in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, etc. I am thinking 30-40% set up their lives elsewhere.
It's interesting enough that the photographer just ran with his assumption that the bread was "found" without asking -- and the other spokesman who had nothing to do with th e picture at all, simply suggested that the "looting" was witnessed, even thought the "finding" was not. These words are tremendously loaded, and as far as we still know, neither was used with any real knowledge of the cir stances. Damned irresponsible.And those captions weren't about whether looting for essentials was right or wrong, it was the racial aspect of it...and how quick people are to put 2 different captions together by 2 completely different photographers and automatically assume that it's racial and not even consider that there might be any other explaination.
According to the The Weather Channel today 9/04/05:
A broad trough of low pressure extends from the eastern Gulf and across the Bahamas. Convection will continue to fire in this area and tropical development is possible. A low pressure feature in the extreme eastern Bahamas also must be closely monitored for development.
Isn't this similar to how Katrina kinda got started, and in the same general area?
Is this another tropical system preparing to crank up?
Katrina's damage is extending far beyond the physical.
This is true, unfortunately very true. But that always happens with disaasters of this magnitutde.
Out of the tons of interviews I've seen the last 3 days on Fox and CNN, I have seen exactly one person say they couldn't get out due to no gas. Every other person has said "I didn't think it would be this bad."
So, while it's still tragic, once again the government apparently needs to be doing everything for people, right down to thinking and chewing their food for them.
I heard one good thing that is going to come out of this... FEMA has traditionally been a coordinating group for local government. After the trainwreck that is NO and La's evac plans and dealing with the aftermath, FEMA is going to assume responsibility in any large scale disasters here in the US instead of trusting local officials to be competent about it.
Why did you only use the 495K figure? The population of metro New Orleans is over 1.3M.The City and State officials for LA and NO estimated 80% of the city was evacuated...
Now I am not a math genius...but 200,000 is a lot more than 80% of 495,000.
And by the way, poor people don't have five days of non-perishable food in their house to tote with them to the SuperDome. Elderly and sick people can't carry five days of food with them. The request for them to bring five days of food was good in theory. It doesn't work in reality.
From WP:
===========================
Left Behind
THE LACK OF National Guard troops because of the war in Iraq; the Bush administration's failure to protect coastal wetlands; the reorganization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: All have been blamed, somewhat arbitrarily, for the stunning scenes of chaos at the New Orleans Superdome and convention center, for the unprecedented floodwaters in the city, and for the huge numbers of people without food or water. But if blame is to be laid and lessons are to be drawn, one point stands out as irrefutable: Emergency planners must focus much more on the fate of that part of the population that -- for reasons of poverty, infirmity, distrust of officialdom, lack of transportation or lack of information -- cannot be counted on to leave their homes after an evacuation order.
Tragically, authorities in New Orleans were aware of this problem. Certainly the numbers were known. Shirley Laska, an environmental and disaster sociologist at the University of New Orleans, had only recently calculated that some 57,000 New Orleans Parish households, or approximately 125,000 people, did not have access to cars or other private transportation. In the months before the storm, the city's emergency planners did debate the challenges posed by these numbers, which are much higher than in other hurricane-prone parts of the country, such as Florida. Because a rapid organization of so many buses would have been impractical, the city's emergency managers considered the use of trains and cruise ships. The New Orleans charity Operation Brother's Keeper had tried to get church congregations to match up car-owners with the carless, and it had produced a DVD on the subject of hurricane evacuations that was to be distributed later this month. Unfortunately, none of these plans was advanced enough to have had much impact this week.
Instead the city decided to use the Superdome as a "shelter of last resort." Following that decision, a major mistake was made: Not enough food, water or portable toilets were made available to accommodate the enormous number of people who turned up. No one in the federal, state or city governments appears to have been prepared for the possibility that thousands would be forced to stay there nearly a week. With some forethought, the National Guard troops who arrived yesterday could have been en route before, or even immediately after, the storm. Five days was too long to tell people to wait without supplies.
The question now is whether other major U.S. cities have focused on their immobile and impoverished residents to the degree that they should. Much of the emergency preparedness literature that has appeared on the Internet and elsewhere has focused on driving, on evacuation routes and on portable supplies. The events in New Orleans should force homeland security officials across the country to understand that this is not enough: Some thought must also be given to the fate of people who cannot or will not leave. The National Guard and FEMA should anticipate that some will remain behind, and food and water should be set aside for them. If fingers are to be pointed in the wake of this tragedy, this is one direction to point them.
==============================================
no car,
no money,
no bank balance,
no credit/atm cards,
no trust of officials,
no homeowner's/contents insurance,
not willing to walk away from their households and leave them to picked over by the criminals,
no means to hand-carry/roll 5 days of food, toiletries, minimal clothes.
limited mobility (even a lot of northside white people can't walk around HEB without an electric cart)
poor health, physically decrepit, 50+% severely overweight and morbidly obese
The NO poor were lucky, again, to have dodged hurricane Katrina.
What they couldn't dodge was the shrub/Repug govt's willful neglect of the levees over the last 5 years in face of opposition at every govt level and from the US ACoE.
Some of you are s. I dare you to go down to one of the shelters and say to the refugee's faces what you say on this board. Especially you Whottt. I'm sure they'd be very receptive.
Here is some information on the refineries that are down. I thought you all would find this interesting.
Refineries
• Valero Energy Corp.: St. Charles refinery in Norco, La., which produces 260,000 barrels a day remains shut but suffers no serious damage. The refinery is expected to restart on Sept. 12. Currently has no power and access is restricted, the company says. Krotz Springs refinery that produces 86,000 barrels a day is operating at 70% capacity due to trouble getting supply through pipelines, the company said.
• Motiva Enterprises: Norco, La., refinery that produces 225,000 barrels a day remains shut. Limited access to the facility has delayed a damage assessment, Motiva says. The company's Convent, La., refinery also remains shut but has suffered no damage that would affect a restart. Motiva hasn't given an estimate for a restart date.
• Murphy Oil Corp.: Meraux, La., refinery remains shut and has been evacuated. Murphy has no information on damage or a potential restart date and reports worsening flooding in the area.
• Exxon Mobil Corp.: Chalmette, La., refinery that produces 183,000 barrels a day remains shut and evacuated. Exxon has given no information on damage or a potential restart date and reports flooding in the area has worsened. Baton Rouge refinery that produces 494,000 barrels a day is in "cutback mode," operating at reduced rates due to supply problems.
• ConocoPhillips: Alliance refinery in Belle Chasse, La., that produces 255,000 barrels a day remains shut. The company has given no information on damage or a potential date for a restart. Plaquemines Parish reports extensive damage and television reports say there are whitecaps on the water in the streets of Belle Chasse, quoting State Treasurer John Kennedy. Exxon says it is doing flyovers.
• Marathon Oil Corp.: Garyville, La., refinery that produces 245,000 barrels a day remains shut. The company on Tuesday brought additional workers to the plant, which wasn't fully evacuated.
• Chevron Corp.: Pascagoula, Miss., refinery that produces 325,000 barrels a day remains shut and evacuated.
• Premcor: Memphis refinery that produces 190,000 barrels a day is reportedly producing at reduced rates due to crude-oil supply snags.
• Total SA: Port Arthur, Texas, refinery that produces 180,000 barrels a day is running at reduced rates due to a problem with a hydrogen compressor, not the storm.
Tell them what?
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/v...7660915.column
TIM RUTTEN
A warning sent but left unheeded
Tim Rutten
Regarding Media
September 2, 2005
As commentators and public officials survey the morass of loss and desolation that once was a great American city called New Orleans, one of the words we hear and read over and over again is "unimaginable."
In fact, the tragedy that this week destroyed a vibrant metropolitan area that was home to 1.4 million people and the city proper that was a national cultural treasure was not simply imagined but foreseen with a prescience that now seems eerily precise.
These days, media criticism has become a kind of blood sport. One of its prac ioners' most frequently repeated complaints is that mainstream news organizations have become increasingly — if not solely — reactive, retailing the sensation of the moment to an audience hooked on illating irrelevancies.
Well, that didn't happen here.
Three years ago, New Orleans' leading local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio's signature nightly news program, "All Things Considered," and the New York Times each methodically and compellingly reported that the very existence of south Louisiana's leading city was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week. All three news organizations also made clear that the danger was growing because of a series of public policy decisions and failure to allocate government funds to alleviate the danger.
The Times-Picayune, in fact, won numerous awards for John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein's superbly conceived and executed five-part series — that's right, five-part — whose initial installment began with a headline reading: "It's only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable every day." One of the separate stories in that first installment — each part consisted of multiple pieces supported by compelling graphics — began: "The risk is growing greater and no one can say how much greater."
The series' second part began: "It's a matter of when, not if. Eventually a major hurricane will hit New Orleans head on, instead of being just a close call. It's happened before and it'll happen again." In that installment, McQuaid and Schleifstein reported that "a major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.... Evacuation is the most certain route to safety, but it may be a nightmare. And 100,000 without transportation will be left behind.... Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable. But there wouldn't be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins....
"People left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. Others will end up in last-minute emergency refuges that will offer minimal safety. But many will simply be on their own.... Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising waters. Others will be washed away or crushed by debris. Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape and little food or fresh water, perhaps for several days."
Sound familiar?
Later, in August 2002, New York Times reporter Adam Cohen wrote that New Orleans "may be America's most architecturally distinctive and culturally rich city. But it is also a disaster waiting to happen.... If a bad hurricane hit, experts say, the city could fill up like a cereal bowl, killing tens of thousands and laying waste to the city's architectural heritage. If the Big One hit, New Orleans could disappear."
Cohen went on to report that, "So far, Washington has done little and New Orleans' response has been less than satisfying."
The reporter quoted Terry Tullier, head of the city's Office of Emergency Preparedness, as saying, "When I do presentations, I start by saying that 'when the Big One comes, many of you will die — let's get that out of the way.' "
Chilling then; worse now.
A little more than a month later, NPR's "All Things Considered" aired an extended two-part broadcast on New Orleans' peril that was, in its own way, every bit as compelling as the Times-Picayune's series. In its opening sequence, reporter Daniel Zwerdling accompanied scientist Joe Suhayda, a researcher from Louisiana State University, as he used an extending measuring rod to determine how high hurricane-driven flood waters might rise in the French Quarter if a levee gave way. Here's an excerpt from the transcript of what followed:
Suhayda: It's well above the second floor there and it's just about to the rooftop.
Zwerdling: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?
Suhayda: Well, I would say the probability is yes....
Zwerdling: So, basically, the part of New Orleans that most Americans and most people around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear underwater.
Suhayda: It would. That's right.
The NPR report went on to note that none of Suhayda's views were even remotely controversial in the scientific or engineering communities. This was not global warming — or even second-hand smoke. And, as Zwerdling went on to explain with great clarity, there was similar agreement that the steps taken by the federal and state government in earlier years to protect the city from smaller storms and to ensure that the Mississippi River would remain open to commerce had dramatically increased the danger from the inevitable larger storm. It was, in other words, the same conclusion the Times-Picayune's reporters reached.
Both organizations also agreed that a massive — and expensive — overhaul of the levee system was required, if the danger to life and property were to be alleviated.
So what happened in the three lost years between then and now?
Nothing.
And did the mainstream news media simply drop the issue, moving on to the next big thing, another victim of our real epidemic — national deficit disorder?
Not really. Since 2002, when all these reports ran, the Times-Picayune has published no fewer than nine stories reporting that the combination of tax cuts, the war in Iraq and the demands of homeland security had led President Bush's administration to repeatedly reject urgent requests from the Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana's congressional delegation that it allocate the money to save New Orleans.
Today, while Bush personally surveys the consequences of his decisions, the staff of the Times-Picayune — driven from their offices by the flood waters — is busy putting out an electronic edition of a newspaper that, in this instance, has done just what a paper is supposed to do: serve the common good.
Politics may have failed the people of New Orleans. Politicians certainly failed them. They may have failed themselves by not demanding better. But their newspaper and other important segments of the American press did not fail them.
Nowadays, it often seems like every other third person with access to a mike or computer is a press critic, who thinks that their particular beef could be resolved by simply resorting to the good old-fashioned practice of shooting the messenger.
As it turns out, one of the truly unforeseen lessons of New Orleans is that whether you rhetorically gun down the media messengers — or simply ignore them — the result is a self-inflicted, sometimes fatal wound.
Cases of dysentary reported in Biloxi from people drinking & brushing their teeth with water from the pipes.
Speaking of media....I was looking through some pictures and came across this one. Do you think pictures like this should be posted? Do you think it's disrepectful of the dead?
I'm not sure how I feel about the morality of it, but it certainly breaks my heart.
I don't know if it's disrespectful of the dead, but I think it is to the deceased's relatives.
I guess that's what I meant ... I've heard about all of the bodies floating around and we all know they are out there, but it doesn't make it any easier to actually see.
Oh, I agree. And I'd hate for a relative that is looking for a loved one to come across that picture and realize it's them.
John Henry picked up a pair of hiking shoes, a pair of tennis shoes that looked unworn, packs of cigarettes and a variety of spirits, including bottles of cognac and Jack Daniels. "We're looting the people who were looting,'' he said, cackling. "I love it. I have to admit it.''
He also picked up a T-shirt showing the Three Stooges. "Larry, Curley and Moe. I'm keeping this one. It stinks, though,'' he said.
Whottt's got his lips stuck on the administrations azz to the point that he's lost all credibility. That's his main fault; he'd rather prove that he's always been right than discuss the truth of the matter.
Not to do be disrespectful or anything but, what is that on the persons head?
Is it a hat, looks odd if it is.
It looks like his wallet, like perhaps someone took it out of his pocket, removed any of it's contents, and then threw it down on his head.
That's what it looks like to me anyway.
Hopefully it just washed up there.....
What I don't get is why people are so obsessed with figuring out why people didn't leave. Whatever the reasons, the people are there and need rescuing. Every city and federal model of what would happen in a cat 5 hurricane predicted that 20-25% of the population wouldn't heed the warnings. That was a given going into this.
If we were told to evacuate San Antonio, guess what ... 20-25% of the population wouldn't. There's no use in figuring out why.
To me, it makes people feel better if they hear that the N.O. citizens had an opportunity to get out and didn't. To some, it makes the death toll easier to handle.
Sickening.
P.S.
When the day comes and The Big One hits San Francisco and kills thousands and thousands, are these people going to come with there "well they should have gotten out" stance? Doubtful ... even though everyone knows that when the major earthquake hits, thousands if not hundreds of thousands will die.
What is the difference?
The difference is that they knew the hurricane was coming. You can't predict an earthquake.
Apples and oranges.
Or are you going on the premise that people in SF know it will eventually come?
I agree that it's not exactly the same but it's similar. Tomorrow it could strike and destroy the city, no?
Isn't it putting your life in mother nature's hand?
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