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Yeah. The one good thing for that town is that a good portion of it sits about 20 feet or so above the bay, so at least there was some kind of buffer from the initial strike.
Still, .
now see thats ed up.
looting people's houses and radioshack... no excuses.
but looting rite aid, sav-a-lot or the HEB equivelant I don't have a problem with.
Yeah. The one good thing for that town is that a good portion of it sits about 20 feet or so above the bay, so at least there was some kind of buffer from the initial strike.
Still, .
Governor reitterating that evacuation order is STILL in effect for NO and that people are NOT allowed to come back into the city. they are attempting to remove all remaining people from NO.
Sparky,
what's going on in that picture?
oh, never mindI see the Artest jersey
Malice at the Palace
law just went into effect 2 weeks ago.....
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news...-looting_x.htm
Changes stiffen price-gouging, looting laws
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Taking advantage of Louisiana residents during hurricanes and tropical storms becomes a much riskier venture on Monday.
Under this year's legislative change to the state price-gouging law, civil and criminal action can be taken against the providers of goods and services who jack up prices anytime when a named hurricane or tropical storm is either in the Gulf of Mexico or threatening the Gulf.
And another change taking place Monday calls for a minimum three-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of looting during a state of emergency.
Previously, the price-gouging law took effect only when the governor or a parish president declared a state of emergency — an action that usually takes place up to several days after a storm starts threatening the Louisiana coast.
Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Metairie, co-sponsor of the bill, said price-gouging complaints are not numerous, but a problem that requires stern action. The change is designed to protect consumers during times when they are deciding whether to evacuate and what measures to take to guard their property, he said.
"To be taking advantage of people during a time when they are concerned about the safety of their families requires heavier penalties," he said.
Civil action can be taken against price-gougers, including fines and res ution. Criminal penalties range up to six months in jail and $500 in fines for each violation.
The state attorney general's office recently received more than 300 complaints of gasoline price-gouging as Hurricane Dennis moved into the Gulf in July, eventually striking Florida, said agency spokeswoman Kris Wartelle. Those complaints are being investigated. The industry said Dennis hit about the same time that a new record price for oil was reached — and the price jumps would have occurred without the storm.
Also, looting during states of emergency starts carrying heavier penalties on Monday: a three-year minimum prison sentence and up to 15 years. Backers of that bill said fear of being looted was a hindrance to getting storm-threatened residents to evacuate.
In 2003, in Lake Charles, three brothers were each sentenced to two years in prison for breaking into two pharmacies during the threat of Hurricane Lili in October 2002.
how about just execute em?
FOX news reporting that a few parishe's in LA have declared marshal law.... looking for more info on this.
Damn, gas is a lot cheaper in SA than here in College Station. It is 15 cents higher here on average.
Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes under martial law according to WWL-TV
"I'm very hopeful, with the devastation we've had, that the number (of deaths) will be much more reasonable than people think. There are not thousands of people floating around." -- Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.
I hate to say it, but I think the people aren't floating around because they've drowned in their homes, attics, etc.
Hopefully not
"At first light, the devastation is greater than our worst fears. It's just totally overwhelming," Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the morning after Katrina howled ashore with winds of 145 mph and engulfed thousands of homes in one of the most punishing storms on record in the United States.
In New Orleans, meanwhile, water began rising in the streets Tuesday morning, apparently because of a break on a levee along a canal leading to Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans lies mostly below sea level and is protected by a network of pumps, canals and levees. Many of the pumps were not working Tuesday morning.
Officials planned to use helicopters to drop 3,000-pound sandbags into the breach, and expressed confidence the problem could be solved within hours
life inside the superdome.
The bathrooms are filthy and barrels overflow with trash. With the air conditioning off since power went out Monday morning, the bricks are slick with humidity.
We're doing everything we can to keep these people comfortable," Gen. Ralph Lupin, commander of the National Guard troops at the Superdome, said Tuesday morning. "We're doing our best. It's not getting any better but we're trying not to let it get any worse."
"I know people want to leave, but they can't leave," he said. "There's 3 feet of water around the Superdome."
The situation was especially difficult for those in wheelchairs, who were lined up in rows five deep along a wall. One patient's IV bag was attached to a stadium seating sign.
Officials were considering moving the patients to areas with better accommodations.
"This is just too hot, too primitive, too uncomfortable for the patients and too hard to work in for the medical people," said Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., head of the medical shelter in the Superdome.
Two people have died, according to Doug Thornton, a regional vice president for the company that manages the Superdome. He provided no other details.
The refugees spent Monday sitting in the seats of the 77,000-seat stadium — home of the NFL's New Orleans Saints — or sprawled out on blankets and towels on the floor. They played cards and read books and magazines in areas where the emergency lights worked. Refugees were given two military-style meals in a pouch a day.
www.nola.com
Martial law declared
Local television stations report that Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes are all now under martial law, allowing the military to assume control over civilian forces.
August 30, 2005
After Centuries of 'Controlling' Land, Gulf Learns Who's the Boss
By CORNELIA DEAN
and ANDREW C. REVKIN
The Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to coastal storms, but over the years people have made things worse, particularly in Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck yesterday. Since the 18th century, when French colonial administrators required land claimants to establish ownership by building levees along bayous, streams and rivers, people have been trying to dominate the region's landscape and the forces of its nature.
As long as people could control floods, they could do business. But, as people learned too late, the landscape of South Louisiana depends on floods: it is made of loose Mississippi River silt, and the ground subsides as this silt consolidates. Only regular floods of muddy water can replenish the sediment and keep the landscape above water. But flood control projects channel the river's nourishing sediment to the end of the birdfoot delta and out into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico.
Although early travelers realized the irrationality of building a port on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease, the opportunities to make money overrode all objections.
When most transport was by water, people would of course settle along the Mississippi River, and of course they would build a port city near its mouth. In the 20th century, when oil and gas fields were developed in the gulf, of course people added petrochemical refineries and factories to the river mix, convenient to both drillers and shippers. To protect it all, they built an elaborate system of levees, dams, spillways and other installations.
As one 19th-century traveler put it, according to Ari Kelman, an environmental historian at the University of California, Davis, "New Orleans is surprising evidence of what men will endure, when cheered by the hopes of an ever-flowing tide of dollars and cents."
In the last few decades, more and more people have realized what a terrible bargain the region made when it embraced - unwittingly, perhaps - environmental degradation in exchange for economic gains.
Abby Sallenger, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey who has studied the Louisiana landscape for years, sees the results of this bargain when he makes his regular flights over the Gulf Coast or goes by boat to one of the string of sandy barrier islands that line the state's coast.
The islands are the region's first line of defense against hurricane waves and storm surges. Marshes, which can normally absorb storm water, are its second.
But, starved of sediment, the islands have shrunk significantly in recent decades. And though the rate of the marshes' loss has slowed somewhat, they are still disappearing, "almost changing before your eyes," as Dr. Sallenger put it in a telephone interview from his office in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Grassland turns into open water, ponds turn into lakes."
Without the fine sediment that nourishes marshes and the coarser sediment that feeds eroding barrier islands, "the entire delta region is sinking," he said. In effect, he said, it is suffering a rise in sea level of about a centimeter - about a third of an inch - a year, 10 times the average rate globally.
"Some of the future projections of sea level rise elsewhere in the country due to global warming would approach what we presently see in Louisiana," Dr. Sallenger said.
Hurricane Katrina was a strong storm, Category 4, when it came ashore east of New Orleans, near a string of barriers called the Chandeleur Islands. "They were already vulnerable, extremely so," Dr. Sallenger said.
He said he and his colleagues were reviewing photos, radar images and other measurements made of the islands after Hurricane Lili, a Category 2 hurricane that passed over them in 2002.
"The degree of change in that storm was extreme," he said. "So we had a discussion this morning: O.K., if Lili can do this, who knows what Katrina is going to do?" The scientists expect to fly over the coast on Wednesday and find out.
Of course, New Orleans is vulnerable to flooding from the Mississippi River as well as from coastal storms. North of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers has marked out several places where the levees would be deliberately breached in the event of a potentially disastrous river flood threat, sending water instead into uninhabited "spillways."
But there is no way to stop a hurricane storm surge from thundering over a degraded landscape - except, perhaps, by restoring the landscape to let the Mississippi flow over it more often.
Some small efforts are being made. For example, at the Old River Control Structure, an installation of dams, turbines and other facilities just north of Baton Rouge that keeps the Mississippi on its established path, workers collect sediment that piles along the dams and cart it by truck into the marshes.
But truly letting the river run would exact unacceptably heavy costs - costs that would be paid immediately by people in the region and in particular by any politician rash enough to endorse such a plan.
Instead, there continue to be efforts to build more capacity into New Orleans flood control efforts, said Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University and the author of a new book, "An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature" (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). That will mean ever more costs, Mr. Colten said, given that the city, which is below sea level, must run pumps simply to keep from being flooded in an ordinary rainstorm.
Roy K. Dokka, a geologist at Louisiana State, said flooding would be even worse for decades to come, not just in New Orleans but in the entire Gulf Coast region.
The consequences were clear yesterday, Dr. Dokka said, around Port Fourchon, La., where the single road that is the commuting route for oil workers heading to offshore rigs lay under water. "That road that all the roughnecks and oil workers drive down every day has sunk a foot in 20 years," he said. "It's now under water every time there's a significant south wind blowing."
But as Dr. Kelman said: "Once you've invested enough in urban infrastructure, you have to keep on buying in. And that doesn't even count the cultural dimension." The reference was to the region's cuisine, culture and mystique.
"With billions of dollars sunk into the soil in southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast," Dr. Kelman said, "it's kind of too late. We're there, and we're staying there."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
I realize I am just a dumb Texan but where the are the Marines? They have a whole fleet of hovercraft/landing craft that would be perfect for a mass rescue scenario like this...no props or jet pump suctions to foul...they can drive over dry land and cross water etc...they sure aren't using them in Iraq...they could use them for base stations as they gather up survivors and take them out in large numbers...
Marines?
Ask the commander-in-chief. He cut short his Crawford vacation to "monitor" the Katrina disaster.
Somebody go tell the stupid mother er to do something positive with his ing life. He'll probably claim "sorry, guvmint be broke, ya'll. Tax cuts for rich + corps, y'all know that comes first, last, and always. I'll go see if China will kind lend me some $$$."
Leave it to the NYT to write a "I told you so" Article while people drown in their attics.
your marine battalions that operate that equipment are in iraq.
Take it somewhere else where people want to hear your idiotic political rhetoric. This thread is neither the time nor the place.
President Bush is the man, your just hating
You're a real , boutons.
There's that whole little consi utional issue of the US military operating on domestic soil, remember.
I think they'd have to figure out a way to "lend" some of them to the National Guard in this situation. Regardless, it's not like they've got those hovercraft laying around the southern US. Closest place they have them is Camp Lejeune in NC. So they'd have to put them on a boat and ferry them around Florida and into the Gulf.
All that aside, if you want to get political take it to the political forum and leave this post free for news.
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