Getting Home Before It's Gone

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http://www.alternet.org/

Jeff Chang, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Anita Johnson, AlterNet
Hurricane Katrina: As corporations get rich, real estate developers circle and Katrina evacuees resettle far from home, grassroots organizations are shifting from relief to demanding the right of return.
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1. More news from New Orleans

Hello Robin ...

I am fine and the place where I have lived in NOLA is fine. Email is sporadic at best.

I was shut out of the city for weeks but I have been down in the area for a couple of weeks working blue collar. It is probably the largest construction site in the US these days.

There is a tremendous amount of damage and personal tragedy which is hard to exaggerate and impossible to illustrate with pictures. Now that the storm has passed, officials and government are the biggest problems down here. Lead, follow or get out of the way.

They are taking way too much time to turn the electricity on and let people back in to the city. Of course, there are major sections of the city that were destroyed, but large portions of the city did not suffer significant damage related to electricity or flooding. People, not Katrina, turned off all the electricity in the city.

Idiots are saying they need to be safe at all costs but 100% is not reasonable. The patient will die on the operating table if you are too careful. Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Just hundreds of feet past the Orleans Parish line business is bustling despite wide spread storm and flooding damage. Nature didn't stop at the Parish line but functionality does. There is a different set of bureaucrats on each side of that line. 'Good enough' was good enough outside the city.

Forces that I don't understand must be influencing this insanity. This man-made disaster is ongoing and it is so frustrating to see the city being taken down by the bureaucrats and the hidden sources of power.

I have a special military pass to get through the checkpoints but it is still a drain on resources since the waiting times at the checkpoints are very long. The colonel who gave me the pass said he had to come up with something because the city couldn't figure out a system to let anyone past the check points. Power company trucks were being denied entry to the city. The disconnect from reality is unbelievable.

There was another forced evacuation days ahead of a threat of just alot of rain from Rita. Reasonable people are not in charge. Some areas that were flooded by the first flood were flooded again because of Rita. The overlooked detail is that those areas were already empty and flood damaged. There was no reason to throw out the people who never were flooded and there was no reason to throw them out before Rita was even in the Gulf.

A small example of the ongoing man-made disaster is that the city is full of tree service companies from other states. They have so little to do that they are being told to cut branches back from the power lines to prevent future trouble. Those trees weren't a problem with Katrina. I watched those same trees being cut back last year. This is not an
emergency. I wouldn't care but they are doing extreme damage to 150 year old live oaks that line the major boulevards.

I can rant about this man-made disaster for hours.

I wish I knew what we could do to help in the short term. The long term solution is education and the restoration of checks and balances in government.

Thank you for all you do.

D.

[2Design]

2. they are blocking all the help and then creating a disaster and

hiring haliburton and blackwater at extravagant amounts of money

they say things got better when troops got there
when reality is - when food and water got there

the over presence of miltary is really crazy

and if * didn't have all the national guard away - this could have been handled better