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...We just got our power back on tonight.
About half of the city is still in the dark. The outlying county is still pretty much powerless in most spots.
On Tuesday night, it was actually cooler outside than inside (temps around 80 w/ 93% humidity) without air conditioning. About three in the morning, I noticed that for the first time in my life, I could see the Milky Way from right in the heart of town. And man was it quiet.
There's a lot of wind damage here: trees on houses, poles and signs down, even saw a large metal billboard harpooned through a building's roof and out the front door. All in all, it's about on a par with Ivan. However, Ivan's eye made landfall just 40 miles to our east whereas Katrina came ashore 125 miles to our west.
We had our ususal water event, where ten feet or so of surge inundates two streets right next to the river and television crews try to use the most dramatic angles possible, to make it look as if all of downtown is saturated.
Gasoline lines are still long but growing shorter as more power is switched on.
Refugees are filtering through. Don't know how many realize this, but right now there are literally hundreds of thousands of these people wandering the Southeast with nowhere to go. This type thing hasn't happened in America since the Dust Bowl and even that wasn't on this scale.
This is flabbergasting. Some of us saw it coming and still never believed that we might witness it. I heard people whining about the possiblity of losing their beach homes at Dauphin Island (south of Mobile) on Sunday and I had to ask them, "Man, do you realize what is about to happen to New Orleans? Do you really understand what is going on?"
And being here is like being on the rim of the crater. We feel like we're a part of the whole thing, but when you see the pictures and hear the stories from Mississippi and Louisiana, you realize we lucked out.
What follows are some things I jotted down during days of staying glued to a small portable black-and-white television in the sweltering heat with little else to do.
Notes from the edge of Katrina
-The anger from the people on the interstates in NOLA is understandable. The story of the cops whose only advice to the elderly woman to move her husband’s body away from her to avoid the odor was despicable.
-When wondering how civil order broke down so quickly in NOLA, one only has to remember that many of the cops in New Orleans are little better than criminals themselves. The Crescent City has been rife with corruption for a while. In fact, that was the platform Ray Nagin was elected on, as a reformer. And he did a good job with it, making waves and enemies as soon as he got into office.
-Looting is occuring in New Orleans and I can’t say anyone is surprised. While the majority of the folks there aren’t criminals, the criminals that are there certainly do their jobs well.
Residents will tell you it can be a dangerous town. I know someone who was mugged while he lived there. He blamed himself, though, saying that if he’d kept his wits about him and been paying attention, it likely wouldn’t have happened.
-Biloxi experienced its share of looting on Wednesday night. Residents of better neighborhoods are readying themselves with firearms and signs that warn, “You loot. We Shoot.”
-Hattiesburg experienced looting. Nasty behavior erupted in gas lines with traffic cops having to halt violent behavior. A Hattiesburg man shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice.
-In Mobile, people broke out in fistfights while in gas lines. Others filled up their cars one day only to emerge the next day and find it had been siphoned out in the night. One man almost started a riot as he let gas overflow from his tank while he obliviously chatted on his cell phone.
-In the city of Daphne in Baldwin County, a fast-growing white flight region over the bay from Mobile, a shelter was setup in a neighborhood. Not long after the first group of refugees arrived, a collection of residents began to call their neighbors, lobbying them to phone city hall and complain about the shelter. They described the refugees as “scuzzy” and said they couldn’t “put people like that right in the middle of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Daphne.” Enough of the neighbors sympathized and called the city. The refugees were relocated to another shelter 24 hours later.
-The Mobile media was all a-flutter about Dubya arriving on Friday. Being limited to only Mobile-based local media, we could get no sense of what was brewing nationally in reaction to the disaster. The locals love ‘em some Bush.
But then again we’re talking about stations that put Baptist ministers on-air during their storm coverage to talk to people about keeping their faith in these times and turning to God for consolation.
-A Baptist woman told me of a conversation they had with another person of like faith on Sunday evening. She said perhaps this was God “sweeping his hand on the (casino) boats and the whole New Orleans to cleanse it.”
I responded with some abhorrence about “God killing people” and was met with “not killing people but wiping the area of mobs, gambling, prostitution, liquor, etc. Sodom and Gomorrah.”
-Is Katrina a boon to Big Oil? They can easily use it as an excuse to jack prices that will never come back down. They have already used it as an excuse to suspend regulations about fuel blends and shipping of oil.
And Jeb Bush, in a Thursday press conference kept hitting the phrase “no new refineries built in a generation.” I keep hearing this new mantra coming from the corporatists.
-I’ve seen and heard about middle and upper-middle class folks who can easily afford the expenditure getting reimbursed for their new generators by FEMA. Couldn’t that FEMA money be put to better use right now?
What makes it doubly frustrating is these are the same folks who vote conservatively based on things like “keeping their taxes low” and “reducing bureaucracy and government handouts.”
-Bush refers to Katrina as “worse than 9-11.” Does that mean he will now declare a War on Weather?
Probably not because to do so would be to acknowledge the evidence backing global warming.
-I noticed that Florida is sending their people and resources to Mississippi, not New Orleans. Does this mean they think NOLA is beyond help?
-Mobile officials say they are expecting an influx of 10,000 refugee students to the local school system. Now, there’s been tens of millions of dollars of damage done to buildings in the Mobile system, a system that continually ranks as one of the nation’s poorest and worst. So on top of that, they are gong to throw more kids into the mix.
This might be the blow that does in the Mobile Public Schools once and for all, an end that powers-that-be and local culture has allowed to happen over the last half-century through apathy and withdrawal.
Mobile will finally get another Old South vestige back, a large, uneducated work force who will toil for next-to-nothing.
Maybe they’ll work on bringing back malaria next.
-The sheriff of Plaquemines Parish put 150 deputies at the parish border to repel “looters.” He said, “We’re not going to let happen here what’s happening in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes happen here.”
So how do they know what the looters look like? Did they get a bulletin?
Hmmm, how would they be able to tell…?
-The delayed FEMA response is puzzling. We have had a spate of hurricanes over the last few years. The 2004 season in Florida alone was a whole crash course in emergency management. By the end of that season, response was much improved over where it had been a decade before. Now, teams were readied and moved into place as the hurricanes neared shore. They launched from staging areas and got to work in the storm's immediate wake.
Why was that not the case this time?
Could it have anything to do with the fact that Shrub is trying to make FEMA an arm of Homeland Security, an agency that seems to be almost terrorism-cognizant to the point of myopia? Remember when Bush dismantled FEMA's Project Impact about the time that the project scored one of its greatest success stories in the northwest?
Perhaps if Georgie wasn't fiddling around with the works, the machine could have worked the way it was supposed to this time. Granted, there were people tied up in South Florida, but there should have been folks on the horn around the country as early as Saturday night.
-New Orleans is a vital cog to America, culturally and economically. It was the reason behind the Louisiana Purchase. It is one of the busiest ports in the hemisphere. This disaster will alter every phase of the nation's economy.
You combine this with the War in Iraq and 9-11 and when people look back on the Shrub presidency in the decades to come, they will wonder how the American people kept themselves from going to the White House and tossing him out on his ear. Regardless of how much can actually be pinned on him, it will stain the emotional memory of his time in office.
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