First-hand report from hurricane katrina: horror

[Hannah Bell]

Socialist Worker contributors Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky were attending a conference for emergency medical services (EMS) workers in New Orleans and were unable to get out before Katrina hit...This story was published at the time.

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TWO DAYS after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city's historic French Quarter remained locked...The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city... the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters...We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the "victims" of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters...

In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city...We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope.... many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads...

Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water...

http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/30/heroes-and-sheroes-of-new-orleans

[Hannah Bell]

1. i thought this story was rather interesting.

[sabrina 1]

2. This story sounds very familiar. I think I remember it from the

time. We were blogging about the hurricane from about two days before it landed. Actually we did not think it would be very bad until I saw a post online, which sounded ominous. The commenter predicted that NOLA would drowned because of the strength and path the Hurricane was on and because of the levees. I remember he said 'it will be like a bowl being filled with soup'.

I thought it was just hyperbole we see so often online. But I went back to our blog and posted it and asked could he possibly be rights. Several people said that they believed he probably was. That was two days before it landed. If I had had control of anything that day, I would have started ordering emergency help right then.

We hardly slept for the next few days. And the horror stories kept getting worse. I remember the people whose tents etc. were blown away by the police helicopter, and I remember the people trying to cross over the bridge and being shot at. No one knew for sure how true the stories were.

The cop shootings were called conspiracy theories for a long time. I am glad that some justice has been done.