"You want it to be one way. But it's the other way."
From this morning’s Wilmington (N.C.) Star News:
“Even if Ophelia were a Category 4 like Katrina, Rickey Sprinkle might not have left: He hasn’t fled a storm since he arrived on Pleasure Island in 1977, and he wasn’t going to start for a storm like Ophelia, he said. Kure Beach has high ground, he said.
“ ‘I don’t think anybody is going,’ he said, buying canned foods like Beanie Weenies and Vienna sausage. ‘It’s not going to blow that bad.’ ”
Technorati Tags: hurricanes
Apropos of my bro’s comment last night:
(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding
by Nick Lowe
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
And each time I feel like this inside,
There’s one thing I wanna know:
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?
And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?
So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.
‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?
At some point, there might have been some sort of emergency logic in not picking up bodies lying (or floating) in public view in New Orleans: Help the living first, because you can’t do much for the dead. But does that logic still hold two weeks after the disaster? At some point you’d have to think that leaving corpses lying in the open might be considered harmful both physically, for the disease potential and encouragement of vermin, and psychologically, for the impact on morale of such callous disregard for the dignity of the deceased.
Reading the New Orleans Times-Picayune, it looks like the “authorities,” whoever they are, haven’t reached that point:
“Traveling by pirogue through the flooded Broadmoor neighborhood Saturday, two men spotted a body floating in a side yard at Rocheblave and Octavia streets. They reported it to National Guardsmen and a civilian airboat operator, who said they were aware of it .
“For 13 days in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the body of Alcede Jackson lay on a porch at 4732 Laurel St., wrapped in a plastic bag and covered in a blanket beneath a sign quoting the evangelist John and commending Jackson to ‘the loving arms of Jesus.’
“Across town, a left turn at Fern Street in the Carrollton neighborhood provided a clear view of the corpse of a man lying face-down on the sidewalk near a vacant lot. He wore blue jeans. His head was uncovered. Residents who witnessed the scene also informed a pair of National Guardsmen stationed on North Claiborne Avenue. They said they knew.”
Compared to this, the “bring out your dead” scenario in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was downright humane and efficient.
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina, katrina
August 29:
President George Walker Bush: “For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be. We are. We’re in place. We’ve got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the — once we’re able to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas.”
September 1 (from ABC’s “Nightline”):
Ted Koppel: “Mr. Brown, some of these people are dead. They’re beyond your help. Some of these people that have died because they needed insulin and they couldn’t get it. Some of the people died because they were in hospitals and they couldn’t get the assistance that they needed. You say you were surprised by the fact that so many people didn’t make it out. It’s no surprise to anyone that you had at least 100,000 people in the City of New Orleans where are dirt poor. Who don’t have cars, who don’t have access to public transportation, who don’t have any way of getting out of the city simply because somebody says, ‘you know, there’s a force five storm coming, you ought to get out.’ If you didn’t have buses there to get them out, why should it be a surprise to you that they stayed?
Michael Brown: Well, Ted, you know, we’re, I’m not going to sit here and second guess –why or when evacuation orders were given or why or why not the city didn’t have buses available. You know, that’s just not the thing that we need to do right now. Frankly, if they, if they had, if they had put buses there. …
Koppel: I’ve heard you say during course of this evening on a number of interviews you just found out about it today. Don’t you guys watch television? Don’t you guys listen to the radio? Our reporters have been reporting about it for more than just today.
Brown: We learned about it factually today that that what existed. We’ve been so focused on doing rescue and life-saving missions and evacuating people from the Superdome that when we first learned about it, of course, my first gut instinction, instinct was, get somebody in there, get me truth on the ground, let me know, because if it’s true we’ve got to help those people.
September 3:
Bush: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
September 9:
Although Brown was not allowed to answer [questions about why he was being relieved of disaster-response duties in Louisiana, he later told an Associated Press reporter in an interview that it was not his idea to go back to Washington. Asked if he was being made a scapegoat, he said: “By the press, yes. By the president, no.”
September 12:
Brown: “I think it’s in the best interest of the agency and the best interest of the president to do that and get the media focused on the good things that are going on, instead of me.”
New York Times:
45 Bodies Found in a New Orleans Hospital
By Kirk Johnson
NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 12 – The bodies of 45 people have been found in a flooded uptown hospital here, officials said Monday, sharply increasing the death toll from Hurricane Katrina and raising new questions about the breakdown of the evacuation system as the disaster unfolded.
Officials at the hospital, the Memorial Medical Center, said at least some of the victims died while waiting to be removed in the four days after the hurricane struck, with the electricity out and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina, katrina
Sent today at 7:58 a.m. by an Oakland public school teacher to her husband:
“Hey, Dan, this is Kate … I came into work this morning and on all of the portable [classroom] doors including mine someone has smeared dog shit all over the doors and the handles and everything and the custodian’s outside cleaning it up. This is awful.”
That’s how Kate’s school week began. She talked to her kids about it during their daily morning meeting. The solution one of the second-graders came up with to deal with the mindless idiots vandalizing the school: Install cameras.
We’ll see.
A day late: From a brilliant abridgment of Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" that Scott Simon read on NPR the weekend after September 11, 2001:
"I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine;
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there. …
I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken;
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris;
Heat and smoke I inspired—I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades;
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have clear’d the beams away—they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt—the pervading hush is for my sake;
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy;
White and beautiful are the faces around me—the heads are bared of their fire-caps;
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. …
I take part—I see and hear the whole;
The cries, curses, roar—the plaudits …
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs … the rent roof—the fan-shaped explosion;
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. …
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you."
Technorati Tags: 9/11
Highly recommended: The New Yorker’s extensive collection of current and historical storm pieces from the September 12 issue, including a clutch of Talk of the Town mini-essays and two classic pieces: One by James B. Stewart on the flooding upriver in 1993, and John McPhee’s 1987 history of the Army Corps of Engineers projects designed to keep New Orleans and other parts of the lower delta dry. on the history of the Army Corps and its effects:
“The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, is on high ground with respect to the rest of New Orleans, but even from the benches of Jackson Square one looks up across the levee at the hulls of passing ships. Their keels are higher than the AstroTurf in the Superdome, and if somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium they would hover above the playing field like blimps.
“In the early nineteen-eighties, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a new large district headquarters in New Orleans. It is a tetragon, several stories high, and it is right beside the river. Its foundation was dug in the mainline levee. That, to a fare-thee-well, is putting your money where your mouth is.”
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina, katrina
Me (reading item in the Chronicle): Have you ever heard of a primate called the bonobo?
Kate: No.
Me: This says it’s called ” ‘the hippie of the forest’ because of its preference for resolving conflict through sex rather than violence.”
Kate: How do they resolve conflict through sex?
Me: I need to find more information about that.
Kate: Make love, not war.
(Beyond our charming chit-chat and the lightweight item in the paper, the un-cute context for the story.)
It’s in New Orleans. Just saw the picture at the “This American Life” site. And Google Maps supplies the cartographic representation. Next: Amour, Pleasure, Desire, Piety, Hope, and Abundance streets.
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina, katrina
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Chip Johnson writes one of the more consistently leaden columns I’ve ever come across. But the decade or so of waiting for him to produce a decent piece is finally over: This morning, he recaps the experience of two San Francisco paramedics, Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, who were in New Orleans the weekend Hurricane Katrina approached. They became part of the trapped throng:
“{New Orleans police] officers told them they couldn’t stay, they had no water for them, and they needed to get up on Highway 90, a bridge that spans the Mississippi River, and walk until they saw the rescue buses they promised would be waiting for them.
“So late Wednesday afternoon, the group set out for a bridge called the Crescent City Connection, where they would find the help they so desperately needed. But when they arrived atop the highway, the paramedics said, they were met by more police officers, this time from neighboring Gretna, La., who weren’t letting anyone pass.
” ‘If I weren’t there, and hadn’t witnessed it for myself, I don’t think I would have ever believed this,’ Bradshaw said.
The officers fired warning shots into the air and then leveled their weapons at members of the crowd, Bradshaw said. He approached, hands in the air, displaying his paramedic’s badge.
” ‘They told us that there would be no Superdomes in their city,’ the couple wrote. ‘These were code words that if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River — and you weren’t getting out of New Orleans.’ ”
Things only got worse from there. The couple’s own account has been making the Web rounds for several days. [And later: WBEZ Chicago’s “This American Life” has a great show this week that features the Bradshaw/Slonsky story and includes a first-person account from someone else who was there. Harrowing.]
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina
Technorati Tags: hurricane katrina