wow, i guess it really has turned out as bad as they thought it might. i mean it seems like NO is basically going to be a ghost town for a few weeks and then take forever to get everything going again. what the hell would have happened if the storm had actually passed west of the city and it got the worst part of the storm? would we just be looking at a lake (which it almost already is) right now? edit: wow, watching that video in droxford's post is painful.
Dude, this is crazy. I am going to donate some money and take some of my old clothes that I never wear to Red Cross. My heart and prayers go out to the families. This is unreal.
This Zep has been playing on a loop in my head all day: "When The Levee Breaks" If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break, If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break When The Levee Breaks I'll have no place to stay. Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home, Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well. Don't it make you feel bad When you're tryin' to find your way home, You don't know which way to go? If you're goin' down South They go no work to do, If you don't know about Chicago. Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good, Now, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good, When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move. All last night sat on the levee and moaned All last night sat on the levee and moaned Thinkin' about me baby and my happy home. Going, going to Chicago... Going to Chicago... Sorry but I can't take you... Going down... going down now... going down....
I can't imagine all those people with nowhere to go... tim562 has a good idea. I was going to clean out my closets; is there any way to set aside and designate stuff for these people? Hopefully some coordinated relief efforts will spring up soon.
This is an shot of where the levee break is located. Not an actual photo of the break, but the area before the hurricane.
Looting Begins in New Orleans Aug 30 12:47 PM US/Eastern By ALLEN G. BREED Associated Press Writer NEW ORLEANS With much of the city emptied by Hurricane Katrina, some opportunists took advantage of the situation by looting stores. At a Walgreen's drug store in the French Quarter, people were running out with grocery baskets and coolers full of soft drinks, chips and diapers. When police finally showed up, a young boy stood in the door screaming, "86! 86!" _ the radio code for police _ and the crowd scattered. Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and snapped pictures in amazement. "It's downtown Baghdad," the housewife said. "It's insane. I've wanted to come here for 10 years. I thought this was a sophisticated city. I guess not." Around the corner on Canal Street, the main thoroughfare in the central business district, people sloshed headlong through hip-deep water as looters ripped open the steel gates on the front of several clothing and jewelry stores. One man, who had about 10 pairs of jeans draped over his left arm, was asked if he was salvaging things from his store. "No," the man shouted, "that's EVERYBODY'S store." Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by. Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold. "To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," he said.
This is just awful to watch on the news but i cant turn it off. i was at all those casinoes in biluxi only bout 2 months ago, and i was amazed how nice it was, id be shocked if it was ever rebuilt....
Local and national law enforcement aren't even letting anybody into the city or near it. That link posted by droxford is just depressingly sad, even the reporter lost it.
i remember reading this article and others like it. this is from 2001. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/research/1282151.html NEW ORLEANS IS SINKING BY JIM WILSON Published on: September 11, 2001 They don't bury the dead in New Orleans. The highest point in the city is only 6 ft. above sea level, which makes for watery graves. Fearful that rotting corpses caused epidemics, the city limited ground burials in 1830. Mausoleums built on soggy cemetery grounds became the final resting place for generations. Beyond providing a macabre tourist attraction, these "cities of the dead" serve as a reminder of the Big Easy's vulnerability to flooding. The reason water rushes into graves is because New Orleans sits atop a delta made of unconsolidated material that has washed down the Mississippi River. Think of the city as a chin jutting out, waiting for a one-two punch from Mother Nature. The first blow comes from the sky. Hurricanes plying the Gulf of Mexico push massive domes of water (storm surges) ahead of their swirling winds. After the surges hit, the second blow strikes from below. The same swampy delta ground that necessitates above-ground burials leaves water from the storm surge with no place to go but up. The fact that New Orleans has not already sunk is a matter of luck. If slightly different paths had been followed by Hurricanes Camille, which struck in August 1969, Andrew in August 1992 or George in September 1998, today we might need scuba gear to tour the French Quarter. "In New Orleans, you never get above sea level, so you're always going to be isolated during a strong hurricane," says Kay Wilkins of the southeast Louisiana chapter of the American Red Cross. During a strong hurricane, the city could be inundated with water blocking all streets in and out for days, leaving people stranded without electricity and access to clean drinking water. Many also could die because the city has few buildings that could withstand the sustained 96- to 100-mph winds and 6- to 8-ft. storm surges of a Category 2 hurricane. Moving to higher elevations would be just as dangerous as staying on low ground. Had Camille, a Category 5 storm, made landfall at New Orleans, instead of losing her punch before arriving, her winds would have blown twice as hard and her storm surge would have been three times as high. Yet knowing all this, area residents have made their potential problem worse. "Over the past 30 years, the coastal region impacted by Camille has changed dramatically. Coastal erosion combined with soaring commercial and residential development in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have all combined to significantly increase the vulnerability of the area," says Sandy Ward Eslinger, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services Center in Charleston, S.C. Early Warning Emergency planners believe that it is a foregone conclusion that the Big Easy someday will be hit by a scouring storm surge. And, given the tremendous amount of coastal-area development, this watery "big one" will produce a staggering amount of damage. Yet, this doesn't necessarily mean that there will be a massive loss of lives. The key is a new emergency warning system developed by Gregory Stone, a professor at Louisiana State University (LSU). It is called WAVCIS, which stands for wave-current surge information system. Within 30 minutes to an hour after raw data is collected from monitoring stations in the Gulf, an assessment of storm-surge damage would be available to emergency planners. Disaster relief agencies then would be able to mobilize resources--rescue personnel, the Red Cross, and so forth. The $4.5 million WAVCIS project, which is now coming on line, will fill a major void in the Louisiana storm warning system, which was practically nonexistent compared to those of other Gulf Coast states. A system of 20 "weather buoys" along the U.S. coastline serves as a warning system for the Gulf of Mexico. However, the buoys are not distributed evenly and Louisiana falls into one of the gaps. From the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Louisiana-Texas border, there are no buoys. Only one buoy serves Louisiana, and it is 62 miles east of the Mississippi River and more than 300 miles to the south. So it's a bit like predicting the weather in Boston when your thermometer is in Philadelphia. The other buoys are near the coastlines of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, and several hundred miles out into the Gulf. Stable Platforms One reason that WAVCIS will be more accurate is that its sensors are attached to offshore oil platforms. The older, floating buoys ride up and down with the waves and often can't give accurate pictures of wave heights and storm surges. Stable platforms mean that the sensors can be placed above and below the water, allowing more precise measurements. Data from each of the 13 stations, five of which are now on line, is transmitted to LSU, where it'll be interpreted and sent to emergency planners centers, via the Internet. "With this new system [WAVCIS], we get to see real information on storm surge and we can feed that into our models and come up with real data," says Mike Brown, assistant director of the New Orleans emergency management office. Because large areas would have to be evacuated, false alarms could be harmful to the economy. Stone sees it as a reasonable tradeoff. "It's better to have that frustration than the loss of life. The potential loss of life in Louisiana could be catastrophic because there is just nowhere to go."
I wonder what happened to the alligator farms and such, or for that matter the wild gators. Are they out there swimming in the streets with ppl wading around? Scary.
CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez offered to send food and fuel to the United States after the powerful Hurricane Katrina pummeled the US south, ravaging US crude production. The leftist leader, a frequent critic of the United States and a target himself of US disapproval, said Venezuela could send aid workers with drinking water, food and fuel to US communities hit by the hurricane. "We place at the disposition of the people of the United States in the event of shortages -- we have drinking water, food, we can provide fuel," Chavez told reporters. Chavez said fuel could be sent to the United States via a Citgo refinery that has not been affected by the hurricane. Citgo is owned by Venezuela's state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). In the Gulf of Mexico, which accounts for a quarter of total US oil output, 92 percent of crude and 83 percent of natural gas production were shut down due to Hurricane Katrina, which slammed Louisiana and Mississippi, according to US government data. Venezuela is the fourth-largest provider of oil to the United States, supplying some 1.5 million barrels a day. Last week, Chavez offered discount gasoline to poor Americans suffering from high oil prices and on Sunday offered free eye surgery for Americans without access to health care. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050829/pl_afp/usweathervenezuelaoil
It drives me nuts that I cannot reach my buddy Trent, who lives there with his wife. Cell phones are dead, and in vain I sent an email hoping that maybe he will check in at some point. I hear some people have text message ability but only by a few carriers.
