Looters of N.O.

Sorry, I didn't read my own link carefully enough. Like you all I do wonder why people would shoot at a rescue helicopter. Don't make any sense even in times of panic.

since Nawlins has been rebuilt and re invented at least 2 times since the 70's, a personal recollection from almost 40 years ago is totally invalid.
Nawlins is a treasure, it must be rebuilt and, as Calif learns, influx of capital to rebuild always stimulates the local economies to a level noone figured would happen.
As far as looting, consider it part of a cleanup. Its 95 degrees, no fresh water, no AC, people are frustrated and almost de-humanized by the devastation.NAwlins is no more slum ridden than LA or NYC or even Philly. It is, however a city, like San Fransisco and Austin and DC,that is imbued with a special character and legend that , to let it rot, would be especially defeatist.
All the rubble cores of the levees on the lake are now being discovered. Some of these rebuilt levees dont go back any farther than the :Moon Landreau" years. It turns out that the cores of the lake levees arent selected granular materials, they were crap and rubble (oprobably left over from Camille)

The landfill material thats gonna be generated from all this, should be engineered so that it can be emplaced to the South of New Orleans in the direction of the BArataria Bay.

au1929

So, au1929, you condone shooting children who are hungry and stealing food?

You've been making invalid inferences about what others are saying. As panzade said earlier where did he condone looting? Where did I even suggest that looting is a fabrication of the news media?

The point I was making is that our news is edited by editors. We read and see what they select for us. Television news tends to be sensationalized and reinforcing.

Maybe they were just real excited to see the helicopter and they were just shooting their guns in the air in celebration, like "Yay, we're all gettin' rescued!"

I didn't think of that!!

That eyeroll at the end makes me think you may not have gotten the fact that I was joking. I was joking!!! If you did get that, then what is the eyeroll for? Oh, maybe you were giving the eyeroll to signal that it was a lame joke.

Damn, eyeroll emoticon thingie. I am always misunderstanding exactly what people mean to convey when they use it.

There's only one guy here I can use the eyeroll on...and that's you...so I took advantage.

Of course he knew you weren't serious.

BBB
FEMA just announced it is no longer doing rescue operations in New Orleans due to violence making it not safe for FEMA staff to continue.
Are those thousands of people going to die because we don't have enough armed troops to control the situation and make it safe for people to be rescued?

BBB

BBB
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:
FEMA just announced it is no longer doing rescue operations in New Orleans due to violence making it not safe for FEMA staff to continue.
Are those thousands of people going to die because we don't have enough armed troops to control the situation and make it safe for people to be rescued?

BBB


Apparently the violence is being caused around the Superdome when only one of the 500 busses Texas promised to take victims to Huston. No others busses have shown up. People are near to rioting.

What a mess!
BBB

BBB
New Orleans needs to be placed under Martial Law with thousands of boots on the ground troops to keep the peace so rescue and humanitarian aid workers can help the victims.

Why isn't this happening? Is it because so many National Guard troops are fighting in Iraq?

BBB

New Orleans police abandon rescue efforts
New Orleans police abandon rescue efforts
01/09/2005 - 12:28:06

With thousands feared dead and the city's remaining residents told to evacuate for weeks, conditions deteriorated further in submerged New Orleans today as looting spiralled out of control.

Mayor Ray Nagin ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts and stop thieves who were becoming increasingly hostile.

"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas - hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said.

Tempers also were starting to flare.

Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus and a truck carrying medical supplies for a hospital. Some police officers said they had been shot at.

Earlier, Nagin had called for a total evacuation, saying that New Orleans will not be functional for two or three months and that people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.

The first of nearly 25,000 refugees being sheltered at the city's Superdome football stadium were transported in buses to the another stadium in Houston, Texas, 350 miles away.

Conditions in the Superdome had become horrendous: There was no air conditioning, the toilets were backed up, and the stench was so bad that medical workers wore masks as they walked around.

Asked how many people died in the hurricane, Nagin said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." The death toll has already reached at least 110 in Mississippi.

If the mayor's death-toll estimate holds true, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which have been blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

Just outside New Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food, water, medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, prompting officials to ask police and the US Coast Guard to help evacuate a 203-bed hospital.

"We have to close it down because we can no longer ensure the safety of our patients or our staff in that hospital," said Steven Campanini, a spokesman for Tenet Healthcare Corp.

He said there were about 350 employees and between 125 to 150 patients inside the hospital, which is not flooded and is functioning.

Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, clothes, TV sets - even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.

President George Bush flew over New Orleans and parts of Mississippi's hurricane-blasted coastline in Air Force One. Turning to his aides, he said: "It's totally wiped out. … It's devastating, it's got to be doubly devastating on the ground."

"We're dealing with one of the worst national disasters in our nation's history," Bush said later in a televised address from the White House, which most victims could not see because power remains out to 1 million Gulf Coast residents.

He planned to appear on ABC's Good Morning America programme today to discuss the tragedy and recovery efforts.

The federal government dispatched helicopters, warships and elite SEAL water-rescue teams in one of the biggest relief operations in US history, aimed at plucking residents from rooftops in the last of the "golden 72 hours" rescuers say is crucial to saving lives.

As fires burned from broken natural-gas mains, the skies above the city buzzed with National Guard and Coast Guard helicopters frantically dropping baskets to roofs where victims had been stranded since the storm roared in with a 145mph fury on Monday.

Atop one apartment building, two children held up a giant sign scrawled with the words: "Help us!"

Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 - the only major motorway leading into New Orleans from the east - pushing shopping trolleys, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.

On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.

Nagin, whose pre-hurricane evacuation order got most of his city of a half a million out of harm's way, estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained, and said that 14,000 to 15,000 a day could be evacuated in ensuing convoys.

The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80% of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, petrol and rubbish.

Yesterday officials with the state and the Army Corps of Engineers said the water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain had equalised, and even appeared to be falling. But the danger was far from over.

The Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a large gap in the failed floodwall.

But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbagsand dozens of highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.

The full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days - in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities' first priority has been reaching the living.

In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.

On the flooded streets of New Orleans, dozens of fishermen floated in on caravans of boats to pull residents out.

One of those rescued was 40-year-old Kevin Montgomery, who spent three days shuttling between the attic of a one-story home and a canopy he built on the roof. Every once in a while, Montgomery would see a body float by. But he cannot swim and had to fight the urge to wade in and tie them down.

"It was terrible," he said. "All I could do was pass them by and hope that God takes care of the rest of that."

That's it, I'm starting a campaign to BAN the eyeroll emoticon from A2K forever!

Re: BBB


No, I think it's because there's no place to put those arrested...and there's no place to house the thousands of boots on the ground.

open letter to President Bush
Dear Mr. President

Mr. President,

Stay the hell out of the hurricane disaster area!

The efforts to save peoples lives don't need to be diverted by one of your political photo-op trips to the areas.

Do us a favor. Rear the newspapers. Watch CNN and CSNBC if you want to know what is going on. Feed your dog. Ride your bike. Take another vacation. Reread the My Goat book.

You've already seen the scope of the devastation from the safety of Airforce One. Don't do anything to get in the way of the rescue operations. You've already done enough to make it worse!

Sincerely,
BumbleBeeBoogie, U.S. Citizen

BBB, normally I agree with just anything you write or paste from an article. However, in this case, sadly, I must voice my disagreement in making out the like the President of the United States should just feed his dog during such a crises. He should be focusing alll of his energy from his position in helping those in stuck in the aftermath of the hurrican. Granted it is not a grand military photo op like standing with the fireman after 9/11 and he can't make glorious war statements, but he should still as President show up at the site if for nothing other than showing these poor people that he cares.

In our system of dual sovereignty, it was never the federal government's responsibility to revitalize the City of New Orleans.

I have no doubt that our federal tax dollars have flooded the State of Louisiana and the City of New Orleans to fund social welfare programs (AFDC, SSI, SSDI, WIC, HUD, etc.) for the benefit of the poor people. They had their hands out before; they have their hands out now. Not even a hurricane can rid this country of people who have entitlement issues--a topic for another thread of discussion.

If the City of New Orleans or the State of Louisiana wanted to rid itself of the urban BLIGHT caused by the poor people--state and local government could have used the power of eminent domain to redevelop the blighted neighborhoods.

But maybe you're right . . . in a way: Why spend millions in state and local funds for revitalization when all they had to do was bide their time and wait for mother nature to strike in order to qualify for billions in federal disaster aid.

Not sure if this aspect has been brought up yet.....

If I were in N.O. I'd be looting for more than just food and clothes.

I'd be looting jewelry and other valuable items also, to use for barter if the situation goes on longer than my food stash lasts.

My husband was saying it was wrong to loot the jewelry for instance, but OK to loot guns for personal protection......

my response, if some crazy person was going to shoot me, perhaps I could trade some looted non-food goods for my life.

I still might get shot, but at least I tried.

Revel


Revel, normally I would agree with you. But for Bush to visit the sites it will take enormous amounts of money to get him there, to provide for his security with enormous staff involvement at the local level, and will divert efforts from rescue and aid away from the people who need it to his political needs. I'd rather the money be spent on the victims and the rescue efforts than on a Bush photo-op.

The people in dire straits have no TV, radio, etc. to hear or watch what Bush has to say. They could care a rats ass whether Bush is among them. What they want to see are rescus helicopters and boats, troops on the ground, care givers, rescuers, feeders with fresh water, places to sleep, etc. Bush's presence is not relevant to their needs. He would only get in the way of the people who can help.

BBB