New Orleans

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XBL
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Postby XBL » Wed Sep 07, 2005 6:06 am

It was right after the huricane, around the time the city was flooding (or was that still in the middle of the huricane?). In their hotel they were said several times a bus was on its way, which wasn't. They also went to another place, where they heard the buses were right over the bridge. When they went there, they were stopped by the police. They saw the bus!

They've slept on the street, saw plunderings from up close. Even their hotel-room was plundered.

I dunno why the police stopped them going onto a bus and that they even had to pursuede a policeman to get a bus for them and a few other people.

I'm not sure what the intention was of the police (and those tourist did not have a clue either, i guess), but maybe they were just trying to put those riots down and 'forgot' or didn't have time to help people get away, out of the city.

The story was just a bit strange to me, but it's a eyewitness report, so you're missing a great part in it, explain why the police acted like this (their reasons, etc).

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kinvoya
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Postby kinvoya » Wed Sep 07, 2005 6:39 am

No ground transportation could get any where near the city for several days so I don't see how it would have been possible for them to get out on a bus at that time.

When people go through a great trauma they almost always look for other people to blame for having done something wrong. I'm sure these people had no idea what was really happening or what those few police officers were trying to manage. Maybe the bridge was unsafe. Almost certainly there was no place the bus could have driven to.

From what I've read at that time the police were trying to keep people from drowning and being killed by looters. It was impossible to get people out of the city at that time. I don't think any other explaination is really needed. Those tourists were not the only desperate people there. They were lucky to get the bus they did finally get. About 10,000 dead people were not that lucky.

Do you understand that it is estimated that 10,000 people died and hundred of thousands were in the same situation as these tourists? A few hundred police officers can't personally take care of each person and can't stand around explaining their actions either. I think they should be thanking the ones who did get them the bus.
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Nick
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Postby Nick » Wed Sep 07, 2005 7:31 am

How much notice did the people of New Orleans have?
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Postby Cookie » Wed Sep 07, 2005 1:30 pm

Schme wrote:
Cookie Monster wrote:
Schme wrote:And by the way, Jamaicans aren't west Indian, I'm afraid.


Oh they aren't? might want to look that one up! Really i think you do before you make sly comments like that.

The West indies is another name for the Caribean, yeh. And jamiaca is in the Caribean.


Bravo! You fooled a foreigner with an obscure term that only Englishmen know! Let's all make a big deal out of it as though you've proved your point through your being petty.

Granted, I didn't know. But it's not really that big a deal. You could be a bit more polite, my friend.

Here, we call it the carribean, and west India stands for the west of India(Like Bombay.).

Now I we know.


Calm down I was being Ironic.

But 'for the record' it's called west india because when it was discovered they thought they had landed in India.
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Postby jeslange » Wed Sep 07, 2005 2:04 pm

My gripes with the situation are mostly about preparedness. A strong storm devastating New Orleans was number 3 on the list of most likely disasters to hit the US. The federal gov did give it some notice, by designating funds and assigning levee-building/related tasks the the Army Corps of Engineers. But, due to both the Fed cutting funding later, and due to corruption in the more local levels of gov in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers plainly said they can't do the tasks.

After the Tsunami, congress (or at least some members) fairly bluntly reminded the gov that we need to take care of the risk to New Orleans before it's too late. There have been many years to actually solve the problem, which was so high on the "Uh-oh!" list, yet it wasn't achieved.

Shortly before the actual disaster, a mandatory evacuation was announced. 10-20% of New Orleans didn't leave. Locations were set up for where people could go afterwards, but the inefficiency of that kind of solution for them bothers me alot. If anyone chose to stay, even if "chose" might not be a good term based on physical ability or income, etc., then they could have been moved in advance. Hospital patients could have already been taken to other locations, or at least there could have been organisation in advance of which patients would go where, etc., so that the response time afterwards would be greatly reduced. For those who stayed based on income or wanting to protect their stores, etc., there was enough time in advance to mostly go door to door to find out who was staying, and to round them up in the sports stadiums or what-not before the point where they were having to wade through toxic waters and bodies and dangling electric wires to get to those places. That would have freed up alot of the rescue personel to get to only a small number of people, rather than alot scattered all around.

Of course, claiming which places will be used for sruvivors is all nice and well, if you also think it might be wise to put some supplies in there too, like water. And, since storms of any size tend to take out some power in the area, and we knew this was going to be a really big storm, then we also could have planned on a communication headquarters, that people in the disaster zone could go out to make their reports at, rather than relying mostly on reporters accountable to their bosses who will therefore not be overall organised in spreading the info.

Aside from military info, the Pres usually states somewhat clearly how much of what is going where, and where it's coming from. Several days worth of "We're sending busses," etc makes me think the response from the Fed was still only at the discussion level, and that claims of supplies already moving were BS. Also, it wasn't until 2 days ago that I saw a convoy moving out of GA. This convoy was quite impressive, even stopping traffic for a bit in an area where we're already used to seeing convoys moving, but that kind of response was way too late. Since GA is one of the most likely locations for a fed level response to depart from, I'd imagine it's part of the "first line of response," further making me think the Fed was BSing about already having supplies and such moving to New Orleans.

As an aside, Bush responded to criticism with by claiming that nobody could have anticipated the levees breaking. Hmmm...we've only known that for about 100 years, and the gov obviously did anticipate just that, since they gave funds to fix the levees and assigned the tasks to the Army Corps of Engineers, and then didn't fulfill the responsibility afterall.

One thing I've been impressed with though, is the response from common people. I might have misheard, but think it is reported to be the largest private response to any disaster, if viewed in the timescale so far. Even if that's not accurate, there are so many people volunteering that the Red Cross and other agencies are having to temporarily turn them away, and many of us are hanging out on waiting lists.

Oh, someone mentioned the National Guard checkpoints. Judith and I were talking about that, and suspect it's an effort to keep the people quarantined, while trying not to let the public know. Aside from any arguments for or against doing that, it's kind of pointless if not letting illness spread is really the point, since over 50,000 refugess are in Atlanta, and however many are also in major cities like Houston. Perhaps there's a majic number not publicised for how long someone can be in unsanitary conditions before the gov considers them a virus rather than a citizen.
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Postby Jur Schagen » Wed Sep 07, 2005 3:13 pm

What's GA? Georgia?
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Postby jeslange » Wed Sep 07, 2005 5:16 pm

Yes, sorry.
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Stan
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Postby Stan » Wed Sep 07, 2005 5:43 pm

There's a whole other aspect to the response. The Governor has complete authority over the National Guard. The Mayor of the largest city in Louisiana should have the Governor's phone number.

Why didn't the City or the State call in the National Guard? That is a State responsibility NOT a Federal responsibility. That's one of the major differences between the US and other places. The Governors have the authority to call in the military.

Also, why didn't the city or the state have someone watching the levees? From what I hear everyone just "woke up" to find the place flooded...CRAZY!

Doesn't the Mayor and Governor have a responsbility to take care of their people? I always hear Mayors and Governors complain about the Feds sticking their noses in their business when it comes to Homeland Security now they want to point fingers. Sorry, you shouldn't be able to have it both ways.

The Mayor New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana should be pointing at themselves for the poor response. Afterall, they are the closest to the scene.
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Stan
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Postby Stan » Wed Sep 07, 2005 7:05 pm

Sorry for the double post...I thought this was interesting:

From the Touchstone Magazine blog about the disaster:

What I find interesting, though, has been the instant, reflexive resort to the belief, and accusation, that SOMEONE IS TO BLAME for this. Someone can and must be held accountable for this vast calamity. This, it seems to me, is a powerful confirmation of something that I have argued in the pages of Touchstone before: that the increase in our mastery over the physical terms of our existence will not make us happier or more content, and may even lead to chronic political and social instability and unease, precisely because of the unsatisfiable expectations it generates.

It has often been argued that an individual's attraction to conspiracy theories, far from being a sign of irrationality, is a sign of hyperrationality, of an insistence that great events in the world cannot ever proceed by chance or without human direction. The historian Gordon Wood wrote a brilliant essay a number of years ago, arguing that "the paranoid style" in politics was partly a product of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with their insistence upon the rational intelligibility and orderliness of events, and upon the human ability to exercise control over them.

It is not so farfetched an idea, though I would place it in a continuum with the practice of magic and other prerational antecedents, including most pagan and animistic religions, which have similar aims. It is quite natural for us humans to wish to control events, and control our world---and natural to believe that, if we are not in control, someone else is. There may even be an element of the scapegoat mechanism, as described by Rene Girard, operating in such matters, reestablishing social order by displacing the sins of the community onto a sacrificial head.

Yet I cannot recall a case quite like this one, in which the tacit assumption was made so widely, so angrily and self-righteously, and so completely implausibly, that the destructive effects of this enormous storm could be, and should have been, prevented---or if not entirely prevented, at least greatly mitigated. If one were today rewriting Candide, the mocked Pangloss figure would be the one who says, "Well, these things happen, and one should learn to accept them gracefully. Although we cannot control our world, we can at least strive to do our best, and understand that there are risks in living below sea level in a hurricane-prone region." And he would be ridden out of town on a rail, by an angry mob. The extension of our power means an extension of our culpability. (Which in practice means that competing groups will be searching for ways to transfer exclusive culpability to one another, one of the reasons why the competition for "victim" status can be so intense in our culture, since being a victim is the surest way to certify one's right to offload one's culpability. We are seeing some of this in the aftermath of Katrina.)

Again, I make no particular judgments about this particular event. We will know more about what really happened in a few weeks or so. But many people will not care about the specifics; the important thing will be that SOMEONE IS TO BLAME. This points to an increasingly familiar pattern of expectation, which only grows as our scientific knowledge and technological wizardry grow. It parallels our society's growing rage at a medical system, including the pharmaceutical industry, that has been remarkably skillful, and more skillful in each passing year, in successfully addressing a range of diseases and conditions that were formerly thought to be untreatable. But modern medicine cannot banish the existence of risk. Which is why the system is all too often a casualty of the very expectations it raises. There is a sense in which, the more things become mastered, the more intolerable are those remaining areas in which our mastery is not yet complete. This parallels very neatly the observation made by Tocqueville that times of revolutionary upheaval occur when social expectations are rising, and that the growth of social equality in America would exacerbate, rather than relieve, Americans' sense of class injury and class resentment. This is less of a paradox than it seems at first glance.

I'm not predicting a revolution. Nor am I counseling fatalism or Gelassenheit. But I do think we would do well to recognize that much of the intense and free-floating anger and unhappiness that pervade so much of our prosperous world may derive precisely from the expectations that our successes in mastering our physical environment have generated. The effects of the hurricane would be much easier to live with, were we not so intent upon convincing ourselves that some human culprits caused it. We might want to pause and reflect upon how little mastery we really have---least of all, of ourselves.
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Postby Schme » Thu Sep 08, 2005 12:37 am

Cookie Monster wrote:

But 'for the record' it's called west india because when it was discovered they thought they had landed in India.



Yes, I figured that after you set me straight.


Cookie Monster wrote:

Calm down I was being Ironic.



That's not really irony, though. It's me getting confused.
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Nick
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Postby Nick » Thu Sep 08, 2005 3:02 am

Yeah I didn't exactly see the irony in that either.
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Postby Cookie » Thu Sep 08, 2005 3:37 am

Theres irony in it, trust me! :wink:
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Yo_Yo
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Postby Yo_Yo » Thu Sep 08, 2005 4:18 am

Well the Yo found a computer to play on while hes here. The destruction here is pretty bad. BTW, this is something along the lines of the fifth time i've had to retype this. I am pretty lucky to get to use a computer down here, and even more blessed to have internet.

Anyways... /sigh It's as bad as the pictures i'm sure you've all seen. But being here adds a whole nother dimension to it. Theres mud everywhere, along with debris. They don't talk about it, but we've had two people from my unit sprain thier ankles on the debris below the water. Can't see anything under the water. And thats just from my unit.

I get to rotate jobs this next week. I hope it goes better then my vurrent one, the details of the current withheld of course. But next week I get to stay out of the water and try to help those on dry land. Wish me luck guys. Yo out.
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kinvoya
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Postby kinvoya » Thu Sep 08, 2005 4:28 am

:D I'm so happy to hear from you Yo Yo. I've been thinking about you and wondering how it was going.

Thank you for going down there and helping. It must be terrible. Today someone told me they were watching a news report from a helicopter flying over the city and the reporter was saying he could hardly stand the smell even up in the helipcopter.

Take care of yourself.
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Yo_Yo
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Postby Yo_Yo » Thu Sep 08, 2005 4:34 am

Well i'm glad to hear it. I honestly thought you disliked me. But yes, it does smell bad here. Not to be gross, but obviously the sewers overflowed, and the bodies... new and old ones. The hurricane couldn't have hit a worse place. But people from all over stoped what they were doing in thier normal lives and came to help New Orleans. We owe a great debt to them.

And I also wanted to mention that any kind of donations to the relief are being used. I see people wearing clean clothes and eating hot meals now, and It means the world to them. Thanks everyone that cares.
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