Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

From the New York Times;

With bridges washed out, highways converted into canals, and power and communications lines left inoperable, government officials ordered everyone still remaining out of the city and began planning for the evacuation of the Superdome, where about 10,000 refugees huddled in increasingly grim conditions, running out of water and food, and with rising water threatening the generators.

So dire was the situation that the Pentagon late in the day ordered six Navy ships and eight Navy maritime rescue teams to the Gulf Coast to bolster relief operations. It also planned to fly in Swift boat rescue teams from California.

This isn’t just about flood water, though that on its own will devastate more lives than we can bear. It’s what’s in that flood water that makes this event so awful.

The water that swept through New Orleans’ streets in the wake of Hurricane Katrina carried more than continued misery for the storm’s victims.

It also brought along a potentially toxic soup of pollution - sewage, chemicals and perhaps human bodies.

“The area’s become a hazardous waste site,” said Dexter Accardo of the St. Tammany Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials are surveying the flooded neighborhoods to gauge how hazardous conditions might be.

This never should have happened.

If you presented a small child with a scenario in which a major city was located below sea level, surrounded by water on three sides, in a location prone to major storms, and asked them whether there ought to be a plan to get everybody out should one of those storms arrive; what do you think they would say? Does it even take a second?

Screw the small child analogy - what would you say? Unless you are cruel beyond all hope, you would probably say that a plan to evacuate those who could not evacuate themselves should have been in place years ago and executed effectively two days ago. Political gamesmanship is inappropriate now. Loyalty to one faction or another should give you no comfort. Failure is everywhere.

If we are moral people, this can never happen again. The details which will emerge in the coming days will be so awful that most of us will put up a wall just to maintain our sanity.

We may well have lost an entire city today. The septic and petrochemical pollution may render what’s left of New Orleans unfit for humans for months, years or generations.

From the Washington Post:

Scores of people could be seen trudging west on foot along deserted Interstate 10, lugging small packages of belongings, headed for refuge from the water that now covers 80 percent of this city.

“I have nothing but me, the children and what we have on our backs,” said Molly Moses, a mother of five who was rescued from the roof of her two-story house four miles from the center of New Orleans. About daybreak, as the waters reached the attic, her fiance punched a hole in the roof, where she was found about 10 a.m. Tuesday clutching her 9-month-old daughter.

“We were just too busy trying to save our lives.”

Rising floodwaters led to a second mass evacuation Tuesday from this low-lying metropolis of terrified residents who had avoided the storm’s most direct destruction when it veered slightly to the east.

That particular article delves into looting. Atrios reminds us of how just how unimportant that is right now:

New Orleans is being destroyed. Looting, especially by those who are obtaining food, water, and other necessities, is about number 589 on the list of things which matter right now.

From the New York Times again:

But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans.

People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government.

Those of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that belongs to every American’s heart - even for people who have never been there.

Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us.

Via Matt (again), New Orleans local television being broadcast from Florida.

The best most of us can do, other than to demand much better from all of our leaders in the face of future expected crisis, is to give money to relief agencies. Here’s a link. Here’s another. I trust all of you can figure out some more. Get to work.

Update: Edited this morning to remove traces of BUI and add some more links.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 12:13 am and is filed under General, Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.