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Katrina = Cat.5 = Goodbye New Orleans

BangingTunes13 said:
off topic..... has anyone heard from Mystic Styles yet?? Going back to page 4, he wasn't leaving his house, which was a direct hit by the hurricane.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't call that off topic.

If someone here knows Mystic Styles personally, you could try a name lookup at the Red Cross registry:

http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/katrina/people

"mystic styles" came up empty. Sorry, a bit of humour. :\
 
There was a thread in the music forum about Mystic, and I saw him on AIM yesterday.
 
let's play the blame game for a bit, shall we?

excerpt

On Saturday, August 27, 2005 -- two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall -- President George W. Bush assumed responsibility for the coordination of "all disaster relief efforts" in the State of Louisiana. This is the specific, undisputed language of Bush's declaration of a State of Emergency, issued that day by the White House, and still available for viewing on the White House website. The responsibility for coordinating all disaster relief efforts in New Orleans clearly rested with the White House. Despite all the post-disaster spin by the Bush Faction and its sycophants, despite all the earnest media analyses, the lines of authority are clear and indisputable. Here is the voice of George W. Bush himself, in the proclamation issued in his name, over his signature on Saturday, August 27, 2005:

"The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing. The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures"
 
Um, this may have already been covered, but where are they intending on pumping all this toxic stuff that has settled in the basin?
 
Thanks SillyAlien. I guess there is no other option right? Just seems an awful thought that they need to move this crud somewhere and do it in a hurry.
I guess when it's in a lake it's then in the soil. I don't know the area, but do they grow/graze anything around that area?
 
There are now about 10,000 people that refuse to leave the city for some reason. Why would you want to stay?
 
News and a plea from the swampy frontline

m885 said:
There are now about 10,000 people that refuse to leave the city for some reason. Why would you want to stay?
Click to expand...

Amigos, how do I begin to speak a picture of the aftermath that was an
even greater terror than the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina
spawned as some kind of water fury birthing an urban Kali-like chaos
fueled further by the incompetence of local and state officials? The
continuous quantity of misinformation that local and national media
began spewing out was irresponsible and more than incorrect at times as
the resilient and mythic city of New Orleans was already being
pronounced dead and those of us who voluntarily chose to stay behind in
hopes of helping to repair whatever damage Katrina might inflict were
eventually sequestered by bad news, the ineptitude of local governance
and currently the national disaster relief creating an apocalypse.

I chose ! to stay because I am devoted to a city I love and was willing to
ride out any natural storm in a metropolis that has survived yellow
fever epidemics and two early fires that cindered the old French
Quarter to the ground so that the Spanish could rebuild it when it was
a capital of its providences even before there was a United States. New
Orleans has a history before the imagination of thirteen colonies
dreamed a revolution against the British to proclaim their
independence. This city is African, Latin, Caribbean, French, Spanish,
Irish, Italian, Vietnamese and Honduran and only after the Louisiana
Purchase in 1803 did it have an “American” presence and become part of
the Union that is now denying it its last breath.

So I ask you where is the compassionate conservative regime that seems
politically poised to punish this first multiracial port city in the
hemispheric Americas that recently voted itself the color blue in a red
stat! e? Is a Christian maniacal executive chief whipping New Orleans
into submission like so many African slaves were whipped by similar
bible-toting masters only a century and half ago?

I am offering such a historical timeline and perspective on how the past
effects the present because we are generally uniformed about this city
that is more than Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and the party town of the Old
South. I am pleading for a collective scream from coast to coast to
save this eclectic relic of a city that has been a home for many--from
one century to another. New Orleans deserves an organized effort of
heart and efficiency. It has survived hurricanes before, but it is
having trouble surviving the official storm masquerading as a savior.
How is it that this great empire of capital and industry cannot manage
to organize its technology to mount a proper rescue for the most
precious pueblo in its possession?

I was able to get out o! n the Wednesday after Katrina hit when the city
officials ordered the water shut down. The water was cut and it was time
to go. And I had to flee this city that I have lived in for the past
twenty years not via the efforts of authorized personnel but via a
pirate bus, a yellow vehicle with the Jefferson Parish School Board
brand on its side, a bus that operated the kind of rescue mission only
imagined in a Louisiana Hollywood bayou version of “Hotel Rwanda.” I
escaped with my partner Claudia Copeland, my writer friend Jimmy Nolan,
who is a fifth-generation native born in the middle of an unnamed
hurricane, and his neighbor who I only know as Kip. Kip was on his third
day of survival without access to a dialysis machine that cleans his
liver and allows him to live.

We, the ones who stubbornly stay from one hurricane to another that
places us in the “cone of uncertainty,” do so because we understand
that our human resilience afte! r the natural storm will help rebuild and
weather whatever mother nature decides to throw at us. We know how to
live with hurricanes and their aftermath, but we were not prepared for
the official sequestering that unleashed an even more furious storm of
urban desperation. Desperation that festered like an untreated wound in
an August summer.

Yes, Katrina was a force to be reckoned with and her damage was more
catastrophic than Hurricane Andrew which hit west of New Orleans in the
early 90’s. Yes, there was flooding in East New Orleans, the ninth
ward, the Bywater, the Lakeside area, but it was never reported that
most of the French Quarter and parts of the second historic
neighborhood called the Faubourg Marigny that borders the old city was
mostly above water and actually very dry only hours after the category
five pounding of Katrina.

We were recipients of all the prayers and rituals that keep New Orleans
from to! tal destruction because the Virgin Mary, Yemaya and the river
goddesses always protect us at the last possible minute and even
Katrina did not hit us directly with her unrelenting winds and water.
In this city that knows respect for the ancients, this city of ghosts
and ancestors is ultimately protected by the magic chants, offerings
and incantations of the local voodoo practitioners who are at work
every hurricane season to make their voices heard so that mother nature
veers her force just enough to allow us another year of life. I have
more faith in the voodoo practitioners and their prayers for the city
than the officials of local and state government whose perplexing
decisions began plunging us into greater despair after the storm.

I live on Dauphine Street in the Marigny neighborhood that extends down
river of the Quarter. We were mostly dry and the camel-back house that
I rent had very little damage with some of the siding b! lown along the
side yard. I am a pantheist and like other New Orleanians, I have
altars at my house. I am in belief that the one altar to “La Virgen
Maria” inspired the large fig tree to fall towards the spacious yard
and away from the back porch. Had it fallen in the opposite direction,
it would have crushed half of the house. As such, most of the houses in
this area were intact structurally with one or two houses compromised
by a fallen tree. Yes, trees lined a variety of parallel streets with
names like Royal and Burgundy. These streets were impassible, but this
was minor as compared to the more eastern sections of the city that
were closer to the eye of the storm. We were spared Katrina’s eye and
the Northeastern quadrant that always carries a greater punch as
demonstrated by t he destructive remnants seen in Biloxi and Gulfport,
Mississippi. Overall, this area and the middle of the French Quarter
where I rode out the storm! at Jimmy’s house was not flooded in contrast
to local and national reports that were carelessly assessing the
Quarter as being “destroyed.”

Can you imagine the terror that this bad information evoked in my mother
who lives in Jersey City, New Jersey and had been praying for me
Claudia and my friends since before Katrina hit on Sunday night? My
mother is a devout Catholic and she prays with heartfelt belief that
God will hear you in times of despair.

But the misinformation and irresponsible reports began at 10pm that
night when the local CBS affiliate Channel 4, which had relocated a
crew to Baton Rouge, began reporting that the weather conditions in the
French Quarter had already deteriorated. They began sounding off a
false alarm to anyone that had changed their minds at this time of
night and were considering to seek safer shelter. Their “news” was
that it was too dangerous to walk th! e streets of the Quarter now in
search of shelter at the Superdome because the weather conditions had
“deteriorated.” This was absolutely untrue- false, a fabricated “news”
lie by reporters who were 85 miles away at the state capitol. I was
there in the middle of the French Quarter and the conditions were such
that some light rain and wind was all that you could experience.

In fact, I was on a second floor balcony in the heart of the Vieux Carre
at Dumaine and Royal Street, and certainly if anyone was in belief of
this information, they would have lost a chance to seek shelter. Where
these reporters were getting their misinformation from and recycling it
out to the local community is unknown to me, but for a crew safely
stowed away in Baton Rouge, they had no right to spew out this
nonsense. Not only was this more of the sensationalized rubbish
disguising itself as journalism, but these reporters b! egan selling
panic as a consumer item. Yes, it was beyond being irresponsible
because while they were sitting over-caked in make-up in a safe
makeshift studio, they became an ugly metaphor for the spewing of
misinformation and panic mongering that grew into an apocalyptic
speculation that already had the city under twenty-feet of water even
when Katrina was 100 miles away and moving eastward.

They digressed into a reality TV news show that was now using Katrina as
a measure for high ratings. Be aware that when a hurricane is in the
Gulf the reporters and weather men and women are the stars of the show.
These were not journalists bringing you information, for they resembled
chattering egos positioning themselves for “glorious coverage”- not
unlike the city council officials who were also gloating in the
applause for themselves for their “contra-flow” evacuation strategies
that again turned the interstate 10 east and! west into a parking lot of
more desperation. It seemed that very little had improved from last
year’s highway experiment that clogged evacuees for ten hours to move
thirty miles outside of the city in either direction as Hurricane Ivan
“the terrible” had us in its “cone of uncertainty” then.

Come every June, we, as citizens of New Orleans, know that we will be
placed in the “cone of uncertainty” again and again by newly-named
storms and depressions that may organize themselves into hurricanes of
categories from one to five. We prepare as always by shuddering our
homes, boarding any exposed windows, gathering batteries, canned foods,
candles, flashlights, wine and bottled water. We are efficient in such
rituals and can make our environments hurricane ready in a few hours of
concentrated energy. We are not made desperate by the threats of
hurricanes that come into the Gulf of Mexico every year, but after
Ka! trina hit, we became some kind of social experiment as water supplies
were cut off and rumors that the city may not be brought back to even
the least of working conditions for the next two to three months spread
as much as the other information that had the French Quarter flooding
on Tuesday afternoon because of the levee breaches and the failure of
the nation al rescue efforts to secure that damage.

By the afternoon of Wednesday, August 31, on other rumors that private
hotels like the Hotel Monteleone at the Canal St. end of the Quarter
were possibly having buses evacuate their guests to safety, we
purchased the hope of a $45 dollar ticket to Houston, TX on a fleet of
vehicles that were to arrive by 6pm. The hotel management had
organized a twenty-five thousand dollar rescue mission of chartered
buses escorted by state police to take their trapped guests to safety.
A few hundred residents had learned of this pric! eless information, and
most notably only a few feet away Allen Toussaint, the legendary
composer and musician, was standing in line with myself, Claudia,
Jimmy, and Kip, the three hundred hotel guests and the other two-hundred
lucky residents holding tickets out of the apocalypse.

By 9pm the buses had not arrived and the hotel management was as
confused us all of us waiting as to why we were still standing there at
this time of night with the city police escort they had also hired just
in case their missing buses were rushed by people without the proper
tickets to board. When the yellow pirate school bus cut the dark like
some night creature on the street pointing its blinding headlight eyes
to the waiting hundreds some cheers broke the whisperings, and we
finally thought our hired fleet of heroic rescue vehicles had arrived.
The bus only arrived with the information that the fleet had been
commandeered--confiscated--stolen by local police officials acting on
martial law.

All along, I had placed myself in waiting close to the hotel management
at the corner of Royal and Iberville to be in proximity to hear any
information on what was unfolding. Only then did I speak to one of the
yellow bus crew of two that told me there were no buses coming and that
they were there relaying this difficult news while offering passage to
Baton Rouge at fifty dollars a head. Imagine how this conversation was
taking place in the flashlight lit dark of night on a French Quarter
street corner where the sounds of madness were audible a block away on
the infamous Bourbon Street that normally hosts an all-night party for
Puritans and yahoos that come to unwind, drink, and throw up from all
parts of the country because they cannot have that much fun in their
own cities of social convention and Christian repression.

Certainly, we made an offer to the bus driver for the four of us that
was quite below their asking rate, and like any other transaction under
the table in this city, it was accepted. We got on the bus as the
Monteleone management was trying to figure out what to do and if to
relay the bad news to the five-hundred people that were losing hope as
the night grew more ominous. We handed over our collection of dollars
to the bus driver and sat on the cold steel floor, with Allen Toussaint
already having been the first to mount this pirate bus when it pulled
up to the street. He sat among a small group of folks that were already
on board--occupying one of the coveted seats. I was ecstatic to be on
any vehicle ready to drive me out of town and would have sat on the
roof if I had to.

If the Monteleone could privately engineer a rescue effort to bring in
ten buses, then how is it possible that the city ! and state could not
organize a fleet of 100 buses to rescue all the people left behind?
These officials could have used the stealth training of the pirate bus
crew that seemed to come in and out of town through back roads that
were quite dry as opposed to news accounts that water compromised all
land rescue efforts. We, the citizens of New Orleans who have managed
to escape, are willing to mount our own pirate and private efforts to
come and rescue our friends and family members who are still trapped by
the infinite and mounting incompetence of those in command.

I ask you to mount a collective scream of outrage and wolf howls into
the airwaves, radio and TV stations, so that we can come in to do what
we have always done in times of disaster and that is to lend a genuine
human effort that is tribal community oriented and truly
compassionate. We are being played as a reality TV show for political
sadists who hav! e the audacity to publicly say we are not worthy of
governmental support because we are an old city. Just yesterday, I
heard that a Republican politician spewed some vitriol to that effect.
Yes, we are an old city in these young United States, and we have
survived a few bad governments, slavery, and tropical plagues. Right now
we are bearing witness to the social plague of heartlessness and
racism, political inefficiency and it is denying life to this gumbo
city of African, Caribbean, Spanish, French, Irish, and Italian
influences. We are being denied the opportunity to rise into the
future of this century. We are being denie d the opportunity to return
to the city we love and rebuild it as only we can re-shape it into the
grand dame that it has been from one century to another.

Jose Torres Tama
Baton Rouge, LA
Saturday, September 3, 2005
 
I have been out of the States since the 1st of this month, and the bullshit I am hearing about FEMA and our the Bush Admin makes me sick. The bullshit response of our government portrayed by the news in the days immediately after the storm makes me sick. How can these assholes attempt to spin and cover up the truth. I hope if the war in Iraq among other policies was not a wakeup call, this will be. I haven't been able to read much news in awhile, and I really hope people of all political stripes are shouting at the top of their lungs against this mismanagement and lack of preperation. If we spent 1/1000 of the money we have spent in Iraq we could have prevented this catastrophe by making the levees stronger and the pump systems more efficient. Everyone knows all the experts have been saying for at least the past couple of years that even a category 3 would cause massive damage. I really don't know how to voice my frustration about this travesty.

Democrats and Republicans alike have been sitting with their thumbs up their asses not addressing the many real problems this nation has for far too long. How many years of neglect can this country withstand before losing that which makes us great? The governors, mayors, city administrators, and all the other people who actually make this country run need to speak out about the lack of governance and leadership at the national level. I'm tired of hearing about senators and other upper level officials taking rediculous amounts of vacation time and holding extravagent parties. The average american recieves so little time off, yet the lazy scumbags at the national level are off drinking martinis and eating shrimp cocktails discussing how to get more power into their greedy hands.
/end rant :X
 
Katrina... a video timeline re-cap

Keith Olbermann Keith put together a video time line that jumps back and forth between different days and shows the spin by Chertoff and others coupled with the reality on the ground.

As we all know, Bush's idiotic claim that nobody anticipated the levees would be breached is exposed immediately. Just think about it. How in God's name could our President say something so false that is so well documented on national TV?


WMV
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Timeline-Katrina.wmv

Quicktime
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Timeline-Katrina.mov
 
Joe Scarborough: Republicans want him to "SHUT UP"

On Joe's show tonight, he went off on Republicans that do not like him speaking out against this administration's handling of Katrina.

Joe: "I'm getting lectured from Republicans in Oregon, California, upstate New York, Arizona telling me I need to back off the President, I need to back off of FEMA, I need to back off these state leaders. You and I are on the Gulf Coast- we know how these things are supposed to be run. This has nothing to do with politics..."

The Republicans are obviously worried that this Republican talk show host's point of view isn't following their talking points and is a real problem because he's not a Democrat saying them. Joe has been honest before (Schiavo not included) and is simply exposing their ineptitude that so many people are feeling right now.

WMP
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Scarborough-bashes-republicans-Katrina.wmv

Quicktime
http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Scarborough-bashes-republicans-Katrina.mov
 
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