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August 30, 2005
New Orleans

Now the city is really in trouble. Having seen and worked against flooding I doubt those breaches in the levees can be closed by dropping sandbags from the air.

The potential area of flooding through the reported breaches is some 75 square kilometers. The average water level would be over 1 meter.

That are up to 75,000,000 cubic meter of water that will not evaporate or vanish in the ground. As New Orleans lies below the natural water level, they will have to be pumped out.

The biggest transportable salvage pump I could find on the net does some 750 cubic meter per hour and there are not many of those around.

It will be a long, long time before New Orleans is inhabitable again. Given the extreme  dangerous location, one might want to ask if that is desirable at all.

The question of course is who will have to take the blame. Here is a hint:

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s
budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose
that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t
be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that
this is a security issue for us.

— Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

 

Posted by b on August 30, 2005 at 19:55 UTC | Permalink
Comments

Do all the anti-government Southern Red-staters want to rethink their positions on big-government? Or do they still want the Fedral government to “get out of their lives?” These people down there should want for nothing. Big-government was made to help citizens in need, so we need to pull out all the stops. Fuck the low-cost loans. If we can afford 300 billion for Iraq, and the big multi-nationals, we can funnel cash to everyone affected by Katrina. Or would the anti-government folks prefer the government to “butt out of their business?”

Posted by: Ben | Aug 30 2005 20:30 utc | 1

Some links:
The local TV station does some good reporting and has a newsblog.
Nola has some stuff I didn´t see elsewhere:

Martial law declared
Local television stations report that Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes are all now under martial law, allowing the military to assume control over civilian forces.

Posted by: b | Aug 30 2005 20:38 utc | 2

This is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

Posted by: Friendly Fire | Aug 30 2005 20:54 utc | 3

i just went to the wwltv blog that b linked to and the post at the top of the page seems on top of priorities in this disaster situation

3:59 P.M. – WWL-TV reporter Jonathan Betz reports widespread looting and WWL-TV cameras showed people walking out of Canal Street stores with racks of clothes and electronics. Some looters concentrated on basics and supplies, while others made no secret of their desire to get what they could.

i can certainly imagine that the first thing everyone is worried about is propery theft. has rumsfeld made any comment on this looting yet?

Posted by: b real | Aug 30 2005 21:08 utc | 4

Evacuation of NO ordered
http://abcnews.go.com/?CMP=EMC-1396

Posted by: Friendly Fire | Aug 30 2005 21:11 utc | 5

b real wrote: “has rumsfeld made any comment on this looting yet?”
Rumsfeld has a history of being pro-looting. The citizens of New Orleans are obviously acting out their pent-up aggressions from having lived under a brutal dictator and this looting is evidence that they are on the path to democracy.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 30 2005 22:08 utc | 6

Unbelievable

Denise Bollinger, a tourist from Philadelphia, stood outside and took 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.”

Posted by: Friendly Fire | Aug 30 2005 22:12 utc | 7

Tues. 6:41 P.M. – Efforts to stop the levee break at the 17th Street Canal have ended unsuccessfully and the water is expected to soon overwhelm the pumps in that area, allowing water to pour into the east bank of Metairie and Orleans to an expected height of 12-15 feet.
Water is still rising, considering evacuating the Superdome…the hurricane damage has been compared to Hiroshima’s after the bomb now.
Looting going on…well, when people are too poor to be able to get out of town…they’re in survival mode now. Makes me wanna holler.

Posted by: fauxreal | Aug 31 2005 0:07 utc | 8

Can you declare a whole city totalled?
Just before the storm hit I’d been listening to a couple of NPR archived reports talking about how much devastation a hurricane hit to NO could cause. They talked about potential flooding, and how difficult it’d be to pump the water out, much less repair the damage. Looks like they were right.

Posted by: jimBOB | Aug 31 2005 0:53 utc | 9

Up to 80% of the populace got out before Katrina.
Which left 100,000 or so to ride it out. We know there are 20,000 to 30,000 at the Superdome.
SO THAT LEAVES ABOUT 70,000 PEOPLE “SOMEWHERE IN NEW ORLEANS.”
Where are they? Are they alive? Are they dead in their flooded homes? Are they washed up in debris piles?
That’s what’s really going to come out over the coming week.
There are clearly tens of thousands of people missing in action.
Those people are either dead or in serious danger of dying if they are not quickly removed from a city filling up with filthy and poisoned water.
The TV news is clucking about looting. It’s irrelevant. Everything that can be looted will have been looted within 48 hours. The real problem is — then what?
Then — hunger, thirst, cholera, diarrhea, starvation — these begin and build to epidemic proportions.
The only real issue is the tens of thousands of people not evacuated.
Left to die.
Who answers for that?

Posted by: Antifa | Aug 31 2005 1:47 utc | 10

i am out of sympathy. suffering that has arisen through either neglect or arrogance & is reproducible – while at the same time another country is being torn apart – physically – every fucken day like katrina – i cannot find it in my heart to even think sympathetically – tho i know as is the habitude it is the poor & the poorest who will suffer the greatest

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 31 2005 1:50 utc | 11

So much to say, but this isn’t a very lively thread so I’ll just respond to the looting issue. I had the standard response until I thght. a bit more.
If you need food & a supermarket it open, but you go to a closed one where you can break in & help yourself that is looting. If you need food & supplies, there is no other way to get it except by going in & helping yourself.
The city is Totalled. The Bastards never sent the Nat’l Guard in to reinforce the levees. It’s gone. There are stores full of wonderful stuff sitting there waiting to be written off somebody’s insurance policy. Should you just leave the stuff there to be wrecked by the flood?
This is different than an urban riot in which people will suffer for what you did to their property during the few hours of mayhem, when by looting you are contributing to the mayhem. Water is God & will claim all one way or the other. Take 20 Rolexes & you’ll have to dump ’em in the water before you get searched to get evacuated; or leave ’em & let the water claim them directly…To steal someone’s working cell phone – now that is serious ‘cuz you’re causing real hardship.
As far as losses, it’s known that 1/3 of the parish around Metarie decided not to evacuate & that ~1/4-1/3 of NO was too poor to evacuate…..I’m expecting to hear about hundreds of thousands of deaths as well…where are all the people.
The Only Good News – Trent Lott’s “home” is underwater!!!

Posted by: jj | Aug 31 2005 2:06 utc | 12

The official policy is to forbid it. The actual policy is to not bother the looters. Officials have other priorities. There is one funny report of a looter asking an officer if he could borrow his squad car.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2005 2:21 utc | 13

The Only Good News – Trent Lott’s “home” is underwater!!!
Too bad the water didn’t eat his rug too.

Posted by: Groucho | Aug 31 2005 2:24 utc | 14

I wish a journo would dig up info. on how real Presidents respond to disasters. It’s almost irrelevant now as it’s moved from disaster to catastrophe. The essential thing was to get the National Guard in there Fri. to sandbag the levees to prevent a breech. That would save the city. I’m almost speechless w/horror.
I think all Pres. Bumblekins thinks about is how Powerful he is, how he can do anything he wants. I think all he’s concerned w/is how he can feel powerful/”feel like a man”,…feel good. So, kill kill kill…FEMA becomes just another agency to manipulate so he can become the First American Dictator. Add to that the possibility that FEMA is so demoralized from being so financially gutted that no one can plan or even think straight, and now the politics must be prohibitive.
What has this Bastard done to defend our country? Isn’t this enough to convince people that they must be thrown out now???
We should conduct a poll to see how many people think, he & Rove had discussions about whether or not to do anything in advance to protect NO…and whether they decided it would be better to let it flood to wash Cindy Sheehan out of the papers altogether. Then he can return to DC & look like some hero sending in supplies to help rescue the people after the fact.
Didn’t Grover Norquist say something about reducing govt. down so far that you can drown it in a bathtub?? Wonder what he has to say now??? (Bets that when Idiot-in-Chief speaks to “the nation”, he’ll yak about acts of God.) Every effing Repug who yaks about smaller govt. deserves to have their life destroyed by this. Divine Justice MoFo.

Posted by: jj | Aug 31 2005 2:50 utc | 15

New Orleans will very soon need hundreds of doctors who know how to do relief work in low-tech third world environments (like a city with no electricity). Cuba has those doctors, with lots of hurricane experience and lots of knowledge about public health and disease prevention in subtropical environments. They could save lives. Think that’s gonna happen in Bush’s America? More proof that stupid rightwing politics kill people.

Posted by: the exile | Aug 31 2005 3:05 utc | 16

Let’s hope W doesn’t declare war on hurricanes. On past performance he’ll mobilize thousands of snowplows.

Posted by: Brian Boru | Aug 31 2005 3:30 utc | 17

I read the thread on the hurrricane over at Kos.
Some interesting points:
Actual captions on photos-
Black “looters hit a drug store”, White people ” finding bread and soda from a local grocery store.” Actually, all shops should be opened by the police for people to take supplies as needed, given the magnitude of the disaster. Everything will go bad after the city is evacuated and flooded anyway.
Stupid-ass Clarence Paige had an essay on the Newshour tonight about how good it is that there isn’t any more racism around in the south anymore! By the way, the main interview on the Newshour was a northern reporter from the Washington Post; I guess it’s hard to find local reporters down there who aren’t to embarrasing to put on TV.
Bush was actually photographed strumming a guitar today (He was trying to play “My Pet Goat”), three days after he should have been doing something about the disaster. Maybe we should just call him Nero.
At one point today, NPR’s lead story was “President cuts short vacation because of emergency.” Every news story is always personalized around Bush to create a cult of personality and a sense of authority. That’s one reason why I won’t listen to the “liberal media” like NPR anymore, and would welcome it going belly up, so we could get a few more progressive stations up and going.
This disaster will be just as damaging in human terms, and probably more costly financially than 9-11. We couldn’t get 9-11 off of our screeens, and yet they are downplaying this. Less rich people have died, it’s true. But more to the point, the propaganda model always accentuates the evil of others (9-11 terrorists), and the goodness of us, especially the authorities (rescue scenes all day today.)
As you watch the coverage, remember that the general underlying tenor is “the government can do no wrong.”
Cindy who? Ya gotta wonder at W’s luck–even if it always seems to come at the expense of others. Now 9-11 will become a big morality play about American unity (NO DISSENT ALLOWED) in the face of adversity.
Just like Vietnam, now is an excellent time to step up the terrorist bombing of innocent civilians to pacify them. Wach carefully for what falls below the radar now.

Posted by: Malooga | Aug 31 2005 4:46 utc | 18

My uncle one of those doctors who could help. In fact, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
Except.
He’s shipping out to Iraq in a couple weeks; he’s National Guard, a medic, and he’s fifty-one fucking years old.

Posted by: Lisa B-K | Aug 31 2005 5:34 utc | 19

Thoughts:
As pointed out ad nauseam before, blacks are “looters”, whites are “survivors”.
The TV media (our dish here gets Fox, CNN, etc.) were mostly nauseating through scientific incompetence, barely disguised tendencies to reach near-orgasmic levels of unhealthy excitement at times, and a complete lack of real empathy.
In a country not in denial, Bush should be hung by a rioting crowd like Mussolini, or put against a wall like Ceaucescu, or stabbed in the Senate like Caesar. That this modern-day Nero is allowed to prance around at times like this is beyond comprehesion — and the response fronm his cult (redstate, freepers etc) is even more incomprehensible.
God is a bitch with a perverse sense of humor.

Posted by: Lupin | Aug 31 2005 7:45 utc | 20

Subscribing to TV is not compulsory — yet.
K street controls the legislature; the Texas mafia controls the executive; the bank probably owns most of the house and half of the car. All we own and control is our time, yet we pay these fuckers (the “TV media”) tens of billions of dollars a year to waste it – and the medical industry even more in order to gain more time to piss away watching crap and bitching about it.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2005 9:49 utc | 21

/begin rant/
The little I have seen, read and heard about the catastrophe management in New Orleans, and other places, makes my blood run cold.
The inefficieny, stupidity, and inappropriate measures are so blatant that that that…words fail.
I am now completely convinced that Americans are totally …
Maybe call Holland to ask how you shore up levees?
Maybe call the Swiss to learn how you evacuate up to a million people with no stress and no difficulty?
Maybe request tents from the UN?
Call some Bangladeshi doctors to find out about typhoid?
Borrow some helicopters from Canada?
Ask a 6 year-old in Africa what is the number one thing stranded people need, and need immediately?
Anyone in the US got an altimeter?
Meanwhile the media goes jingle jangle and the pundits err err about…oil prices and looting! And sob sob “all those poor people who are without a safety net”…
It is beyond belief. The US is a failed State.
/end rant/

Posted by: Noisette | Aug 31 2005 10:55 utc | 22

it is not a failed state, it is a degenerate society.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2005 11:10 utc | 23

A pessimistic pumping scenario and an optimistic one.
Why did this happen?
Global warming will also have to do with the increasing frequency of hurricanes. So let’s make things worse.

Posted by: DharmaBum | Aug 31 2005 14:07 utc | 24

The cops don’t give a shit about people grabbing stuff, until CNN went hysterical. The whole city is going to be destroyed , they know it’s about human life.
I’m actually convinced that the mayor allowed looting because he knew that’s the only way to get the National Guard.

Posted by: folkers | Aug 31 2005 15:32 utc | 25

They need to crank open the top of the superdome so Homeland Security can airdrop the refugees some glossy brochures describing the agency’s disaster planning efforts. If they could only get the generators going for a half hour they could project the PowerPoint presentation onto the big screens.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2005 17:13 utc | 26

some things.
first about the “missing” 70K or so. i read over at urbansurvival.com (IIRC) that there are massive amounts of people dead which are being covered up by stories about looting. one quote i remember attributed to a member of a salvage team went like “we’re fishing them out by the dozen” and there are supposedly areas where corpses are floating around in all the streets.
second thing was that bit published in the MSM that 34-36% of new orleans inhabitants live below poverty line. to me that is comparable to 3rd world, probably like any mexican city. over one third of the population living below poverty in a city which is in the middle of one of the biggest commercial ports worldwide looks like a crime of catastrophic proportions against the population to my naive european eyes. that shitty line of trying to block a hole of 150 meters (reported) in a dike by dropping sandbags from nonexisting helicopters is very revealing about the attitude of “authorities” who dont take their responsibility vis-a-vis their community anywhere near serious. i think that the major of new orleans will see himself as lucky if the city is abandoned, because he’ll have no constituency who would make him and his team take responsibility for avoidable failures.
next thing, i read that the dikes and other infrastructure protecting the city from flooding were not upgraded or repaired due to budget cuts and reallocation of money to “homeland security” and the military. if one takes military spending of the US to be about 75% of the federal budget, between current-year costs and debt repayment for past wars it is clear what effects military overspending has on national infrastructure and society. the massive military infrastructure of the US has been bought at the price of neglecting necessary projects, among others, investment in reserves and infrastructure which could have ameliorated and at least partially absorbed the social impact of this foreseable catastrophe.
next thing i read was that the people who went to the stadium (“dome”) looking for shelter were made to wait for hours and subject to denigrating searches.
next thing – again to my naive european eyes – is wastefulness. i checked in google maps and found that in a radius of about 100km around new orleans there are 4 major airports and many smaller “municipal” airports. so, for what does a backward city of p’haps a million of which a guessed 50% wouldn’t even be able to afford to fly need so many airports ? no wonder oil is running out and gasoline prices are going crazy.
if incompetence, contempt and wastefulness is all the american “authorities” have to offer their citizens one has to wonder how any degree of social cohesion can exist in that country – a possible and probable answer to that rhethoric question can be found in the proliferation of jails and militarization of police corps together with brutal and intimidatory tactics employed against civilians.
if the horrible mismanagement of the immediate consequences of this catastrophe does not politicize americans, probably nothing will. in the meantime i concur with noisette above: the US looks like a failed state to me.

Posted by: name | Aug 31 2005 21:41 utc | 27

More of the same

While the flow of information is frustratingly difficult, our reporters have yet to find evidence of a coordinated approach to relieve pain and hunger or to secure property and maintain order.
People are hurting and people are being vandalized.
Yet where is the National Guard, why hasn’t every able-bodied member of the armed forces in South Mississippi been pressed into service?
On Wednesday reporters listening to horrific stories of death and survival at the Biloxi Junior High School shelter looked north across Irish Hill Road and saw Air Force personnel playing basketball and performing calisthenics.
Playing basketball and performing calisthenics!
When asked why these young men were not being used to help in the recovery effort, our reporters were told that it would be pointless to send military personnel down to the beach to pick up debris.

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 31 2005 22:35 utc | 28

my husband and I were heartbroken as we watched people walking the streets of New Orleans, homeless…looking for water. Children…hungry and thirsty. We wanted to do our part to help. Many of our friends like us sat down and discussed what we would need to do without in the upcoming months so we could make commitments in the upcoming months so that we could make regular donations….and while we planned how we would help we listened to this Louis Fariquan (?) person on television and we found out how much the black people hated us white people…we had no idea! After listening to him we were not inclined to be so sacrificing….I don’t think he wanted our white money.

Posted by: callie | Nov 2 2005 19:31 utc | 29

Dear callie
If you are for real I suggest you review what you wrote. If you really wanted to help those poor negroes you certainly could have. That you have never heard of Louis Farrakhan demonstrates more than just a little ignorance. I suppose you had never heard of Rosa Parks before today as well.
I find it truly sad that you have to be afraid of people who have lost everything and prefer to let them suffer rather than part with some of your “white” money.

Posted by: dan of steele | Nov 2 2005 19:50 utc | 30

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