THE BIG VIRTUAL EASY?

We see all kinds of postings on all kinds of lists from people who used to live in the path of Katrina and Rita, connecting with each other and with old friends and colleagues elsewhere. The Internet has eased the plight of people displaced and thrown apart from each other in a way that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A number of schools in the Gulf Coast area are pulling themselves together by offering online courses and other services to their displaced students. This trend works in opposition to all the forces that have been operating for years to separate us from our families, friends, and neighbors. Maybe we need to think about ways the Internet could be used more consciously and in more routine situations to keep us in touch with each other.

For instance...

I don't think I'm unique. But the hospital I was born in has been long since closed (Newton Hospital, Newton MA). The kindergarten I attended (The Outdoor School, Hollywood FL) has disappeared altogether. While the public school I attended from first through seventh grade (Hollywood Central School) is still in existence, the actual building in which I went to school burned down a while back. My high school (Assumption Academy, Miami FL) has been bulldozed for condos. My college (Radcliffe) has been merged into Harvard. The street I lived on during my senior year (Hayes Street in Cambridge MA) has disappeared--not the building, the entire street. I sometimes get to feeling like the Nowhere Man in "Yellow Submarine"--remember the grey blobby guy whose world disappears as he walks through it?

I think the recently-deplored epidemic of "hoarding" may result from this kind of living--we hold on to stuff because we can't hold on to our physical world.

Additionally, we can't always hold on to what happens to us in that world. On August 28, 1968, here in Chicago, I went to a rally in what was then the Grant Park Bandshell (the replacement of which has since been replaced) to protest the Democratic National Convention, which was being held due west of there at the time (at an amphitheatre that has since been torn down and replaced by condos.) I went with a friend who was a reporter (for a newspaper, by the way, which has also since disappeared) who did his job by asking one of the cops on duty there for a crowd count estimate. The officer told us that the capacity of the bandshell was 10,000, and there were obviously people standing in the aisles and around the edges, so he figured something like 12,000.

I went home that night (after being tear-gassed while attempting to catch my train) to watch the news; the official crowd estimate for the rally at that point was somewhere around 8,000. When I woke up the next morning and caught the news again, it was down to 2,000. I quit listening at that point, afraid the event would disappear altogether.

And now we have actually seen real physical towns and neighborhoods wiped off the map. But we still have ways of holding on to them, on line, and keeping in touch with those we lived near. It looks as if some people are going to start moving back into New Orleans. It also appears that a fair proportion of the city's population will never move back. But they can form a city on line, with its own celebrations and communities and even business endeavors. This may be the first of the virtual cities. But it will probably not be the last.

HERE WE GO AGAIN!

Hurricane Rita is rolling inexorably toward the Gulf Coast, and hundreds of thousands of people are trying to get out of her way. This time, the authorities are really seriously trying to get everything right. They're using buses to evacuate people who can't drive themselves; they're evacuating hospitals and nursing homes; they're getting people onto the roads as early as possible. And it may still not be enough. Already a bus full of nursing home patients has exploded, killing more than 20 people in a fire that was probably intensified by their oxygen tanks. Many evacuees have run out of gas before getting anywhere near a safe destination. Some of the levees in New Orleans are in trouble again, and the hurricane hasn't even made landfall yet.

On one hand, it's good that the disaster mavens are getting a second chance to do right what they screwed up last time. On the other hand, it's really scary when, with a lot better information, a lot more willingness to pay attention to that information, and a serious commitment to protecting all the people in harm's way, they still CAN'T do the job.

I am still seeing right-wingers claim that global warming has nothing to do with the fact that we are getting more hurricanes every year, and more of them are Category 3 or higher. As I understand it, the relationship of large bodies of warm water to the frequency and intensity of hurricanes is Meteorology 101, right up there with the cycle of rain and evaporation of water. The only people who can seriously deny it are the flat-earthers. But we have elected a government that puts flat-earthers in positions of responsibility requiring scientific know-how and common sense. That probably means that, for the next 3 years, we are committed to taking no long-range action to protect the southern US from more and nastier hurricanes.

What would such long-range action entail? Maybe a permanent evacuation of barrier islands, beaches, and low-lying Gulf Coast areas. Maybe a permanent evacuation of the entire Gulf Coast. Certainly a revision of building code standards in that part of the country, and a revised flood insurance plan that either bans residences in flood-prone areas, or makes it outrageously expensive. Maybe a plan to move hazardous chemical manufacture and storage away from parts of the country prone to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Whatever it takes, we probably won't get around to it under this administration. So the next election becomes literally a matter of national life or death.

A month or so back, my husband and I watched the ultra-disaster movie, "The Day After Tomorrow." It purports to portray the ultimate result of global warming--a nationwide plague of hurricanes and tornadoes culminating in an instantaneous ice age. At the time, it looked pretty far-fetched, to the point of absurdity. It still does, but not quite as much. Probably its producer will not enjoy telling us "I told you so" any more than I will. Seize the time.

ANOTHER WIN FROM JON

And Jon does it again, for Odd Lot #8 (Ludwig Van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietsche, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Al Capone)--the link is syphilis (all of them are believed to have died of it.)

Here's Odd Lot #9: Jesse Jackson (Sr.), Marilyn Monroe, and William the Conqueror.

COMMON SENSE

We are suddenly confronted with a catastrophe which is both crisis and opportunity. Can we start with what my mother always considered the three basic questions to ask in such a situation:

What do we have lots of?

What do we need?

How do we turn what we have lots of into what we need?

Any comments on any of these points will be passed on to readers. My own immediate reactions: one of the things we have lots of is good ideas. Let's not let them go to waste.

Another thing we apparently have lots of is good will and eagerness to contribute.

What we need is, first of all, some way to meet the government's inescapable deficit from meeting relief and reconstruction needs without (given the tax priorities of God's Own Party) raising taxes.

Another thing we need is a way to encourage Americans to save more--we have one of the lowest rates of saving in the Western world, and we now know that retirees can no longer count on employer pensions to provide for them.

So: can we turn that energy and eagerness into a solution for the deficit and the relief needs of the Gulf Coast by starting a government relief bond drive? My husband is an old-time radio junkie, so I spend a lot of time overhearing broadcasts from World War II, when every other commercial urged the listeners to buy war bonds. Lots of them did, apparently, much to the benefit of the war effort. It was a way of harnessing the popular energy at the home front behind the "good war." Why can't we do this again? Use relief bonds as a way to both pay for Katrina relief and reconstruction, and fund the retirement of today's workforce. Please, pass this on. It's an idea whose time has come.

SOME GOOD LINKS AND INFO ON KATRINA RELIEF

Thanks to Kate Walsh, who keeps sending me all this great stuff. The following piece is from:
Henry Breitrose
Professor of Communication
Department of Communication
Stanford University
Stanford, California USA 94305-2050
+650-723-4700

"quite clear~ as to where the essential responsibility lies; not with the mayor or the governor as many would like to insist. This is a reflection of the extreme dangers of the Reagan ideology, magnified x 10 with the current group in power. That all protections from the government are "entitlement" and that the people are, essentially, on their own. With all the benefits of a hearty economy going to the few insiders. Again, isn't this what we got rid of in the late 1700s? Privilege for a few, and misery for the many?
Will this reality be enough to wake people from their sugar dreams?


"CHRONOLOGY.... Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration:

"January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management.

"April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program...." he said. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level."

"2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three "likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country."

"December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management.

"March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism.

"2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery.

"Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: "You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it."

"June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: "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."

"June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes.

"August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden.

"A crony with no relevant experience was installed as head of FEMA. Mitigation budgets for New Orleans were slashed even though it was known to be one of the top three risks in the country. FEMA was deliberately downsized as part of the Bush administration's conservative agenda to reduce the role of government. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away.

"Actions have consequences. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell."

Following are some good links:

http://www.suheirhammad.com ("A Poet Describes What She Has Seen")
www.beliefnet.com/story/174/story_17484_1.html ("I Was Fired For Helping")
www.counterpunch.org (September 17-18 "A Student Report from Louisiana"

KATRINA RECOVERY ISSUES

The latest word is that residents of New Orleans' driest sections may be able to start moving back home as early as Monday. But the city is still 50% under water. This may be the time to start planning for an interim census of the whole Gulf Coast area, and absentee voter registration for those who can't get home yet. Otherwise, several legislative districts may just be wiped out. And most of them, in all probability, will be Democratic districts. Since God's Own Party appears to believe in multi-party elections only in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress will need to be heavily lobbied to get started on reconstructing these constituencies.

ODD LOTS #8

Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Nietsche, Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston Churchill's father) and Al Capone.

CHARLTON HESTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE

Where is the NRA now that the citizens of New Orleans are being systematically disarmed without the authorities even (so far as I know) bothering to check first for proper gun ownership documentation? Why doesn't the Second Amendment apply to displaced persons in situations where (one would think) being armed could make the most difference?

JON DOES IT AGAIN!

Odd lots #7 (Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, and St. Augustine) were all born in what is now Algeria, and all (I'm not actually sure about this, and will check it later, but this is as esoteric as you can get) wrote commentaries about Plotinus. Actually what I had in mind was just that they were philosophers born in Algeria, but I'll certainly go with Jon's answer. Which came in so fast I haven't had time to concoct the next Odd Lot. Watch this space.

ODD LOTS #6 WINNER!

Jon does it again. Julia Child, Meyer Kahan, and George H.W. Bush all at one time or another worked for the CIA. Ms. Child may count twice because of her connection to the other CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, one of the most renowned cooking schools in the country.

Here's a more esoteric one: St. Augustine, Albert Camus, and Jacques Derrida.

BETTER PLANNING NEXT TIME

If there is one thing that’s absolutely clear from the Katrina debacle, it is that, whether or not the federal, state, and local government authorities are willing to plan and organize for possible disasters in the future, there is a definite limit to how much they will be able to do. If ordinary people do not take on the responsibility of individual, household, and neighborhood planning, and the civic responsibility of demanding appropriate action from the various governments in our lives, nobody else is going to.

I grew up in Florida during a period when we could count on 2 or 3 major hurricanes a year. It got to be pretty routine to shutter the windows, bring in the lawn furniture and the cat, bring out the oil lanterns, the battery radio, and the Sterno stove, fill the bathtub with water, and hunker down for the storm. I don’t remember ever being afraid, even though in one storm, our neighbor’s roof blew off. This was just what you did.

A listfriend sends me the following fascinating link about how they do disaster planning in Cuba: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090305Y.shtml That’s one place to start. Here are some others:

1) Federal and state laws require every state and local government agency to formulate, keep on file, and make available to the public, plans for evacuation or other appropriate response to natural and unnatural disasters (like releases of hazardous materials.) Of course, that doesn’t mean they actually do it. To find out who you need to contact to get a look at the plans in your area, start with your state’s EPA and work down from there. If you find out there are no such plans, or the existing plans are ridiculous, it’s time to start agitating, and getting in touch with local environmental groups. If there are such plans, and they look decent, get yourself a copy, and figure out where you and your neighbors fit in. (Example of a ridiculous plan, this one in southern Cook County, Illinois: in the event of a hazardous material release, the agency in charge plans to get a bunch of refrigerated trucks on-site. Period. No, this is not to keep emergency workers supplied with popsicles. It’s to provide a temporary morgue for the bodies.)

2) Look around you. Do any of your neighbors have mobility problems? Do you have neighbors who do not drive? Are you in a position to exchange heavy lifting for a place in a car, or vice versa? Work out a plan with your neighbors. If you can’t help out directly, put them in touch with someone who can. Make a phone tree or an e-mail list of people you will check with in the course of taking emergency action.

3) Get in touch with your neighborhood association, or your condo board, or your tenants’ union, to talk about disaster planning. That includes purely localized fire, flood, power outage, or snowstorm, as well as the really bad wide-area stuff. Figure out what all needs to be done in the event of the most likely and least drastic problem, and then work your way up to the most unlikely and horrendous one. If we have learned one thing this year, it is that very unlikely things happen all the time. Parcel out responsibilities for: communications, heavy lifting, health needs, pets, evacuation, shelter, and supplies.

4) Get in touch with the specialists in this stuff: the Red Cross (which I think teaches courses on some of this), your state EPA, federal EPA and FEMA (but wait till things quiet down for them), any local survivalist groups, and (honest!) the Mormons, who are really into things like stocking provisions. Set up meetings or classes for groups you belong to, like churches, PTAs, and social clubs. Google “disaster planning” and see what pops up in your area.

5) Make your own household plan. Figure out what to grab first, where to head to, how to communicate, and where to meet when things quiet down.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me.
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?”

NEW HINT FOR ODD LOTS #6

Julia Child probably counts twice.

BLAME IS NOT A GAME

"Blame game.” “Finger-pointing.” “He said-she said.” “Guilt-tripping.” “Time to move on.” A French collaborator with the Nazis who was finally brought to trial decades after his crimes had been committed is reported to have said, “I’ve forgotten about all that. Why can’t they?” The list goes on. It is what the perpetrators of harm say to their victims when they can’t say “I’m sorry” and can’t even figure out how to say “I’ll do better next time.”

A very dear friend of mine whom I shall call Lou has nothing but scorn for President Bush, on whose watch this mess happened. Bush set up FEMA to fail, Lou says. He is allowing Brown to be scapegoated, but Brown was his choice for the job in the first place. But Lou believes the local and state authorities are getting a really bad rap for having failed to set up an evacuation plan for New Orleanians without cars. “It couldn’t have been done,” he says. “Mayor Nagin did the best anybody could have done in a situation nobody else has ever confronted at all. We need to stop hitting him over the head. There was no way the poor could have been evacuated, and trying just would have cost more lives.”

So the poor of New Orleans drowned and starved so that the middle class could live? Let’s think about that. If somebody came to me and said, “There’s going to be a hazmat leakage in an hour. We can choose between trying to evacuate the folks in your South Side Chicago neighborhood, which probably won’t work very well, or we can concentrate on keeping Winnetka and Naperville safe, which probably will. There’s no way we can do both. Are you willing to give up your life and the lives of those you love for the suburbanites?” what would I say? What would any of us say? Probably something like “Get the **** out of my doorway and let us get out of here!” There are people whose job it is to give up their lives so that others might live. Firefighters, police officers, soldiers, doctors, nurses, paramedics, sometimes teachers and even telephone operators and lighthouse operators. When they take jobs like that, they know the obligations that go with it. So do their families. But the rest of us, ordinary citizens, have no such obligation. We have the right to preserve our own lives and the duty to preserve the lives of our families, by any means necessary.

So of course, the authorities in New Orleans, assuming they had actually made such a rational calculation of who could live and who could die in the hypothetical Hurricane Pam, knew better than to tell the people on the wrong end of it, in advance, that they had drawn the short straw. Maybe that was the right choice. The greatest good of the greatest number. But now they are going to have to deal with the consequences of those same people knowing that they were written off in advance of the disaster. However rational and utilitarian the reasons, the poor of New Orleans now know that the social contract was always null and void for them.

What about the rest of the citizens of New Orleans, the 80% who benefited from the extraordinary evacuation planning for auto traffic and got out with their families, their pets, and at least the most essential of their belongings? Are they worried about trying to go back and live with those with whose danger and suffering their own safety was purchased? I would be.

That’s not a new problem, of course. The most salient example of it in living memory is probably the reaction of Congress and the chattering classes to the anticipated return of the soldiers who had fought World War II. Sixteen million Americans fought in that war. Most of them would be returning home at roughly the same time. They had seen and done things no one should have to live remembering. They were young, strong, trained in the use of weapons, and capable of shedding blood. And, the civilian authorities worried, maybe they were also angry at those who had sat home and reaped the benefit of their suffering. Situations like this are what revolutions are made of.

So Congress came up with what turned out to be an absolutely brilliant solution, what was later titled the GI Bill of Rights. It provided, for all those who had served in the armed forces during World War II (and later on, in Korea) full tuition plus a living stipend for college and post-college education; medical care; and low interest home loans. An entire generation of veterans became the first in their families to go to college and own their own homes. An entire generation was moved into the middle class. The prosperity of the 1950s and early 1960s was built on the GI Bill. It was the closest this country has ever come to socialism.

Maybe this is what we owe the veterans of Hurricane Katrina. Maybe this is what it will take to re-establish the social contract with those who drew the short straw: a Katrina Bill of Rights.

TRACKING KATRINA'S SURVIVORS

A listfriend sends us this information:

"A friend who's helping put me onto this:
http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/PeopleFinderVolunteer

"I haven't looked at it much yet, but evidently
they're culling "I'm looking for so and so" and
"I'm still alive" notices from all over, and
putting them into a database so folks can find
loved ones.

"They need folks to help with data entry. Info is
on that page.

"Wiki is the project where folks work together to
produce open-source reference material--Wikipedia, etc.

"blessings,
Janelle"

I don't know what else is being done to help survivors find each other, or to account for the dead and missing, but we clearly have the technology to do a decent job of it. For starters, is anybody using the US Census Bureau database for the New Orleans area, to check off the people who ought to be there? Now that food, water, shelter, sanitation, and medical care are more or less under control, information should be the next priority.

FATS DOMINO IS ALIVE AND WELL!

Fats Domino has been rescued from his New Orlweans home by boat. We have no further information on his condition or that of his family, but the Times-Picayune displayed a photo of the singer being helped off the boat by rescuers.

LEFT BEHIND, or And I Alone Am Escaped To Tell Thee

Probably most Americans these days are familiar with the “Left Behind” series of evangelical apocalyptic novels. I worked my way through them (except for the last one, which I no longer have the heart to read) on the recommendation of one of my students. In some ways they are merely a specialized example of the larger genre of apocalyptic fiction, most of which gets filed under “sci-fi” or “speculative fiction” these days. Basic requirements: Civilization As We Know It gets wiped out by one or another dreadful device of nature, warfare, or toxic blowup. Our Hero (who is usually but not always male) survives (sometimes by dumb luck, sometimes by intelligence and courage), builds a community, and hunkers in to rebuild civilization (with varying degrees of success.) The reader is encouraged to identify with Our Hero and thus to believe that s/he too could survive some dread device that kills almost everybody else. In the Left Behind series, of course, the Good Guys survive, spiritually if not always physically, by virtue of having the right beliefs and spiritual commitments.

Speculative fiction writer Martin Gidron sent me an e-mail today, under the heading “Alas Babylon,” in which he points out, “what many of us long suspected about the utter futility of Cold War era evacuation plans in the event of nuclear war turns out to have been absolutely correct. Just look at the chaos and staggering death toll from an event for which there were several days of warning, not 20 minutes!” (Alas Babylon is the title of one of the better examples of apocalyptic fiction, written in the 1950s by Pat Frank; Frank’s hero and his community survive by virtue of living in a backwater too far away from any potential target to be worth bombing. Read it if you can find it. The backwater in question, by the way, is now in one of the fastest-growing sections of the country.)

All of this, of course, is related to the “Hurricane Pam” disaster planning exercise conducted in New Orleans last summer, long before Hurricane Katrina was even a tropical depression. Martin Shlepstein, environmental reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who attended the exercise, now tells us that the planners worked out a solid plan for evacuating the 80% of the population of the city who could drive their own cars out. That plan, in fact, was put into effect earlier this week, and worked splendidly. But, he also tells us, the planners were well aware that the rest of the population, a number they estimated at 112,000 households, would not be able to evacuate. They made no alternative provision for that group, consisting mostly of those who were too old, too disabled, or too poor to own or drive cars. They did discuss, briefly, using trains and cruise ships to evacuate the carless, and then dropped the subject. They made a half-baked attempt to get the churches to set up a “buddy plan” to encourage their members to offer rides to the carless, but it never really got off the ground.

In fiction, you can disregard an entire universe of possible characters without risking anything worse than a bad review. In real life, the consequences are another thing entirely. The officials of New Orleans seemed astonished that the un-evacuated citizens of their city have now turned to looting and far worse in the absence of food, water, medical care, shelter, sanitation, information, and any evidence that the city, state, and federal authorities give a flogging damn about them. That astonishment, I suspect, reflects something far darker. I think the city authorities did not expect the un-evacuated to survive at all, much less to resort to unauthorized methods of attempting to keep hand and mouth together. I think that’s what happens when people in power confuse plans of collective action with speculative fiction.

Not exactly to cheer anybody up, but to end at least on a more appropriate note, I’d like to close with another piece of quasi-apocalyptic literature with a less elitist and more compassionate tone: the folk song “Mighty Day,” about the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 (the 105th anniversary of which falls on September 8), the greatest natural disaster, by number of deaths, in United States history: 8,000 by accepted figures, perhaps as many as 12,000. The tragedy killed more Americans than any other natural disaster, indeed, more than the legendary Johnstown Flood , the San Francisco Earthquake, the 1938 New England Hurricane and the Chicago Fire combined.

I remember down in Galveston
when the storm winds swept the town
The high tide from the ocean
pushed the water all around.

There was a sea-wall there in Galveston
To keep the waters down,
But the high tide from the ocean, Lord,
Put water in the town.

The trumpets warned the people,
"You'd better leave this place!"
But they never meant to leave their homes
Till death was in their face.

The waters, like some river,
Came a-rushing to and fro;
I saw my father drowning,
God, I watched my mother go!

Now death, your hands are icy;
You've got them on my knee.
You took away my mother,
Now you're coming after me!

The trains they all were loaded
With people leaving town;
The tracks gave way to the ocean, Lord,
And the trains they went on down.

The seas began to rolling,
The ships they could not land;
I heard a Captain crying,
"God, please save a drowning man!"

It was a mighty day, a mighty day
A mighty day, great god, that morn
when the storm winds swept the town.

WHERE TO SEND HELP

Thanks to Bob Schwartz for these links to make donations that will actually get to the hurricane victims: FEMA - http://www.fema.gov and Red Cross - http://www.redcross.org. Apparently there are already some scams out there raising money for fake charities. Or, like the Gospel says, "where the body is, there shall the vultures be gathered."

HARD TIMES UPDATE

Mark Shlepstein, the environmental reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune, indicates that the city's disaster planners knew well ahead of time that the city's evacuation plan made no provision for evacuating anyone who could not provide their own private transportation. In a disaster planning exercise earlier this year (called "Hurricane Pam"), they estimated the number of people in this situation as 112,000 households. (For more information, see http://www.thebirminghamtimes.com/News/Article/Article.asp?NewsID=4744&sID=3) Which is to say, the city wrote those people off long before the storm was a twinkle in Gaia's eye. The fact that the city fathers are now "shocked, shocked" that there is looting and crime in the streets at the hands of those who could not get out suggests strongly that they had not expected the unevacuated to survive at all. The only reason I do not consider the looters exonerated by that fact is that they probably never knew it.

FATS DOMINO IS MISSING!

The latest info from New Orleans is that Fats Domino and his family decided to "ride out the storm" in a neighborhood which is now under water. His manager, who is not in New Orleans, has not heard from him since the storm struck.