I’ve pretty much stayed away from getting into any discussions about Hurrican Katrina and its aftermath for a few reasons: First, I don’t really think I have anything to add to the debate because you know, there really isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, any debate. What has happened there is unimaginable, and all of us watching on TV, no matter how shocked and appalled we are still see these images through the filter of our televisions which tempers the shock no matter how in touch we think we are. How could this happen to a major American city? How could so many people be surviving (“living” really isn’t an appropriate word) in these conditions? And I can’t even imagine what I would be feeling knowing that my home and my life had been destroyed, but unlike a fire or some other catastrophic damage to my house or apartment, I can’t even return to my city, my larger home because there’s no place to live or work or anything. The response of our government has been appalling and shocking, and yet even more shocking is the inability of some people to do anything but try to spin whatever actions and mistakes have been made into not such a big deal.
But whatever. You don’t need to hear me say that because there are other people around the interwideworldnetweb doing it much better than I. (For example, this email to Andrew Sullivan.)
I don’t have any friends in the region, but I know some people who know some people, and my uncle, a broadcast journalist, is there now covering the events. The emails I’ve received are striking, and I thought I’d share them with whoever is interested. After the jump are both of them: first the one from a friend, which is actually in turn from a friend of his, and then one from my uncle. They’re both long reads, but they’re also both worth reading.
Meanwhile, donate if you can. The easiest and best way is just to go to The American Red Cross.
(Received 09/02/05)
From: H
Subject: Conditions in Louisiana
Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:00:06 -0400
Dear Friends,
As I’m sure all of you know, I’m from Louisiana and my mother, most of my family, and many good friends still live there. Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast on Monday, has caused incredible destruction in New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana. Last week, I was in my hometown of Opelousas, Louisiana, during the hurricane; fortunately, Opelousas only experienced wind and rain and my family suffered no damage.
However, I have pasted in below a short email from RG, a good friend of mine from high school who lives in Lousiana. Her email describes the terrible conditions there.
After the hurricane, I went out and bought blankets, pillows, towels, and soap and brought them to a large group of evacuees staying at a church hall in my hometown. If you are in any position to help in any way, please do so. I don’t usually believe in sending forwards or standing on a soap box, but I do love New Orleans and this is, indeed, a crisis of massive proportions. Now, R’s email:
___________________________________________________________________________
I don’t know how much of the news you are watching, but the situation is unbelievably bad around here — medievally and third-world kind of bad. Not only is New Orleans still totally underwater — 15 feet deep in places — but it is also still populated by refugees, many of whom are still trapped since the weekend waiting to be found. The city is literally under martial law, and bands of boys who have spent their lives in gangs on the very rough streets of New Orleans have taken their arms and more guns and ammunition looted from area businesses to walk the streets of New Orleans in open defiance of authority to threaten everyone around them. Evacuations of the SuperDome and hospitals are finally underway, and many of these incredibly poor and vulnerable people are going to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Houston. Unfortunately, Baton Rouge and Lafayette have already seen a rise in lawlessness as refugees overtake areas that are unprepared to handle them with adequate law enforcement, health care, or supplies. In addition to all this, below the waters covering New Orleans, there are estimated to be thousands of dead bodies. 20% of New Orleans did not evacuate. That is 250,000 people. There were only 10,000 in the SuperDome. Disease from standing water carrying putrefying dead bodies is an enormous health concern. Furthermore, toxic waste is spilling into these waters. There is NO drinking water or food for the people there other than the meager supplies too slowly coming in.
I am writing this to you to beg you to help in any way you can. Send money to the American Red Cross, who is helping immensely. Call your senators, congresspeople, and the President, and DEMAND more assistance. This problem is more devastating and far-reaching than you can possibly imagine, and we need more federal assistance than we are getting. Also, I would encourage you to beseech your representatives to ask for international assistance. It is not an overstatement to compare this event to the recent tsunami, and the world rallied to assist those people. It is also not much of an overstatement to compare the poor people of New Orleans to third-world citizens. New Orleans has the greatest divide of rich and poor in the nation, and some of the worst poverty in America is concentrated along the New Orleans gulf coast. The state of Louisiana cannot handle this problem alone. Please do your part to support the aid effort we desperately need here.
Forward this to as many people as you can. Even though this problem seems far away and isolated to some of you, its impact is already being felt nationally in our gas prices, and I fear that the social ills we are facing here will also quickly export themselves to our neighbors.
Keep us in your thoughts and prayers, and please help.
_____________________________________________________________________
Best,
H
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(Received 09/01/05)
Dear family and friends,
As some of you know, Monday, (I was) asked to go with a camera crew to New Orleans. When I say “go to New Orleans,” I mean we flew to Houston, the nearest functioning airport, and drove overnight. But if I moan and groan about how I’m suffering, shut me up. I only went a couple of nights without sleep. Maybe a million people are going to have to go months without a home. Right now they have no place to live, no place to work, no place to get food, no place to send their kids to school. In my career, as you know, I have covered some of the major wars and natural disasters of the past few decades, but this one, measured by the scope of its impact, is right near the top of the list. I have seen scene after scene that I can compare in my professional experience only to war zones. The only difference is, in other places people are fleeing the fighting; here they are fleeing the water.
Maybe two thirds of the city is under water. Some places it’s only a foot or two, and that’s tough enough. But some places it’s 15 or 20 feet, and that’s impossible. Tuesday my cameraman and I tied our star to a convoy of state fishery employees whose convoy of pickup trucks pulling boats we passed at about 3 in the morning on the road from Houston. We geared back, stuck with them, followed them to a staging area, got them to let us join in, and used them to get through the roadblocks meant to keep out anyone without life-saving business in the city. Most important, they helped us to get to the worst parts of the flooding, because their job was to put into the water and cruise at rooftop level looking for anyone who’d survived. This itself was amazing, because all the familiar landmarks for an urban neighborhood— corners, street signs, sidewalks, parked cars, front doors— all were somewhere below us. This part of the city was just a lake.
I spent as much time that day helping save lives as making notes for the two programs we’re doing (a half hour, then an hour). We went out on a flat bottom boat literally pulling people off rooftops, the only parts of their homes left above the waterline. Typically, they got there by punching a hole in the roof, which they’d reached from their attics…. until the water started rising even up to there. One guy I literally carried down from the top of his roof to the boat was on his oxygen tank. In one case, we pulled a family of 14, including 7 little kids, two very frail elderly women, and a man almost as big as the house itself, through a single second story window that would only open halfway. We’re on the boat up against the side of the house, and we thought about kicking in the glass, but these people were in a small space with water up to their hips, and the flying glass would have been dangerous, and the broken glass through which we’d have to pull them would have been worse. Like everyone else, they had only the soaking wet clothes on their backs— the water rose too fast for many of them to grab anything else, like photos, necessary medicines, even in the case of many, shoes, so they were barefoot. At one point we joined a few other boats taking people off the roof of the local two-story elementary school. Some had kids on their shoulders, who they’d hand to us shivering. Some were calm, some were frantic. All were still shaking from the fear of rising water and no rescue. All hungry and dehydrated because temperatures are in the humid 90s. All were grateful to be going somewhere else.
But that’s the next part. Yesterday we spent moving around New Orleans. That makes it sound simple, and it’s not. There’s water everywhere. So you start somewhere in water you can negotiate in the high-off-the-road SUV we rented at the Houston Airport. Then you slowly drive into something deeper and deeper until it’s too dangerous to keep going— the engine comes close to getting flooded in the deep fetid water, which would not be pretty, and twice, we started moving not on our wheels but on the current. You also suddenly strike tree trunks or sofas or bikes that are submerged. I don’t think Hertz is going to want to keep our account.
One place we got to yesterday was the Superdome, the huge sports & convention arena in the city where there are something like 20,000 refugees. But with power lines broken and hanging and off all over the area, it too has no electricity, so the toilets no longer flush because the pumps don’t work, so they’ve piled up with human waste, which makes the whole place smell like a sewer, so everyone’s outside on the exterior walkways in the broiling sun. But it’s 20 or 30 feet above street level, which is why they chose it, although now they’re trying to evacuate it. To get there, we hitched a ride on an empty boat heading into deeper water to rescue some people stuck in an office building. To get out again, we went down the Superdome’s ramp to the street, and waded holding equipment above our heads about four or five city blocks with the water up to our breasts. Of course there are curbs and toppled newspaper stands and who knows what else underfoot. So with the cameraman holding one hand on my shoulder and walking behind me, I’d take a small step at a time, and if suddenly I dropped six inches, he knew to be ready for a step. Or if I kicked a newspaper stand, he’d know to stop and sidestep around it. He’s holding the $120,000 HD camera.
Wherever you go, you see people who I can only liken to the walking dead. Yesterday, for instance, there was a guy maybe 30, pushing his father, maybe 60, in a wheelchair. Through three or four foot deep water. We could have set off a firecracker next to them; they wouldn’t have flinched. I guess they’ve just seen too much tragedy and suffered too much loss of hope to react to two strangers with a TV camera pointed at them. But people like that are everywhere. They have no realistic hope for the foreseeable future. Their homes are under water; their places of work, their schools, their markets, their highways, their cars, their doctor’s offices, their checkbooks, their marriage licenses and birth certificates and computers and televisions and clothing and furniture— it’s all submerged and saturated. Estimates now are that to get the electricity back on, first they have to get the water out, and to do that, they have to fix the levees that breached, and to do that, they’ve got to figure out how in an environment they’ve never experienced before— so estimates are something like 4 months. And even then, when and if people can finally come back, they’ll come back to a level of loss few Americans have ever suffered.
Yet most, when I ask how they’re coping with it all, graciously say they feel happy to have survived. And happy to have their families together. Some didn’t survive, of course. No one can say yet, but my guess matches other estimates: there’ll be thousands who couldn’t get out of their attics, who couldn’t punch a whole in their roofs, who didn’t last til the boats came. The instructions to every boat were, save the living, leave the dead. There was no choice but to exercise those priorities.
Anyway, as with stories I’ve covered in the past, this is one to make you grateful for everything you have. Personally, it’s also one where there’s some pride in providing information that people need or, at least, want. As for safety, I can’t say everything we’re doing is perfectly safe, but we’re trying to approach it all as smartly as we can, making decisions about where to go and what to do based on our assessment of the risks. That’s what you have to do covering catastrophes made by man or nature. So far, so good.
I’m sending this from Baton Rouge, about 80 miles north. There’s exactly one route in and out of New Orleans, and we found it. We have to leave because there is no gas in New Orleans. And no food. And no fresh water. And certainly no place to sleep. Tuesday night, we came mainly just because of the gas, but we stopped at coffee shop to eat our first food since Denver, and since our office had found no available hotel rooms for almost three hundred miles— because about a million people left New Orleans before the hurricane hit— I went up to a guy and his teen son at the counter who just looked nice, and asked if they had a guest room at their home and, if they did, could we pay them to use it each night we’re here. He was a good choice. In fact a perfect choice. If you can believe it, he went to the University of Colorado and his fraternity brother was a guy named T., who is a friend of ours. Luck was on my side. I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be able to operate, because at about 9 last night when we got back up to Baton Rouge, almost all the gas stations in town were out of gas and closed. They have too many people here now, and in fact also lost power for a couple of days because of the storm. But one of the tools you use as a journalist is resourcefulness. ABC News has actually rented a fuel tanker from Houston and sent it to New Orleans to fuel the cars of its people here. I don’t work for ABC any more, so we’ll just have to figure out something else.
Gotta go now. Thought you might appreciate an inside look at this horrible disaster. If you helped Tsunami victims as we did last year, think about helping Gulf Coast victims the same way. They can use all the help they can get. That’s all that’ll give them any hope. They don’t have much.
— (Uncle G.)
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Out of Focus 