Project Katrina

I really hope Nagin and his staff have thought through the health ramifications of letting thousands of residents back into New Orleans. It appears mold can be a pretty pesky fungi.

Doctors prepared for a possible surge in the number of patients in New Orleans on Friday as many residents returned to begin the long process of rebuilding their lives after Hurricane Katrina.

Contaminated water, mold and the dusty sediment left behind when the city was pumped dry are some of the key health threats facing residents, according to Dr. Frederick Cerise, the head of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

"We’ve been testing around the city and it’s not consistently clean and that’s because there are still leaks in the system," Cerise said.

"So as the water comes out of the pumping stations, it’s clean, but as it goes through the pipes because of the leaks there, there is still seepage in. So it’s unpredictable…"

Cerise said that mold could be a serious problem for people with asthma, allergies or weak immune systems and that some people could have allergic reactions similar to pneumonia.

He recommended that people wear protective masks in closed areas or when doing work that could kick up dust.

Pictures via Paul.

This is the single best editorial I seen written about the current situation in New Orleans and the spirit of the people. It was published in the NO Times Picayune on September 10th. I can’t locate a copy on line. A friend actually send me a clip via “snail” mail.

Dear America, I suppose we should introduce ourselves: We’re South Louisiana.

We have arrived on your doorstep on short notice and we apologize for that, but we never were much for waiting around for invitations. We’re not much on formalities like that.

And we might be staying around your town for a while, enrolling in your schools and looking for jobs, so we wanted to tell you a few things about us. We know you didn’t ask for this and neither did we, so we’re just going to have to make the best of it.

First of all, we thank you. For your money, your water, your food, your prayers, your boats and buses and the men and women of your National Guards, fire departments, hospitals and everyone else who has come to our rescue.

We’re a fiercely proud and independent people, and we don’t cotton much to outside interference, but we’re not ashamed to accept help when we need it. And right now, we need it.

Just don’t get carried away. For instance, once we get around to fishing again, don’t try to tell us what kind of lures work best in your waters. We’re not going to listen. We’re stubborn that way.

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If you’ve read many "human interest" stories about New Orleans and the French Quarter in the past several weeks, then you must have heard about Johnny White’s Sports Bar. The stories like to note that he never closed in the past 16 years. Heck they don’t even have locks on their doors. Before I go on, let me be clear, Johnnie White’s is a "hole in the wall." Heck, I’ve had closets that were larger and much cleaner. But there is just something I love about the place. Every time I go to the quarter I usually start and end my day, night, morning at Johnnie White’s.

For the past several weeks I have been stunned by the talking heads who keep talking about how New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt. So they know that New Orleans is the fourth largest port in the world. A quarter of our oil passes through the region. So that about a quarter of all our seafood is produced there? I have to believe they are not aware of these issues. Click here for a great article about the history and the importance of New Orleans to our way of life.

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the
American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the
Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that
funded American industrialization: it permitted the formation of a
class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they
could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the East and in
Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding
capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land or the farmers and ranchers
who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography—the
extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and
allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the
rivers flowed into one —the Mississippi—and the Mississippi flowed to
the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans
that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored,
sold, and reloaded on oceangoing vessels. Until last Sunday, New
Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

There is much more to the article, which you can read here.

Meanwhile, in the wake of new New Orleans flooding from Rita, the WWL-TV blog quotes the N.O. police chief as saying: “I don’t know if this area (the Lower Ninth Ward) will come back. I don’t know if they can protect this area from the weather.” Other notes also from the WWL-TV blog:

There are a few dozen homes under water [in Lake Charles], but expectations were for far worse damage. Officials thankful damage wasn’t worse. Most of downtown Lake Charles was spared.

Some of the worst damage reports from hurricane Rita area coming out of Vinton, on the Texas border, where several fires were burning this morning and the roof was torn off a recreation center.

A riverboat casino and a barge in Lake Charles were knocked loose and floating free. The barge slammed into the Interstate 10 bridge spanning the Calcasieu River, which was closed while authorities inspected the damage.

Trash cans and fallen trees were strewn about downtown Lake Charles and casino parking lots near the lake were under about a foot of water. But fears of serious flooding in the city not far from the Texas line were
unfounded.

More on the coastal areas:

There’s widespread flooding in coastal parishes along the Gulf of Mexico as Hurricane Rita tore away rooftops and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across southwestern Louisiana.

Authorities had trouble reaching some stranded residents because of blocked roads and savage winds, but there were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries.

The region of refineries, ranches and sugarcane fields was largely evacuated ahead of the storm, but some residents stayed behind and were rescued by boat and helicopter.

There were no initial reports of damage to oil refineries along the coast, but industry officials and analysts cautioned it was still too early to assess the full impact.

And, more on New Orleans:

Hurricane Rita produced less rain than expected today in storm-tested New Orleans, but outlying areas south of the city were flooded by a storm surge.

Only about three inches of rain was expected throughout the day from the storm’s outer bands, much less than had been forecast. Weather service meteorologist Phil Grigsby says overall, it looks like New Orleans has lucked out in that it didn’t get the heaviest rainfall.

But south of the city in low-lying Jefferson Parish, a storm surge of 6 to 7 feet swamped some neighborhoods. Residents of Lafitte, a town of 1,600 about 21 miles south of New Orleans, were being evacuated by bus.

The Baton Rouge Advocate had an interesting article, from Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s perspective. A lot on the wrangling that took place behind the very public governmental meltdown in response to Katrina:

The state had sent 68 school buses into the city on Monday.

Blanco took over more buses from Louisiana school systems and sent them in on Wednesday, two days after the storm. She tapped the National Guard to drive them. Each time the buses emptied an area, more people would appear, she said.

The buses took 15,728 people to safety, a Blanco aide said. But the state’s fleet of school buses wasn’t enough. On Wednesday, with the FEMA buses still not in sight, Blanco called the White House to talk to Bush and ended up speaking to Chief of Staff Andy Card.

“I said, ‘Even if we had 500 buses, they’ve underestimated the magnitude of this situation, and I think I need 5,000 buses, not 500,’” Blanco recounted.

“‘But, Andy, those 500 are not here,’” the governor said.

Card promised to get Blanco more buses.

Later Wednesday night, Blanco walked into the State Police Communications Center and asked if anyone knew anything about the buses.

An officer told her the buses were just entering the state.

“I said, ‘Do you mean as in North Louisiana, which is another six hours from New Orleans?,’” Blanco recalled in the interview. “He said, ‘Yes, m’am.’”

It was at that point, Blanco said, that she realized she had made a critical error.

“I assumed that FEMA had staged their buses in near proximity,” she said. “I expected them to be out of the storm’s way but accessible in one day’s time.”

Since Katrina hit I have checking out some bloggers in Louisiana. Electric Mist is one of the best. The author is Toni McGee Causey. Toni writes for a living, and it shows in posts like this:

I passed a man at a shelter the other day. He was tall and lanky and sunburned, dressed in cut-offs and a soaked blue t-shirt, with a grubby baseball cap shoved on top of muddy curls. There was something about his lean, sinewy body that made me think of the shrimpers I’ve seen down in Cocodrie — it’s a hard life and it makes for no-nonsense, self-sufficient men.

He was sitting in a metal folding chair, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees, and the exhaustion in his shoulders made me ache. Between his feet was a medium sized box, and he was staring down into it. The box held some basic necessities: toiletries, canned goods, a pair of socks, and a pair of underwear. I realized, then, that he was barefoot — the grime around his ankles marked him as having abandoned his shoes somewhere along the way. His large feet were probably too big for any of the donated shoes stacked up at a one of the neaby tables.

When I looked back at that box, I wondered what he must be thinking. My first thought, without seeing his face, was that this wasn’t much to give a man after he’d lost everything. This wasn’t much to hold onto for a man like that, and maybe he was angry at having lost everything, or frustrated that this is what he’d been reduced to. I had no words that would be of use, no words which could do any good, and I began to turn away when he suddenly looked up and caught my eye.

He had tears on his cheeks. When I stood there, not sure what to do, he shrugged and said, "I can’t believe how generous people are. I can’t believe total strangers would go out of their way to help so much." I mumbled something about it being the least we could do, as neighbors, and I moved off into the crowd, feeling wholly inadequate and humbled in the face of such grace.

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Please let us find out this story by the UK Mail isn’t true.

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save.

Her heart-rending account has been corroborated by a hospital orderly and by local government officials. One emergency official, William ‘Forest’ McQueen, said: "Those who had no chance of making it were given a lot of morphine and lain down in a dark place to die."

This goes to the heart of a recent post. It would seem our government let down (in a deadly fashion) those that needed aid the most, those that could not remotely help themselves.

I was expected this to happen sooner rather then later. Long, detailed stories from regular citizens on the front lines. Not :30 sounds bites, interviews with politicans or talking heads thousands of miles away, but powerful stories about human suffering and kindness. Here are stories of eight such people (these are from days ago) from the Interdictor blog:

Jeff Rau, a family and now personal friend to whom I will forever be linked, and I were volunteering with a boat and pulling people out of the water on Wednesday. I have a first-hand experience of what we encountered. In my opinion, everything that is going on in the media is a complete bastardization of what is really happening. The result is that good people are dying and losing family members. I have my own set of opinions about welfare and people working to improve thier own lot instead of looking for handouts, but what is occurring now is well beyond those borders. These people need help and need to get out. We can sort out all of the social and political issues later, but human beings with any sense of compassion would agree that the travesty that is going on here in New Orleans needs to end and people’s lives need to be saved and families need to be put back together. Now.

I will tell you that I would probably disagree with most of the people that still need to be saved on political, social, and cultural values. However, it must be noted that these people love thier friends and families like I do, desire to live like I do, and care for their respective communities (I was even amazed at the site of seemingly young and poor black people caring for sickly and seemingly well-to-do white people and tourists still needing evacuation from New Orleans’ downtown area) the same way I care for mine.

Eight people in particular who stood out during our rescue and whose stories deserve to be told:

We were in motor boats all day ferrying people back and forth approximately a mile and a half each way (from Carrolton down Airline Hwy to the Causeway overpass). Early in the day, we witnessed a black man in a boat with no motor paddling with a piece of lumber. He rescued people in the boat and paddled them to safety (a mile and a half). He then, amidst all of the boats with motors, turned around and paddled back out across the mile and a half stretch to do his part in getting more people out. He refused to give up or occupy any of the motored boat resources because he did not want to slow us down in our efforts. I saw him at about 5:00 p.m., paddling away from the rescue point back out into the neighborhoods with about a half mile until he got to the neighborhood, just two hours before nightfall. I am sure that his trip took at least an hour and a half each trip, and he was going back to get more people knowing that he’d run out of daylight. He did all of this with a two-by-four.

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