Wilma is now a Category 4 hurricane which is expected to re-strengthen somewhat. Speed is still 7MPH and air pressure has risen to 910 MB. Computer models still have the storm making initial landfall in the Yucatan Peninsula–the outer bands are just now beginning to touch northeastern Mexico–and rebounding toward Florida this weekend. Forecasters still stress that this is a dangerous storm.
In July it was the Superdome, home field of the New Orleans Saints, rallying point for conventioneers and Mardi Gras Krewes. In August, it was a refuge of last resort for more than twenty-three thousand people. In September, it was one of the first areas of focus for a shell-shocked nation and arriving military personnel. Now, in October, it’s a cesspool.
The full report of the damage and what’s needed to repair it may not be available until December 1, but much of the damage is obvious. Toilets would not flush while evacuees were trapped inside for nine days. There is mold from the ceiling to the floor, and in the turf. Before the stadium can host events again, it will need to be cleaned to antiseptic standards.
As the Golden Band from Tigerland played, a national audience watched #10 LSU beat #11 Florida. Normally this would have been a great afternoon for me. It wasn’t. I wanted to cry throughout. Where was the mention of Katrina and the human toll?
It just wasn’t there. The MSM (main stream media) is now talking about Rove and Miers 24/7. Katrina is getting kicked to the curb. It is so "yesterday." But I have to ask myself how many homes have been rebuilt? How many small business’s have reopened? Not many. Not enough. As I watched I couldn’t get away from this quote in Time:
If the rhetoric seems strident, it’s only because the situation in St. Bernard Parish is so desperate. Unlike in New Orleans, which is turning on the lights and water spigots, the 67,000 people who live on the peninsula to the east–mostly white and middle-class homeowners–have nothing at all to go back to. Katrina’s tidal surge, with waves of up to 25 feet was so strong, it moved houses–their concrete foundations still attached–down streets.
The parish president, who lost his home like everyone else did, figures there is just one habitable house left out of 25,000 in the entire parish … Rodriguez figures that with only 20,000 to 25,000 residents expected back this year, the parish will have to somehow survive without sales and property taxes for two years. Five weeks after Katrina, there is no electricity and no hope of any in the coming weeks. Not one gas station or grocery store is open. The lone hospital has been shuttered–for good. Sheriff Jack Stephens, who has had to lay off half his department, is worried about keeping the parish’s remaining 182 deputies on the payroll.
New Orleans has also laid off city employees. How is this possible! We’re giving billions to rebuild, but not the funds to keep government employees, even police officers, employed!
This blog at times was getting hundreds of hits an hour. Now dozens per day. The American public is starting to forget, think about other things. If you are reading this stop, tell everyone you know to wake-up, and remember that it will take years to rebuild New Orleans. Not days or weeks.
I guess it is just the little stuff.
French Quarter bar owners frustrated with the slow pace of recovery in New Orleans won a partial victory Friday when the city pushed back its curfew from midnight to 2 a.m., allowing a little more partying into the wee hours.
Bars on or near Bourbon Street had been threatening to defy the midnight curfew, complaining it was putting a damper on the famously raucous neighborhood and the city’s economy, too.
Can these stories get any worse? Some days it is almost impossible to find good news related to Katrina.
When the definitive story of the confrontation between Hurricane Katrina and the United States government is finally told, one long and tragicomic chapter will have to be reserved for the odyssey of the ice.
Ninety-one thousand tons of ice cubes, that is, intended to cool food, medicine and sweltering victims of the storm. It would cost taxpayers more than $100 million, and most of it would never be delivered.
The somewhat befuddled heroes of the tale will be truckers like Mark Kostinec, who was dropping a load of beef in Canton, Ohio, on Sept. 2 when his dispatcher called with an urgent government job: Pick up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., and take it to Carthage, Mo., a staging area for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Mr. Kostinec, 40, a driver for Universe Truck Lines of Omaha, was happy to help with the crisis. But at Carthage, instead of unloading, he was told to take his 2,000 bags of ice on to Montgomery, Ala.
After a day and a half in Montgomery, he was sent to Camp Shelby, in Mississippi. From there, on Sept. 8, he was waved onward to Selma, Ala. And after two days in Selma he was redirected to Emporia, Va., along with scores of other frustrated drivers who had been following similarly circuitous routes.
At Emporia, Mr. Kostinec sat for an entire week, his trailer burning fuel around the clock to keep the ice frozen, as FEMA officials studied whether supplies originally purchased for Hurricane Katrina might be used for Hurricane Ophelia. But in the end only 3 or about 150 ice trucks were sent to North Carolina, he said. So on Sept. 17, Mr. Kostinec headed to Fremont, Neb., where he unloaded his ice into a government-rented storage freezer the next day. "I dragged that ice around for 4,100 miles, and it never got used," Mr. Kostinec said.
