Project Katrina

Rachel Maddow is doing her show from New Orleans today. A few quotes from interviews she conducted:

James Perry, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center:

You know, again, the people are extremely resilient, right? They’re here because they’re fighting to be here. Folks aren’t asking for a handout from government, but just a help up, right? And that’s all that folks are saying.

Tracie Washington, the Louisiana Justice Institute:

There’s been this cross-pollinization of people. People—I was a trial lawyer five years ago. I didn’t work with, you know, the grass eaters and, you know, people who eat tofu [....] I had a hippie-free life. Now they’re all in my office [....] And I love them to death.

Billy Sothern, author of “Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City“:

The main thing that I see here in New Orleans is that all of these problems, whether it’s the crime problem, the housing problem, the schooling problem, this is the razor’s edge of problems that exist everywhere in America. And to the extent that they remain unresolved in New Orleans, I think that there’s very little hope that they’re going to be resolved elsewhere.

Garland Robinette of WWL radio:

I spent months in a place in Vietnam where you could barely walk and they could land a helicopter. And five days, president of the United States or nobody else could fly in water or food to people that were dying? And now BP with the oil spill—that took them a while to get going. And we’ve still got people worried about how they’re going to survive on the coast. It’s kind of like we’re not part of the United States.

This is a story written around the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that I found while researching a story I am writing on the third anniversary. It is well worth a read, although sad on many different levels.

More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.

[....]

But Hurricane Katrina denied most of the 1,464 victims in Louisiana such final flourishes of dignity; no watch chains for them, no stylish hats. The hurricane scattered bodies over hundreds of square miles, where water, heat and time distorted what many of the dead looked like in life. It was a forensic hell.

The system hastily conceived to fulfill a sacred mission—to collect, identify and release for burial hundreds of bodies—descended at times into the common ineptness of a motor vehicles bureau, ill equipped to deal with wholesale catastrophe. As a result, many families waited far too long for the release of identified bodies, delaying burial, prolonging grief.

Defying the bureaucratic impediments, pathologists, investigators and counselors rose to the sorrowful challenge. Working like wartime MASH units, they reunited families with their missing loved ones and attached names to nearly 900 of the bodies they examined. Even so, some 50 victims remain unknown to the world still, a year later.

“I wish we could have identified everybody,” Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state medical examiner, said. “Ninety-nine percent is a failing rate if it’s your kid missing. That’s the bottom line.”