Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

[Warham]

They won't be able to let people back in for at least two to three months they said, and I think they were being hasty and a bit unrealistic. They probably won't let anybody back in for another six months to a year. I'm probably being hasty in suggesting that.

[scorpioboy33]

can you imagine if a few of those hit the country...I'm telling you the environment is mad and it's PAY BACK TIME!

[Cathedral]

I'll tell you what i saw.
Every bit of coverage on the looting was all blacks, except fo one shot where an elderly man was standing outside a shop watching it being looted...he just stood there and watched them scurry around like roaches.

But i don't blame anyone who took clothes, shoes, food and water.
They had no way out and just think about being stuck in your attic for two days, then you get lifted out and dropped on a highway with no clue what to do next and no way to get where you don't know you're going.

But anything not survival related is bullshit.

There was a cop shot in the head by a looter, but he will recover i hear.

I have never seen anything like this on this scale and i still can't believe the extent of the devastation.

But most of all, I feel for those who were angry because they felt nobody was doing anything to help them.

It's a cluster fuck that nobody knows how to deal with and my prayers are with them all.

[Seshmeister]

Re: Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

Originally posted by Warham
Nagin estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people remained in New Orleans, a city of nearly half a million people.

I don't want to sound like a cunt about this but why did these people stay?

1000s of miles away I knew it was a bad place to hang around for days.

It's not like the Tsunami where noone had any warning...

There's a degree of Darwinism going on here. Some people seem to be totally unable to look after and take responsibility for themselves.

Oof that doesn't sound too liberal does it...

[Seshmeister]

Originally posted by Cathedral
There was a cop shot in the head by a looter, but he will recover i hear.

Most of the energy of the bullet was absorbed by the donut he was holding...

[FORD]

Re: Re: Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

Originally posted by Seshmeister
I don't want to sound like a cunt about this but why did these people stay?

1000s of miles away I knew it was a bad place to hang around for days.

It's not like the Tsunami where noone had any warning...

There's a degree of Darwinism going on here. Some people seem to be totally unable to look after and take responsibility for themselves.

Oof that doesn't sound too liberal does it...

I think it was a case of confliciting innformation. Pretty much at the 11th hour, they retracted all the predictions of the Cat 5 mega-devastator hurricane hitting New Orleans dead on, and indicated that the worst of the storm was actually going to hit Mississippi more than New Orleans itself.

And actually that **IS** what happenned. The hurricane itself didn't do most of the damage to New Orleans, the damaged levees did, and that's because the city sits like a "bowl" which is naturally 60 feet below sea level.

Beyond that it's the case of a lot of these people being poor and not having anywhere else to go. Some of them may of not even had a car to get out of town. Between that and the confliciting news reports, they probably thought they could just ride it out, as many people do in Florida hurricanes every year.

[Seshmeister]

Points taken but 90% did think it was bad enough to get out.

How much does a beat up car cost in the US these days?

$500?

Every year the gap between the rich and poor seems to get more extreme.

What about buses or trains?

To me it's like people that go back into a burning building to save a TV or something. Everyone is so wrapped up in materialistic shit they've toatlly lost the plot about what actually matters,

I guess we've all got so comfortable and isolated from shit people seem to be unable to grasp that it doesn't take that much for everything we rely on guaranteeing our comfortable lives to fall apart.

[ODShowtime]

Originally posted by scorpioboy33
What education do you need to leave when you hear...get the fuck out? Was there not safe place within the city for people to go

I'm talking about the POOR people in New Orleans. I've heard about the public schools up there and believe me, they've got some un-educated people.

People who never watch the news. Who aren't aware that their city is under sea-level. Who can't comprehend no electricity or McDonalds. People who could never even think of buying a car. There were thousands of people like that in New Orleans.

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by FORD

In either case, the stores are insured, and whatever they had probably wouldn't be sellable after the flood anyhow.

Alot of insurance policies don't cover homes and businesses against looting OR flooding.

[Nickdfresh]

Re: Re: Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

Originally posted by Seshmeister
I don't want to sound like a cunt about this but why did these people stay?

1000s of miles away I knew it was a bad place to hang around for days.

It's not like the Tsunami where noone had any warning...

There's a degree of Darwinism going on here. Some people seem to be totally unable to look after and take responsibility for themselves.

Oof that doesn't sound too liberal does it...

It's a pity too, things looked relatively decent for New ORLEANS until "the levee (broke)."

[ashstralia]

i just saw a report on the devastation.

absolutely tragic.

[BigBadBrian]

Re: Re: Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

Originally posted by Seshmeister
I don't want to sound like a cunt about this but why did these people stay?

1000s of miles away I knew it was a bad place to hang around for days.

It's not like the Tsunami where noone had any warning...

There's a degree of Darwinism going on here. Some people seem to be totally unable to look after and take responsibility for themselves.

Oof that doesn't sound too liberal does it...

It doesn't sound too liberal but it sounds quite naive. I don't mean that as a slam either.

As OD said, some of these people are "street smart" in some aspects but quite uneducated in the real world. They just don't give a damn about anything other than what happens in their own little world. They rarely watch the news, don't read the newspapers, and education is not a priority. Sad, but true. A tragedy is happening because of this cultural phenomenon.

[BigBadBrian]

Evacuation Disrupted Amid Fires, Gunshots
Sep 01 10:11 AM US/Eastern


By ADAM NOSSITER
Associated Press Writer


NEW ORLEANS


Gunfire and arson blazes disrupted the evacuation of 25,000 people from the Superdome on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured into New Orleans to help restore order across the increasingly lawless and desperate city.

An additional 10,000 National Guard troops from across the country were ordered into the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast to shore up security, rescue and relief operations in Katrina's wake. That brought the number of troops dedicated to the effort to more than 28,000, in what may be the biggest military response to a natural disaster in U.S. history.

"The truth is, a terrible tragedy like this brings out the best in most people, brings out the worst in some people," said Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on NBC's "Today" show. "We're trying to deal with looters as ruthlessly as we can get our hands on them."

The first of 500 busloads of people who were evacuated from the hot and stinking Louisiana Superdome arrived early Thursday at their new temporary home _ another sports arena, the Houston Astrodome, 350 miles away.

But the ambulance service in charge of airlifting the sick and injured from the Superdome suspended flights after a shot was reported fired at a military helicopter. Richard Zuschlag, chief of Acadian Ambulance, said it had become too dangerous for his pilots.

The military, which was overseeing the removal of the able-bodied by buses, continued the ground evacuation without interruption, said National Guard Lt. Col. Pete Schneider. But Schneider said fires set outside the arena were making it difficult for buses to get close enough to pick people up.

President Bush urged a crackdown on the looting and other lawlessness that have spread through New Orleans.

"I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this _ whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."

On Wednesday, Mayor Ray Nagin offered the most startling estimate yet of the magnitude of the disaster: Asked how many people died in New Orleans, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands." The death toll has already reached at least 110 in Mississippi.

If the estimate proves correct, it would make Katrina the worst natural disaster in the United States since at least the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, which was blamed for anywhere from about 500 to 6,000 deaths. Katrina would also be the nation's deadliest hurricane since 1900, when a storm in Galveston, Texas, killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people.

Nagin called for a total evacuation of New Orleans, saying the city had become uninhabitable for the 50,000 to 100,000 who remained behind after the city of nearly a half-million people was ordered evacuated over the weekend, before Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast with 145-mph winds.

The mayor said that it will be two or three months before the city is functioning again and that people would not be allowed back into their homes for at least a month or two.

With New Orleans sinking deeper into desperation, Nagin also ordered virtually the entire police force to abandon search-and-rescue efforts Wednesday and stop the increasingly brazen thieves.

"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas _ hotels, hospitals, and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said.

In a sign of growing lawlessness, Tenet HealthCare Corp. asked authorities late Wednesday to help evacuate a fully functioning hospital in Gretna after a supply truck carrying food, water and medical supplies was held up at gunpoint.

"There are physical threats to safety from roving bands of armed individuals with weapons who are threatening the safety of the hospital," said spokesman Steven Campanini. He estimated there were 350 employees in the hospital and between 125 to 150 patients.

Tempers flared elsewhere across the devastated region. Police said a man in Hattiesburg, Miss., fatally shot his sister in the head over a bag of ice. Dozens of carjackings were reported, including a nursing home bus. One officer was shot in the head and a looter was wounded in a shootout. Both were expected to survive.

Looters used garbage cans and inflatable mattresses to float away with food, clothes, TV sets _ even guns. Outside one pharmacy, thieves commandeered a forklift and used it to push up the storm shutters and break through the glass. The driver of a nursing-home bus surrendered the vehicle to thugs after being threatened.

Hundreds of people wandered up and down shattered Interstate 10 _ the only major freeway leading into New Orleans from the east _ pushing shopping carts, laundry racks, anything they could find to carry their belongings.

On some of the few roads that were still open, people waved at passing cars with empty water jugs, begging for relief. Hundreds of people appeared to have spent the night on a crippled highway.

The floodwaters streamed into the city's streets from two levee breaks near Lake Pontchartrain a day after New Orleans thought it had escaped catastrophic damage from Katrina. The floodwaters covered 80 percent of the city, in some areas 20 feet deep, in a reddish-brown soup of sewage, gasoline and garbage.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it planned to use heavy-duty Chinook helicopters to drop 15,000-pound bags of sand and stone into a 500- foot gap in the failed floodwall.

But the agency said it was having trouble getting the sandbags and dozens of 15-foot highway barriers to the site because the city's waterways were blocked by loose barges, boats and large debris.

The full magnitude of the disaster had been unclear for days _ in part, because some areas in both coastal Mississippi and Louisiana are still unreachable, but also because authorities' first priority has been reaching the living.

In Mississippi, for example, ambulances roamed through the passable streets of devastated places such as Biloxi, Gulfport, Waveland and Bay St. Louis, in some cases speeding past corpses in hopes of saving people trapped in flooded and crumbled buildings.

Link

[BigBadBrian]

Should NEW ORLEANS be salvaged? Should it be rebuilt?

I went to both DemocraticUnderground and FreeRepublic in search of that question/answer.

I was surprised at the result.

Amazingly enough, there were some people on both sites that favored keeping it while some favored demolishing the city and moving it.

What does everyone think? The repairs will cost US, yes US, in the billions, maybe trillions.

[Nickdfresh]

Re: Re: Re: Mayor: Katrina May Have Killed Thousands

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
It doesn't sound too liberal but it sounds quite naive. I don't mean that as a slam either.

As OD said, some of these people are "street smart" in some aspects but quite uneducated in the real world. They just don't give a damn about anything other than what happens in their own little world. They rarely watch the news, don't read the newspapers, and education is not a priority. Sad, but true. A tragedy is happening because of this cultural phenomenon.

Yes, I agree, sorta'. But you forgot some key components of "ghetto" culture...Poverty and shitty, underfunded urban schools...