Katrina's aftermath

That's assuming that MS, AL, and FL wouldn't be having problems of their own which is clearly the case now. That quote is from August 1 - certainly things were a lot more optimistic back then.

Surely there is a place where it stops being "looting" and starts being survival. I wish they would put in the minimal amount of effort it would take to refer to them as, I don't know, "flood victims" rather than "looters".

xpost

re the evacuation: carnival cruise lines issued a statement saying they're looking into the feasibility of getting one of their ships to new orleans. it would be difficult, but it's not out of the question.

Oh man, that would be, like, the greatest thing ever.

"Asked whether the governors were short of Guard members for the hurricane mission, a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman said, "The numbers would suggest otherwise.""

Virtually every state in the nation is sending in National Guardsmen. That would be the expected response anyhow.

No one, anywhere, in any place of power, has said that they lack the manpower needed to deal with the disaster because of Iraq. LA's National Guard, by itself, never would have been able to deal with the disaster anyhow, and given that what's been occurring has been happening over a period of several days now, having people transported in from TX, AR, OK, VA, and other completely unaffected areas was going to have to happen anyways. Its what is occurring now and has been occurring for some time.

I was just thinking exactly the same thing and posted on ILM.

On another board I go to, someone posted two pictures, one of some black dudes w/Diet Pepsi and some other stuff...the others of two white skateboard looking kids w/some food....captions called the blacks "looters" and said the whites were "Carrying food they found at a grocery store"....finders keepers, looters weepers...

-Things are beginning to improve, basically by not getting worse. The predictions of flooding continuing en masse haven't yet come to pass.

-Work is continuing to sandbag the broken levee.

Watching the Cam from Interdictor: No surprise at the weather (clearly very sunny). No real water coming up to St. Charles anymore. Several vehicles on the street. Not many people on foot. Military and police vehicles have been driving through regularly, as long as vehicles towing boats.

from the cam: LOOOOOOONG line of vehicles going down St. Charles now. Now a small mob of people.

that would be rather counterproductive, wouldn't it? I mean, Bush is hardly a petulant and political guy. the state governments have said by their actions, at the least, that they have insufficient manpower and equipment. the newspapers and other commentators, who don't have to please anyone to get a response, have noted that a large chunk of the manpower and equipment is in Iraq.

LA's National Guard, by itself, never would have been able to deal with the disaster anyhow,

you miss the point. the current disaster may have been greatly compounded by the failure to stop the levee breach (assuming that would have worked, but we can't know either way). that failure apparently was due to their preoccupation with rescue missions. if they had had more people and equipment, it would have been more likely that both would occur simultaneously.

Finding Bread"

no news on their site. they're playing in atlanta on sunday, hopefully they already evacuated themselves and their equipment.

Jefferson: You can return Monday with your ID. You will be allowed to collect your belongings and will not be allowed to return for a month.

How long were neighbors of Chernobyl or Three Mile Island supposed to wait to return to their homes? I mean, fuck.

Is that basically the argument? Because they aren't saying so, its true?

>the newspapers and other commentators, who don't have to please anyone to get a response, have noted that a large chunk of the manpower and equipment is in Iraq.<

There's a good chunk of manpower and equipment in Iraq. Fine. Here's my question; What good is a Apache helicopter in a flood? How about an M1A1 ? Not much. The question is "has the fact that there are troops in Iraq in any way retarded the ability of Louisiana to help itself?" Everyone says "no". In fact, none of the newspapers who have reported the people being in Iraq have made the claim either, as well they shouldn't. To say such at this time would be obvious politicism.

>that failure apparently was due to their preoccupation with rescue missions. if they had had more people and equipment, it would have been more likely that both would occur simultaneously.<

You're assuming that all the equpiment in Iraq has pertinance to the mission of saving lives in Louisiana. This is not true. There is nothing that A-10 Warthogs or Personnel Carriers can do to plug that hole. Even merely having helicopters is facetious, given that the minority of the helicopters are capable of heavy lifting operations, and furthered by the number of helicopters from outside LA that are being used in the effort.

Besides, if it was true, don't you think somewhere in the blogoshpere or media, someone would have leaked this already?

sorry he didn't post the link...just wrote out the captions and pix himself...he's not on the board now...

Residents in close proximity to Chernobyl never did. Three Mile Island, as far as I know, never touched off any long term evacuations.

say, who else has remembered that the nomination hearings for John Roberts start next week? We gonna have a fun September...

President Bush is considering an address to the nation asking citizens to conserve energy, a top White House source says.

Bush ordered the release of oil from federal petroleum reserves to help refiners affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Bush returned to Washington on Wednesday to oversee the federal response to the historic disaster. He plans to coordinate federal efforts, across more than a dozen agencies, to assist hurricane victims.

"Still undecided is whether or not to call for a nationwide effort to reduce energy consumption during this emergency," a top Bush source explains. "It is seriously being considered."

i like the "coordinate" bit. He's going to be in his office with 3 telephones and multiple email windows running, issuing orders for the next 72 hours.

oh yeah, and gasoline at the local supermarket jumped 17 cents per gallon from its price on monday morning.

WWL-TV reported that the Miller Brewing Co. was sending several truck loads of water to the region from its Albany, Ga., plant.

Yeah, that's going to go down real well...

Cue Annie Potts: "Yeah, it's a sign, alright; 'Goin' Out of Business.'"

and certain loons believe that the rest of the world doesn't care.

perhaps this site is true: http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/

Well, the biggest problem was that the lake would drain in, but now that everything is equalized, the only real problem is that it'll take longer to repair the levees and then pump out the water.

One bit of good news is that New Orleans doesn't appear to face a threat of being surrounded by even more water than it has outside its levees right now. By yesterday, the water level in the Mississippi had dropped about 11 feet since Monday, as the storm surge that had pushed upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, temporarily reversing the river's course, receded. Yesterday, the water level in the stretch of river that runs through the city was down to a level of about 4.28 feet, well below the flood level of 17 feet and low even under normal circumstances, hydrology experts said...

The rain that Katrina dumped on Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday won't affect the river's water levels because many of the rivers in the area flow directly into the Gulf. Rain that Katrina deposits in Tennessee and farther north isn't likely to reach New Orleans for at least two weeks, Mr. Richards said.

Parts of Kentucky, Ohio, and other areas where Katrina was headed have been unusually dry, meaning less runoff from the storm, Mr. Richards said.

Likewise, the water in Lake Pontchartrain isn't likely to rise, said Richard Keim, assistant professor at the School of Renewable Natural Resources at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The fresh water source that feeds it is only about as large as the lake itself, so while much rain has fallen in the area, not much will end up in the lake, says Mr. Keim. The larger question is when the storm surge will recede into the Gulf, the lake's other water source. Lake Pontchartrain has only two narrow, winding outlets to the Gulf, so it is unclear how long it will take them to empty.

<HIPPIEFUCK>hahaha, only during emergencies though!<HIPPIEFUCK>

woah woah woah...people...slow down...let's not do anything rash....jeez you'd think a major american city had just slid into the ocean...oh wait.

Police officers were asking residents to give up any guns they had before they boarded buses and trucks because police desperately needed the firepower: Some officers who had been stranded on the roof of a motel said they were being shot at overnight.

jesus christ, fuck

Urine isn't a problem. It is, for the most part, fairly sterile. You can actually drink it if you absolutely had to.

Police fought a losing battle to stop widespread looting and the sweltering city of 480,000 had no drinkable water and no electricity. SHARKS WERE REPORTED SWIMMING IN THE STREETS and even the Superdome – a shelter of last resort for 20,000 people – was at risk from the rising waters.

Wednesday August 31, 2005

Mark Schleifstein
Staff writer

The catastrophic flooding that filled the bowl that is New Orleans on Monday and Tuesday will only get worse over the next few days because rainfall from Hurricane Katrina continues to flow into Lake Pontchartrain from north shore rivers and streams, and east winds and a 17.5-foot storm crest on the Pearl River block the outflow water through the Rigolets and Chef Menteur Pass.

The lake is normally 1 foot above sea level, while the city of New Orleans is an average of 6 feet below sea level. But a combination of storm surge and rainfall from Katrina have raised the lake's surface to 6 feet above sea level, or more.

All of that water moving from the lake has found several holes in the lake's banks - all pouring into New Orleans. Water that crossed St. Charles Parish in an area where the lakefront levee has not yet been completed, and that backed up from the lake in Jefferson Parish canals, is funneling into Kenner and Metairie.

A 500-yard and growing breach in the eastern wall of the 17th Street Canal separating New Orleans from Metairie is pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of lake water per second into the New Orleans area. Water also is flowing through two more levee breaches along the Industrial Canal, which created a Hurricane Betsy-on-steroids flood in the Lower 9th Ward on Monday that is now spreading south into the French Quarter and other parts of the city.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin warned Tuesday evening that an attempt to plug the holes in the 17th Street Canal had failed, and the floodwaters were expected to continue to rise rapidly throughout the night. Eventually, Nagin said, the water could reach as high as 3 feet above sea level, meaning it could rise to 12 to 15 feet high in some parts of the city.

Louisiana State University Hurricane Center researcher Ivor van Heerden warned that Nagin's estimates could be too low because the lake water won't fall quickly during the next few days.

"We don't have the weather conditions to drive the water out of Lake Pontchartrain, and at the same time, all the rivers on the north shore are in flood," he said. "That water is just going to keep rising in the city until it's equal to the level of the lake.

"Unless they can use sandbags to compartmentalize the flooded areas, the water in the city will rise everywhere to the same level as the lake."

This isn't the first time that the 17th Street Canal has proved to be a hurricane-flooding Achilles heel. Following a 1947 hurricane that made a direct hit on New Orleans and Metairie, officials were unable to clear floodwaters from Metairie through the canal for two weeks.

Sewage from a treatment plant that stagnated in the canal created enough sulfuric acid fumes that nearby homes in Lakeview painted with lead-based paint turned black.

The slow-motion flooding of the south shore mirrors a similar flooding event during Tropical Storm Isidore, when weather conditions blocked water from leaving the lake as heavy rainfall pushed its surface higher and higher, causing extensive flooding in low-lying areas of Slidell a day after the storm had passed by.

Van Heerden said water flowing through New Orleans. back door used a weakness that he and many others have been concerned about for years: a V-shaped funnel formed by the joining of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and the Inner Harbor Navigation Channel. Storm surge as high as 18 feet pushed through the funnel, into the Industrial Canal and on to the lake. It's that surge water that is thought to have caused breaks in the Industrial Canal levees breaks that lake water is now flowing through into the 9th Ward.

Water entering that funnel also is thought to have topped levees surrounding Chalmette and eastern New Orleans, causing extensive flooding in both places.

Van Heerden said that if there's a silver lining to this disastrous event, it's that the eye of Katrina didn't go directly over or to the west of the city. If that had happened, the storm surge could have been much higher and would have directly topped levees all along the lake and much more rapidly filled the bowl, which would have meant an even higher death toll than is anticipated from this slow-moving event, he said.

This flood event contains many of the features used by federal, state and local planners early this year to begin shaping what was supposed to be a catastrophe recovery plan for New Orleans: failed pumping stations, breached levees, rooftop rescues, makeshift medical triage zones.

In drawing the plan, officials assumed that it would take several days to a week before enough manpower and equipment could be staged to deal with many of the problems they're facing now, such as how to close the breach in the 17th Street Canal.

There, the problem is how to close the hole quickly. Strategies suggested during tabletop exercises indicated it could take several days to position barges and cranes in place to more permanently fill such a gap, assuming it was part of the worst-case, storm-surge-driven flooding scenario.

The slow-motion reality of the collapsing canal wall has the state Department of Transportation and Development and the Army Corps of Engineers working into the night to plug the breach and try to stem the flooding in Lakeview, West End, Bucktown and large swaths of East Jefferson.

A convoy of trucks carrying 108 15,000-pound concrete barriers - like those used as highway construction dividers - was en route to the site Tuesday night, said Mark Lambert, chief spokesman for the agency. Helicopters will lift the barriers above the hole and drop them in place, even as another 50 sandbags, each weighing 3,000 pounds, are also being maneuvered into place.

"That's 800 tons of concrete," Lambert said. .What we are trying to do is just stop the water from going into the city."

More difficult will be the overtopping of levees along the Industrial Canal caused by the high lake water flowing in. Lambert didn't say how the state would address that problem.

The problems caused by floodwaters will only get worse, according to van Heerden and the earlier tabletop exercises. For one, if the water in the city does rise to the height of levees along the lakefront, it may be difficult to open floodgates designed to keep the lake out that would now be needed to allow the lake to leave. Van Heerden said the rising floodwaters also would cause major pollution problems in coming days, as they float dozens of fuel and chemical storage tanks off their fittings, severing pipelines and allowing the material to seep into the floodwaters.

"In our surveys of the parish, a lot of the storage tanks we looked at weren't bolted down with big bolts," he said. "They rely on gravity to hold them down. If an industrial property is 5 feet below sea level and the water gets to 5 feet above sea level, that's 10 feet of water, and I'm certain many we looked at will float free.

"You'll see a lot of highly volatile stuff on the surface, and one spark and we'll have a major fire," he said.