Day: September 4, 2005

(Repost – Scroll down to see Update III)

Laurel and her family left Slidell, Louisiana on Sunday, August 28th and drove 500 miles north into Tennessee. They weren’t going to mess around with Hurricane Katrina. They didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. But leaving wasn’t easy. What to take? What to leave? Pack enough clothes for a week. Grab the family photo album, the dogs, and some food from the fridge. Put everything into the minivan. Turn around, and snap the picture.

The “Before” picture. A simple digital image of the house, captured just before they fled Slidell.

And now, Laurel wonders what’s left of her home. What does it look like? Is it still there?

“I hope the ‘after’ photo isn’t too horrifying. I can only pray. There is very little information on TV right now about Slidell. The eye of the storm passed right over it, and so far all we have is news that half the town is under water. I am just hoping that my house is on the other half.

So basically, we’re refugees. We have nowhere to live at the moment and will probably spend the next month shuffling from relative to relative.

The posts on her blog describe the emotional roller coaster ride they are stuck on. Frustration, anger, hopelessness, gratitude, and thankfulness. Most of all though, she’s happy to be alive, and to have her family close.

MORE: Photos from Slidell. I wonder if any of these pictures are from locations near Laurel’s house?

UPDATE: Laurel writes to say that one of the pictures from Slidell shows a street which is very close to her house.

“The ones labled “Entrance to Breckenridge” are taken at the end of my my street. The photo is taken from Pearl Acres Road. If the person who took the photo had turned around and walked a few steps, they would have been looking up my street (Rosemeade Drive). We are relieved to see that the homes are still there and don’t really appear to have that much damage.”

“We don’t have any tall trees near our home, so there is little chance of damage from trees to our house. I’m encouraged to see that so many people have returned already from seeing the cars in the photos.”

So far so good. Soon as Laurel has an “After” picture of her place, we’ll post it here.

UPDATE II: Laurel’s house was relatively untouched. Only superficial damage. Satellite view here.

UPDATE III: Here’s Laurel’s house, “After“. As you can see, it still stands.

View 54 images of Laurel’s home (inside and out)

Related:
— Whereabouts Unknown
— Goodbye Big Easy

Via 7news – Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge, killing five or six, a deputy chief said. A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal. The contractors were walking across a bridge on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to fix the 17th Street Canal, said John Hall, a spokesman for the Corps.

(h/t Dan Riehl)

Update: Apparently, there was some confusion with this report, and it has since been corrected to say that contractors were NOT killed.

Each of us have had a thought about how or when we will die. If you’re like me, you picture a soft-lit room with your (grown-up) kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids gathering at your bedside as your 95+ year-old body slowly drifts off into the afterlife. Obviously, we hope to leave this world in the most peaceful way possible.

I’m sure Vera had the same desire. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way for her.

A makeshift tomb at a New Orleans street corner conceals the body of a woman named ‘Vera’ who had been lying on the sidewalk for days in the wake of Hurricane Katrina on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005.

God bless you Vera.

Related: The rescue that never came to the St. Bernard nursing home. (Video – “Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area.” — I’ve seen a lot of heart breaking videos this past week, but this has got to be one of the toughest to watch)

Bestselling author John Grisham and his wife are contributing $5 million to help Mississippians rebuild after Hurricane Katrina.

An Associated Press analysis of Census data shows that the residents in the three dozen hardest-hit neighborhoods in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama also were disproportionately minority and had incomes $10,000 below the national average.

People living in the path of Hurricane Katrina’s worst devastation were twice as likely as most Americans to be poor and without a car — factors that may help explain why so many failed to evacuate as the storm approached.

Median household income in the most devastated neighborhood was $32,000, or $10,000 less than the national average.

Two in 10 households in the disaster area had no car, compared with 1 in 10 in nationwide.

Nearly 25 percent of those living in the hardest-hit areas were below the poverty line, about double the national average. About 4.5 percent in the disaster area received public assistance; nationwide, the number was about 3.5 percent.

About 60 percent of the 700,000 people in the three dozen neighborhoods were minority. Nationwide, about 1 in 3 Americans is a racial minority.

One in 200 American households doesn’t have adequate plumbing. One in 100 households in the most affected areas didn’t have decent plumbing, which, according to the Census, includes running hot and cold water, a shower or bath and an indoor toilet.

Nationwide, about 7 percent of households with children are headed by a single mother. In the three dozen neighborhoods, 12 percent were single-mother households.

A call for submissions from the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, needs help in finding URL’s of sites and blogs that contain documents of this major disaster.

Please email links to sites and pages that should be saved for future research to [email protected].

We have worked to archive events such as 9/11 and the tsunami with the generous help of volunteers finding and sending in links. We then save these digital works for the long term and create research tools (for example: http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/sept11/index.html and http://web.archive.org ). As a library, we provide free access to those wanting to learn from these events — we can only hope that we learn some lessons from disasters such as these.

Again, please send email to [email protected] with lists of URL’s you suggest should be archived relevant to the Katrina Disaster.

We are also looking for a couple of volunteers that can help orchestrate the crawl. If you are interested, please send a note to [email protected] with “volunteer” in the subject line.

Thank you.

-Brewster Kahle
Digital Librarian
Internet Archive

From Metroblogging New Orleans:

“You might have heard that the Superdome has been completely evacuated but there are still people left at the convention center.

They have food, water, and the ability to make phone calls but the transportation logistics for those that are still left are unclear.”

Related: Delusional, Dysfunctional, Divisive, and Defiant

Jeez Alan, you could have at least waited until Monday to dance on top of the Chief Justice’s barely dead body.

You’re despicable.

As cable TV continues to cover Katrina 24/7, reporters seem to be reaching for new ways to describe the scene. CNN’s Jeff Koinange, during a report on Sunday’s “Late Edition”, saw it this way:

“This water, I cannot tell you how dirty and filthy and smelly it is and there’s mounds of garbage everywhere, so when you combine the water with the garbage and this baking sun, this is not good at all.

I haven’t seen bodies but I can smell the putrid smell of dead bodies. I know that from everywhere. From the convention center to this morning when you were walking about you can smell the dead bodies. You know they are there. We’ve ask several authorities why aren’t they taking care of body bags and getting them out of here to avoid disease. They said the priority is the living and that’s what they want to take care of first.”

If it weren’t for the videos taken during the South Asia Tsunami disaster, would there have been as big an outpouring of money and other relief? Probably not, but I wonder if we need this kind of reporting? Do we even need to hear the descriptions of Katrina’s dead? Do we need to see the dead bodies?

Children Found Alone on New Orleans Causeway. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of kids who have lost a parent or both parents in Katrina. NOLA.com has many more listings of the lost by those who are looking. 

(via Michelle Malkin)