I want to wish everyone in Katrina's path good luck. Also, what's the best way to help from a distant state? Send money to the Red Cross?

Love,
Robyn

If I were going to send money to Katrina victims it would definitely be to local NO charities, such as food banks, community chest and so forth. New Orleans has a very good volunteer system of dedicated friends and neighbors who work in the community. This way you know your hard earned contribution will get to the local folks, and not be eaten up in book keeping and other ambiguous costs which are sometimes a problem in larger organizations.

Shockingly enough -almost 28% of the city's population live below the poverty level - many of these are children and older folks. Not only would a storm of this magnitude destroy what few possessions they have, but thousands of lives lost...simply because the poor/elderly either have no place farther inland to go, or no car to get them there.
New Orleans is one of my favorite places on earth, but is also home to many members of my family, on both sides of the Causeway. This news weighs heavily on my mind tonight...one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the states may be demolished, unless this storm lessens dramatically

Well, I work for a moving company. Today we got notice that Eglin and Tyndall AFB's in Florida, Keesler and Columbus AFB's in Mississippi and naval installations in Mississippi and New Orleans have been closed temporarily due to the storm. This is very unusual. I don't recall any closings during all last season's terrible storms, though I know the naval base in Pensacola was effected for a while.

At least two of our regular associate businesses are under water, including any household goods stored there. We haven't been able to hear if the folks we know down there are OK. One of the companies is in Biloxi. We're worried. And my coworker's family lives in Biloxi. Her sister and stepfather left, but her mother refused. She lives 400yds off the beach. They haven't heard from her.

It's been a long day, and even safe up here in Nebraska, Katrina's wet, dangerous fingers touch our lives. In addition to the worry over those we know down south (my own sister just returned to Atlanta on Sunday, and Monday morning in the storms from Katrina a tree fell on her rental house...) there's also the enormous effect on our business. Any goods we were supposed to transport to those closed bases have to stop where they are and find storage. Anything that hasn't already left has to find places in our warehouses. And anything stored in one of the effected warehouses is going to be a mess to sort out.

I just hope everyone closer to the situation is OK. My thoughts go out to those down there and with family there.

Has anybody heard from DieHard? He's from Louisiana although I don't know what part.

A couple of things I do not understand.

1. Just what sort of low-life loots in these circumstances? A small amount I think I could understand (there are always some bad eggs in any society) but not mass looting.

2. How are so many properties destroyed? Are the properties not solidly built? We were hit by a hurricane some years back and although some houses lost their roofs or tiles from them, mostly homes were not destroyed.

This was a catagory 5 hurricane. 175 mph winds at times. That's enough to destroy even the most well-built houses. As a comparison, when a hurricane hit the Channel Islands in 1987, the winds gusted up to 110 mph in that area. But a lot of the property may NOT be well-built since it is designed for low-income people, or it isn't well-maintaned because it is owned by people with little income. Also, the majority of damage was done by severe flooding. Even a solidly built house will succomb to 4 ft of standing water for days on end.

And a lot of the looting is from people who are desparate. A picture of looting appeared in the news today... a woman breaking into a convenience store and stealing food and diapers. What kind of low-life is she? A lot of the looters are probably motivated by some amount of greed, but consider that the folks who stayed, despite evacuation notices, were mostly those who had not the means to leave. These people have nothing left. They need anything they can get.

I hear what you are saying about people in desperate need, yes I can see they might have no alternative but to help themselves. Hopefully they will pay for their 'purchases' once the owner of the store returns.

As for our little storm in 1987, we never have hurricanes so our properties are not built to withstand them. That one was a bit of a shock. I don't think any properties were flattened, just a few lost their roof. I would have thought that properties in a high-risk area (such as earthquakes in California) would be built to minimise damage. It must cost more to have a house flattened, worth spending extra in the first instance.

A lot of them are, to an extent. But like tornadoes, there's actually very little you can do if a severe enough storm strikes. There's a great deal of difference between 110 mph winds and 175 mph winds. It is not easy, and very costly, to build a building that can withstand the force of a catagory 5 hurricane, and they typically don't happen that often, the past few seasons to the contrary. I am guessing they bank on the chances being good the buildings will never HAVE to withstand that force, and when they get hit with it and fail, it's more of a fluke than anything.

This storm has really wreaked havoc with the gulf coast. The death toll in Mississippi and Alabama keeps rising, as search and rescue teams reach more areas. The breaching and failure of parts of the levee system and the pumping stations has left 80 percent of New Orleans under water. A giant evacuation effort is underway to move people from the Superdome and other shelters to safety outside the city. Buses are to transport up to 25,000 to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. Most of the hospitals in New Orleans are being evacuated, some taking patients by boat to higher ground to ambulances. Over one million people in the gulf area are without electricity. Things are a mess.

It's easy to see looters simply as thieves who are out to steal electronic goods, etc rather than people trying just to survive. No doubt there are both types in New Orleans right now. Lothruin's absolutely right about the building standards. Many houses were of poor standard and uninsured, that being all the poorer people could afford. Some of these will have lost everything, and how many of us in similar circumstances might resort to looting essential items if we had nothing else?
I'm sure the State and national governments will do everything possible to alleviate the hardship, but those who've suffered deserve the same support as any other victims of natural disasters anywhere else in the world.
On UK TV earlier today a weather expert gave an interesting comparism of the energy released by Katrina, saying it was equivalent to more than all of the energy generated by all of the power stations ever built!

Having been through and to New Orleans many times, I'm pretty familiar with what passes for a building code down there.Many folks don't realise that many of the smaller buildings toward downtown and the French Quarter date back to the late 17 and early 1800's. There was no building code to speak of when much of the "Big Easy' was built. Many of these people are tenth generation citizens of the Quarter and this is truly devastating to them. Yes, you'll probably see some looting when a young mother gets desperate enough. Or when families see their elderly in want of water or food...it's heart rending to see .

Yeah--you have to remember that many people in NO are desperately poor. And right now their whole world is under filthy water. Many individuals who were right on the edge before this happened were probably pushed over for good. Most of the wealthy and middle class residents had the means to get out. The people who are left did not. Thank God they are finally moving those people out of the Superdome. Conditions in there must be horrendous.

--Robyn

I have an online friend who lives (lived!) in New Orleans. Luckily she and her family were able to evacuate in time to her mother's house in Mississippi--farther north, fortunately. All they were able to take with them were some clothes and photos.
She saw images of her street on the news, the houses were submerged nearly to the roofline. They have lost everything, had were not insured. Now they are told it will be several months before they will even be allowed to reenter the city.
And New Orleans wasn't even the hardest hit place.

This isn't just one destroyed city, it's over 300 miles of coastline (around 500k, I think?). As someone else mentioned, it's not so much the intial hurricane that did the damage, but the flooding. Much of New Orleans is well below sea level, and it's going to take a long time for water levels to return to normal, I think.

And, living in California, I can tell you from personal experience that even though buildings are built to safety specs, that doesn't guarantee that they will hold up to the forces that assault them. Sometimes, as in the Loma Prieta earthquake, earthquakes don't act the way they normally do--that one had unusual movement patterns and wrenched the ground in ways that no building was really built to withstand. Mother Nature doesn't always follow "the rules".

I feel positively ill when I watch TV and see the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. My heart goes out to all the people affected by this horrible disaster. So many lives lost. So many people homeless. So many filled with despair. It's all so heart-wrenching.

In September 2003, Halifax received a direct hit from Hurricane Juan....a category 2 storm. Our lives came to a stand still. Being without power, gasoline, clean water etc. for 10 days seemed like an eternity. In fact many things in Halifax will never be the same again. We are still recovering in some ways. Juan was like a summer breeze in comparison to Katrina.

This wasn't just a 'little storm,' though. Your buildings may have mistood a little storm, but this one gathered up its strength in the Atlantic and then in the Gulf of Mexico, giving the coast a direct hit. This is, from what I understand, the worst hurricane to have hit the US in recorded history.

From here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9076525/

Quote:

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Here’s what they report: No power, sewage, food or water for 48+ hours, all exits are flooded, save one that leads to more water, no supplies have been delivered, 11 doctors shared 2 flashlights last night, many dead are reported in the hospital, the generator in the basement flooded, no helipad exists, no word from the outside world on a rescue or a plan, the stench is said to be unbearable and the collective mood and health standards are going downhill quickly.

---

And that's at a hospital.

The FBI New Orleans field office was hit so hard that it lost the roof and won't be useable for at least a year, let alone be back to its old condition. (The four people who were in the building during the hurricane came through ok.) And that's a federal building that houses classified material, so you know it was built to code and secure. If that can happen to a scure building, imagine what happened to the other buildings.

As for what someone said about the people of NO being poor - one figure I'd heard was that 28% of the people in that city lived below the poverty level.

The city's geography is also a problm - it's below sea level. It's next to a lake that is ABOVE the level of the city. So yeah, it pretty much withstood the hurricane, it was the flooding that was the major problem. That's why there was a huge sigh of relief Monday night but Tuesday when the levees broke...

Every time someone says that I think of the Led Zeppelin song, "When the Levee Breaks" and it makes me so sad. That song was always mournful, and the lyrics "When the levee breaks I'll have no place to stay" just make it worse right now.

New Orleans was like a living museum really. It's rare to see a city in America like that. The old city was full of buildings and houses that were sometimes maintained by history buffs who had the money to keep them up to code, or else some that weren't as well kept that people lived in as best they could. When I visited there, we got lost outside the center city, and it was miles and miles of high rise apartments and they gave us directions into the center.
Then on the exterior are the suburban neighborhoods.
It's like Venice going under the water finally, or the equivalent for us in the States. Or imagine the city of York in England, beautiful touristic center, then modern buildings and homes on the outskirts. NO is a bit like that but with low income housing surrounding it. Such a large part of the economy was tourist based as well as oil based that the loss of tourism alone will strike them down.

I must comment on two things that struck me today though in the coverage and they gave me knee jerk reactions.
One item, "Bush cuts vacation short a week to deal with crisis"
I'm sorry, mea culpa for even mentioning this, but the guy's running a close second to Ronald Reagan for the 'working vacation' from his ranch during his terms of almost a year,and we hear that he had to cut his vacation short a week?
Few Americans get anything near a month vacation, 'working' or otherwise and not even many Europeans manage a whole month off all together, and we hear that poor Bush is cutting his vacation short to deal with the crisis. I apologize, I don't deny the man a vacation but, people are in utmost despair in the neighboring state, and we're supposed to clap when he shortens his vacation?
Sorry, this does not happen often but my knee-jerk reaction was to ask why should he prolongue his holiday when such devastation in his country is happening? If you were an emergency personnel in a neighboring state on vacation, wouldn't you go and help? The local emergency crews here are ready to go there now, immediately offering to help them. For me, Bush stopping his vacation is a given, not a noteworthy item in the news.

Then, the emphasis on oil and how Americans will have to pay so much more at the pump because of this crisis. I know it's important to the economy, but they haven't even pulled all those unfortunates out of their mess, they probably have lost everything, and we're whining about how much we pay at the pump? We should be thankful that we have something and stop whining. We should let the dust settle. Sure it's an inconvenience, but don't you think they'd rather be whining about the gas prices?

I guess it brings to mind how Americans take completely for granted the price of gasoline they're paying and they keep on buying cars that consume much more than they should.
At a time like this, you see people lamenting how high gas prices are...
I hope you see my point. It's not that I'm enjoying the pinch (always relative because of the price Europeans pay which I used to pay) but I feel so much more for those people devasted over there, that gas prices are the least of my worries.

As to the looters, I heard a lady on the news sobbing with shame at having to do it, but she said that she had a family who had no food, and that if she could, she'd pay the merchant some day. That she hadn't been raised to do this, but that it was survival. If those supplies were going to rot and be wasted and the owners had been evacuated, then, perhaps it is a survival matter for some of the looters.
If you were in the middle of such devastation and you had no food for your kids, you might have to do it.

Apparently on MSNBC, they were filming in a Wal-Mart saying 'look at all the looters, where are the police' and found a New Orleans policewoman, in uniform, filling up a cart. When the reporter asked what she was doing, she replied 'looking for looters' but just continued on filling up her cart, not doing anything about the looting going on around her.

I understand the looting for vital supplies such as food, medicine and those blow up mattresses they're using as boats, but when you have people stealing TVs, jewellry, etc, it's insane.

Not that I condone such actions, but stealing a TV or jewelry is, perhaps, part of their survival instinct. The reality is that those companies who are being looted will likely recover most or all of it from insurance. Meanwhile, those people who have nothing, they don't just have nothing NOW, they have nothing to look forward to as well. Like I said, I don't condone the behavior, but it isn't tough to understand that even stealing luxury items is just one more thing they're doing to make it by. Stealing food for today isn't going to help them out tomorrow when all the food's been stolen, when they've gotten out of the city and they have no money, no opportunity to steal their food, etc. I have to wonder if, in a similar situation, I wouldn't resort to pocketing a diamond necklace, if I knew that my family's future was one of poverty and starvation, and that diamond necklace was one more week, one more month of food.

Who would have thought we'd be having such a bottom line conversation like this one a month ago? Eerie how this storm came out of left field...one day things are normal and the next day thousands are injured starving and or dying. NO and area authorities are so afraid that when the waters recede, and they are able to start going from house to house, they will find hundreds of whole families dead - trapped in the attic of their one story homes, because they were unaware the 17th street levee had failed. It's hard to comprehend. And I haven't heard from any of my cousins yet. We can only wait for one of them to make it to a phone. They wouldn't allow us into the city unless we were health care workers and even those admissions are limited, right now. It's hard not knowing. I could be down there in a few hours but for what? We'd be turned back, I'm afraid.

My coworker heard from her sister and mother today. Her sister had evacuated, as I said earlier. They hadn't heard from their mother, so her sister headed back in her stepdad's car, called my coworker on a cell phone during the drive. Had to turn around in several places where the road was underwater, or gone altogether. The Olive Garden where their mother worked is completely destroyed. When they finally made it back to the house, the had to practically break the door down, but their mother was OK. The back half of their house is gone. All their belongings are destroyed but what they specifically attempted to save. No job now, because the restaurant is gone. Money will be gone soon enough, I'm sure. It's very depressing.

I know virtually nothing about New Orleans expect that they have a pretty decent Mardi Gras so I hope these questions aren't stupid or anything.

Why were so many people still there, it's not as though the hurricane snuck up on them. Was it just so much worse than expected?

What is the population distribution of blacks and whites? I'm really only seeing black people on the news - or would it be a poverty thing? Where would New Orleans rate on a wealth scale?

Just such amazing figures they are coming out with, amount of water, amount of land covered, amount of money, amount of injury and so on.

Why is it that the people who are willing to dig deep into their pockets to help the victims are the poor and middle class?
Why don't the rich get out their cheque books?

Copago, the racial distribution in New Orleans has always been heavy with darker skin. Culturally, the African and island people did a great deal to help make New Orleans what it is today, and they did so from very early on.

Wealth-wise, I think there is quite a lot of money in New Orleans, but a VERY large percentage of the population was below the poverty line as well, and most of the people who stayed did not have the means to evacuate. When you evacuate a city the size of New Orleans, combined with the surrounding areas, and considering there is only really one major motorway out of the city, it would be difficult to evacuate even if you had many resources at your disposal. And a lot of people DIDn't have the resources; no money, no car, etc. Of course there are always those who resist leaving, despite the words of caution, but usually there are just those who can't.