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And on that - what is the National Guard, like a home army yes? (anyone know what Aust. equivalent is?)

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There are lots of animal groups in the area helping, too. One that I donated an EZ-up canopy to is called Noahswish.org. They place pets with foster homes until their owners can take them back.

--Robyn

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He Held Their Lives in His Tiny Hands
By Ellen Barry, Times Staff Writer


BATON ROUGE, La. — In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

Thousands of human stories have flown past relief workers in the last week, but few have touched them as much as the seven children who were found wandering together Thursday at an evacuation point in downtown New Orleans. In the Baton Rouge headquarters of the rescue operation, paramedics tried to coax their names out of them; nurses who examined them stayed up that night, brooding.

Transporting the children alone was "the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, knowing that their parents are either dead" or that they had been abandoned, said Pat Coveney, a Houston emergency medical technician who put them into the back of his ambulance and drove them out of New Orleans.

"It goes back to the same thing," he said. "How did a 6-year-old end up being in charge of six babies?"

So far, parents displaced by flooding have reported 220 children missing, but that number is expected to rise, said Mike Kenner of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which will help reunite families. With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were parted from their parents accidentally; one woman handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to find that the bus had left.

"When my kids were little I used to lose them in Target, so it's not hard for me to believe," said Nanette White, press secretary for Louisiana's Department of Social Services. "Sometimes little kids just wander off. They're there one second and you blink and they're gone."

At the rescue headquarters, a cool tile-floored building swarming with firefighters and paramedics, the children ate cafeteria food and fell into a deep sleep. Deamonte volunteered his vital statistics. He said his father was tall and his mother was short. He gave his address, his phone number and the name of his elementary school.

He said that the 5-month-old was his brother, Darynael, and that two others were his cousins, Tyreek and Zoria. The other three lived in his apartment building.

The children were clean and healthy — downright plump in the case of the infant, said Joyce Miller, a nurse who examined them. It was clear, she said, that "time had been taken with those kids." The baby was "fat and happy."

All evening Thursday as strike teams came and went to the flooded city, volunteer Ron Haynes carried one of the 2-year-old girls back and forth, playing with her until she was calm enough to eat dinner.

"This baby child was terrified," he said. "After she relaxed, it was gobble, gobble, gobble."

As grim dispatches came in from the field, one woman in the office burst into tears at the thought that the children had been abandoned in New Orleans, said Sharon Howard, assistant secretary of the office of public health.

Late the same night, they got an encouraging report: A woman in a shelter in Thibodeaux was searching for seven children. People in the building started clapping at the news. But when they got the mother on the phone, it became clear that she was looking for a different group of seven children, Howard said.

"What that made me understand was that this was happening across the state," she said. "That kind of frightened me."

The children were transferred to a shelter operated by the Department of Social Services, rooms full of toys and cribs where mentors from the Big Buddy Program were on hand day and night. For the next two days, the staff did detective work.

One of the 2-year-olds steadfastly refused to say her name until a worker took her picture with a digital camera and showed it to her. The little girl pointed at it and cried out, "Gabby!" One of the boys; with a halo of curly hair; had a G printed on his T-shirt when he arrived; when volunteers started calling him G, they noticed that he responded.

Deamonte began to give more details to Derrick Robertson, a 27-year-old Big Buddy mentor: How he saw his mother cry when he was loaded onto the helicopter. How he promised her he'd take care of his little brother.

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An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State


by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski

It took four long days for state and federal officials to
figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]

There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.


Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

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I wouldn't move back there.

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That's why I like the Northeast - the worst we get is a blizzard...

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I wouldn't mind the Northeast...except for the snow. It's not so bad here, except for summer when we can top 100°F.

I don't mind snow, as long as I get to stay home that day.

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September 7, 2005
In Baton Rouge, a Tinge of Evacuee Backlash
By PETER APPLEBOME
BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 6 - Last week came the rumors - of riots at Wal-Marts, of break-ins at homes, of drug gangs from New Orleans roaming the streets of its more sedate neighbor 75 miles up Interstate 10.

Today came the reality - of a dozen or more relatives crowded under one roof, of hours stuck in traffic trying to get to school or work, of frustration and fear about what kind of city Baton Rouge will be with at least 100,000 evacuees and rescue workers added to the 227,000 residents it had before the storm hit.

Make no mistake. The overwhelming response of people in Baton Rouge to Hurricane Katrina has been one of compassion and sacrifice with every church in town, it seems, housing or feeding evacuees.

But there have also been runs on gun stores, mounting frustration over gridlocked roads and an undercurrent of fear about crime and the effect of the evacuees.

After the chaos of the storm, which did some damage here, and a long weekend, Tuesday was the first day most residents returned to work and school. Before the evacuation, blacks made up about half the population of Baton Rouge and almost 70 percent of New Orleans, and in conversations in which race is often explicit or just below the surface, voices on the street, in shops, and especially in the anonymous hothouse of talk radio were raising a new question: just how compassionate can this community, almost certainly home to more evacuees than any other, afford to be?

"You can't take the city out of the yat, and you can't take the yat out of the city," said Frank Searle, a longtime Baton Rouge resident, using a slang term for New Orleanians derived from the local greeting, "Where y'at?"

"These people will not assimilate here," Mr. Searle said. "They put up with the crime in New Orleans, and now it's staring them in the face, but up here that's not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they have to. This is the South. We will take care of it."

For a week Baton Rouge, the state capital, home of Louisiana State University and a place that sees itself as a less raucous cousin to what had been the kingdom of sin and merriment to its south, has been trying to come to terms with its sudden status as the state's most populous city.

"It's a new Baton Rouge we're living in, isn't it?" said Jeanine Smallwood of suburban Prairieville, in the middle of a 90-minute drive to work that should have taken 20.

Like many people in and near Baton Rouge, Mrs. Smallwood, her 1,700-square-foot house now sheltering 14 people, is trying to balance the need for compassion with the vertigo of a changed city. And so while she wishes all the evacuees well, she said she feared an influx of people from the housing projects of New Orleans, places, she has heard, where people walk around in T-shirts that read, "Kill the cops."

"Or so the story has it," she said. "Those aren't neighborhoods I go to."

She was so rattled, she said, she told her daughter she might have to move. On reflection, she said, there is little chance of that. Instead, she is hoping for the best.

"People are, what's the word? Not frustrated, not scared, it's more like their lives are on hold, everything's changed and we're trying to figure out what the new normal is going to be," Mrs. Smallwood said.

Many relief workers and volunteers say the worries over crime reflect more wholesale stereotyping of people fleeing a catastrophe than anything based in fact, but safety is a major issue. At the height of the post-storm panic last week, people waited in line for three and a half hours at Jim's Firearms, a giant gun and sporting goods store. Many were people from New Orleans with their own safety issues. But many were local residents jumpy about the newcomers from New Orleans and stocking up on Glock and Smith & Wesson handguns.

Jim Siegmund, a salesman at Jim's recently returned from military service in Iraq, said he did not think there was anything to worry about. Still, holding a cellphone in his hand and comparing it to a 9-millimeter handgun he said: "When push comes to shove, this won't protect you, but a Glock 9 will."

Joel Phillips, a 38-year-old contractor, said he had never owned a gun in his life, but after watching an angry argument at a gas station, he stood in line for three hours at Jim's to buy a 9-millimeter Ruger handgun and then went with a friend to a firing range over the weekend to learn how to use it.

"I have two daughters, I sometimes have to work in bad neighborhoods," Mr. Phillips said. "I probably don't need it, but I'll feel better knowing that I have some protection."

Many evacuees are staying with family or friends, their campers, S.U.V.'s and pickups parked on front lawns or circular driveways.

Most people at the broad array of shelters were dazed but appreciative of the help from local volunteers like the Louisiana State University students, upbeat and attentive, tending to sick and exhausted evacuees at the triage center on campus.

But others, particularly those at the main Red Cross shelter at the River Center convention center downtown, were seething with frustration, not just over the disaster they were fleeing, but from the sense that they were being treated not so much like guests as people being warehoused until they could be shipped elsewhere.

Patricia Perry, a postal employee from New Orleans, said anyone with a wristband from the River Center shelter was being stereotyped outside it as one of "those people" - looters, criminals, outcasts.

"It's like a stigma," she said. "All they really want to do is get us out of town. Well, I'm from Louisiana. I work hard. I pay my taxes. Surely, this state can find a place for us to live."

Still, many residents, with the sense of intimacy that remains so much a part of Southern life, took their role as hosts seriously, as if it would be bad manners, the ultimate sin in the South, to do otherwise.

So when Pam Robertson, manager of a convenience store, asked a customer how he was doing, it was not dutiful chatter but a real question that begged for a real answer.

When it came, she took the man's hand in hers over the counter and talked about her friend Hunter, evacuated from Loyola University, about her upbringing in the town of Henderson in the heart of Cajun country, about the grid of local streets here.

She greeted one and all with the same missionary zeal, as if the right words could somehow undo the disaster of the past week.

And when asked how she was doing, or even when they didn't, she replied: "I'm tired, but I'm hanging in. It's good. It's all good. God is good. We'll get through it."

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