Devastation

  • I hadn’t been tun­ing in con­stantly to news about Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, because it didn’t seem like the kind of story where that works. The effects are far too enor­mous, and there was never any of it that was going to change. See­ing end­less footage of reporters try­ing not to get blown down and shots of enor­mous debris, tremen­dous surf and palm trees blown nearly side­ways didn’t seem like the thing to do. I should have been pray­ing — I’m sorry to have to admit that I didn’t even think of it. Why is it that nat­ural dis­as­ters don’t even reg­is­ter with me that way? They just seem like some­thing that hap­pens, period.

    I’m still not sure I can take in some of the reports that are start­ing to come in.

    • The flood­wa­ter is cov­er­ing 80% of the city, up to 20 feet deep. But it’s not really water — it’s “a red­dish brown soup of sewage, gaso­line and garbage,” accord­ing to the AP story. And in case that doesn’t paint a clear enough pic­ture for you, Mayor Nagin had con­cerns about the peo­ple stay­ing in the water:

      Peo­ple walk­ing in that water with those dead bod­ies. It can get in your pores — you don’t have to drink it.

    • Thou­sands esti­mated dead in New Orleans alone — and that’s after 80–90% of the peo­ple had evac­u­ated. Can you imag­ine if they hadn’t been warned in advance? In the paper, they’re com­par­ing this to the San Fran­cisco earth­quake in 1906, but there is that impor­tant dif­fer­ence to me. As bad as this one was, every­one — even those who chose not to go — were warned of what was coming.
    • Of those that stayed, tens of thou­sands are at the Super­dome with no air con­di­tion­ing, no place to bathe and non-working toi­lets. The plan is to evac­u­ate 25,000 to the Hous­ton Astrodome.
    • But then what? The mayor esti­mates that the city won’t be func­tional for two or three months. Peo­ple won’t be allowed back for at least a month or two. In the mean­time, the loot­ers seem to be grow­ing in num­ber and becom­ing more hos­tile. The police were told not to inter­fere with them, but the city will cer­tainly want to do some­thing before too much longer, or any of the homes that haven’t been destroyed by the storm will be pil­laged by thugs — what this NYT reporter calls “the storm after the storm.”
    • And that’s not even to think about the effects in the rest of Louisiana. Or Mis­sis­sippi. Or Florida, Alabama, Geor­gia and …

    Enough. Like I said, I can’t take it in, and I don’t want to keep talk­ing about it as if I can. The Inter­na­tional Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian Char­i­ties is tak­ing dona­tions HERE, and I’m sure all churches will be tak­ing up a spe­cial col­lec­tion for Sun­days to come. If you want to be more ecu­meni­cal, here’s FEMA’s list of charities.


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    September 1st, 2005 | Grace | No Comments |

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