New Orleans from the Air, August 31, 2005. The Super Dome is in the lower left corner.
"Crowd Control"
The inside of the Superdome. As of 9am Sept. 2, 2005, I have heard that there were still 5,000 people inside.
Here is the straight dope:
International Red Cross Site
New Orleans Times-Picayune live on-site coverage
Livejournal Blogger holed up in New Orleans high rise
The rest of this entry is pretty much me just flapping my gums (or fingers).
I watched about an hour of CNN last night. The best thing I saw was an interview with a group of tourists who had tried to charter buses to get out of New Orleans, but the buses had been commandeered by the National Guard. The white man who was being interviewed was almost weeping with a combination of frustration and exhaustion as he described being left stranded after paying for a ticket. Then he put an arm around someone and the camera panned over to show an African-American man standing there with his wife. The tourist said that the man had come by with a vehicle and carried them out of the city.
There has been a lot of rumbling, ranting and tongue clucking over all the footage of people looting and how the media is showing only African-Americans looting. I was in a bar last night with some friends and when we started talking about what's going on in LA, a woman eating dinner next to us, told us that she had grown up in Shreveport. It was hard to tell if she said that because she wanted to talk about what was going on, or if she just wanted to let us know before she heard anything depressing. She said that most of the people that didn't evacuate, couldn't. Too poor, no car, probably didn't want to leave their homes because they were afraid of losing whatever they had to anyone who stayed behind.
The worst thing I saw last night was the correspondent at the Houston Astrodome who was on the scene when at least 3 buses pulled up from New Orleans and were told that there was no more room. I seem to remember that he gave up talking for a few moments. It was too incredible. One minute I was seeing footage of a woman looking out the window of a bus, almost hysterical with relief to get out of the Superdome while the voiceover described the 12 hour ride with no air conditioning. The next minute, I was seeing buses being turned away, just driving away. There was no word on where they could go.
That seems to be the situation in a nutshell. Nobody has any clear information on what to do, how to do it, or where to go. I read an interview on the Interdictor blog in which a man described how the authorities were threatning anyone who approached them for help. Anyone who has ever taken/attempted to take public transportation in the Boston area knows firsthand that it's never a good policy to not be forthcoming with information in an emergency. It's hard to imagine that whoever planned to put people in the Superdome didn't "wargame" what would happen if you take 10,000 people who have just had what little they own washed away and are now left in a big concrete box with a few restrooms and no air conditioning, and stop handing out the waterbottles and MRE's after a couple of days.
As I click obsessively back and forth between various media outlets, it's starting to remind me, ironically enough, of a big dam that's about to burst. There are small cracks appearing everywhere; blogs describing people wandering around in armed gangs, comments here and there about the history of political corruption in New Orleans, reports that at least 40% of the police force has deserted, the Governor of Louisiana describing the incoming Nation Guard troops as "locked and loaded...they will shoot to kill...and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.". I can't escape the sensation that pretty soon whatever carefully constructed wall the press and the disaster management authorities have built around the reality of the situation will burst under the pressure of what we are seeing versus what is being "offically" reported.
The rest of the planet is already pretty much aghast at how we have handled this.
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