THE CONTINUING SAGA OF KATRINA
Two Tales of Woe from the Daily Kos

Like I said yesterday, I'm headed to the Big Easy tomorrow for the first time since the Hurricane, which makes it weird that there were two posts on Katrina and New Orleans over at Kos today. At any rate, I'm in the mood, so I'm pointing Real Art in that general direction.

2005: Never Forget ...

The comments below were collected from the Katrina Diaries. They've been edited slightly for brevity, most of the proginators have given their consent to have them reprinted. They're brutal, they're real, they're amazingly ahead of traditonal media. Offered here on behalf of those who can now never be heard, so that we never forget them.

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We're in New Orleans. We're staying at the Hilton because they have a generator and special hurricane rates. by nolalily on Sat Aug 27, 2005 at 06:27:12 PM PDT

We've decided to go to Austin. Maybe we'll get up to Crawford and visit Cindy. My love to you all and thanks again for your care and concern. by nolalily on Sat Aug 27, 2005 at 10:29:42 PM PDT

Dear God Please save the only blue city in this red state. by RandyMI on Sun Aug 28, 2005 at 09:25:55 AM PDT

Good God ... Speechless. by Plutonium Page on Sun Aug 28, 2005 at 09:08:58 AM PDT

Should have had a federal hurricane preparedness program. Oh the republicans are in power? That explains it. Now FEMA is but a political payback program for red states. by easong on Sun Aug 28, 2005 at 08:01:55 PM PDT

Horrible and Tragic. That the resources and preparation weren't in place to fully evacuate everyone from the path of the storm. by robolywa on Mon Aug 29, 2005 at 07:35:34 AM PDT

Levies are breaking....the WWL coverage is breaking up, they have flood warnings...Breach at industrial area, 3-8 feet water so far...breakin' up, can't hear much...(industrial canal bridge?) by Barbara on Mon Aug 29, 2005 at 07:39:00 AM PDT

My beloved city destroyed. Thousands of lives...destroyed. by jillian on Tue Aug 30, 2005 at 02:26:45 PM PDT

Where is the leadership? There are not enough troops there. They need troops to secure the City. They need every available helicopter in the SE to move. by reggg3 on Tue Aug 30, 2005 at 04:43:42 PM PDT

[I saw] were two screen captures from yahoo news. One-a white couple walking through water with bags of food captioned: "people found food". Two-a black guy walking through water with bag of food:"looter. No lie. I felt physically ill. by JLongs on Wed Aug 31, 2005 at 05:53:37 AM PDT

Click here for the rest because there's a whole lot more.

Of course, I didn't read any of this the first time around because Becky and I evacuated ourselves. In retrospect, we didn't really need to, but I still totally support the idea of running the hell away from category five hurricanes if at all possible. Better alive and inconvenienced than dead or hurt. Yeah, getting out and heading for the hills was a big freak out and all, but, judging from the comments above, we were probably going to be freaking out wherever we were. God, the whole thing was so terrible.

New Orleans, NIMBY, and another crisis on the horizon

For those of you unfamiliar with NIMBY, it works roughly like this: people of a city decide that some unit is needed for the further development of the city, but then they put up mighty resistance to said element being placed in their own vicinity. This is most commonly associated with things like prisons ("We need more prisons, but not in my backyard!") You get the idea.

NIMBY's a bad enough way to approach city development, but coupled with the still-massive problems facing New Orleans' return to normalcy, it's outright poisonous. Today's The Times-Picayune has a searing editorial on the way that NIMBY is keeping us deep in the red:

"As one Kenner resident put it opposing a trailer village for Loyola University employees, 'Compassion is all right, but compassion can't be at the expense of my property.'"

And

Price gouging in disaster areas is hardly a surprise, however. In fact, the T-P has a full front-page story on the way FEMA is dumping loads of money on multilayered, tiered operations that keep prices high:

"Depending on the extent of damage and the size of the roof, the federal government is paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 to install a typical tarp. The cost to taxpayers to tack up a covering of blue vinyl is roughly the same, on a per-square-foot basis, as what a homeowner would pay to install a basic asphalt-shingle roof.

Yet the laborer putting nail to tarp typically earns only a fraction of that. The cost is driven up by layers of subcontractors, an expensive flowchart that sometimes produces the sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor, known in post-Katrina parlance as a 'fifth-tier sub.'"

Click here for the rest.

Very much a bummer to hear some of the specifics as to why the reconstruction seems to be at a standstill. And it all strikes me as just being more of the same: NIMBY, which in this case refers to where to put trailers for temporary living quarters, is the same phenomenon that ghettoized thousands of poor and miserable New Orleans African-Americans out of sight and out of mind until Katrina came along; the waste millions of dollars by Bush's FEMA is related to the same phenomenon that filled the failed agency's ranks with inexperienced political cronies--that is, it's all about helping out the White House's political buddies, like with Halliburton in Iraq. This is all just nuts. Anybody in the Big Easy who has a problem with displaced citizens and workers temporarily living nearby is totally fucked in the head. That they are taken seriously at all by any governmental body is a testament for the sick times in which we live. And the Federal waste...aren't the conservatives supposed to be in charge? If you'd told me ten years ago things would be like this today, I'd have laughed in your face.

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