the Rude Pundit just spent some time in N.O. has fresh pics

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

today was pics, tomorrow he will have comment on what he saw. if anyone will tell us the truth, Rude will do it.

I believe it was TIME a few weeks back
with their story - New Orleans
It's Worse Than You Think

oh, yes
so much worse

some around here can only dip into to the city
work on their house a little
then come back out
it's just too much to bear

http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com

Schroeder's been posting the pictures and news from N.O. for some time now.

If some enterprising photographer could round up a slew of pre-Katrina photos, and reproduce them precisely, standing in the same spot as the original photographer, and taking the same shot post-Katrina. Then do up a slideshow, click, click...click, click. I think it would really hammer home the destruction.

You cannot fully appreciate the "after" unless you have seen the "before."

I was a few months old during Besty in 65. This house (my father had it built) survived Betsy, and Camille (I lived further south during Camille) with minor flood damage. Katrina destroyed it. (It's on Highway 603, several miles from the beach, but right on a canal.)


This is where I lived through Camille when I was 4. There was a house and a Gulf station there, and it was not flooded. The water from Katrina was over the roof, and they found bodies on the roof of the K-Mart across the street. (Highway 90 and Nicholson, in Waveland).


I couldn't even capture the damage in Pass Christian and New Orleans. I took a lot of pictures, but nothing shows what it is really like. I didn't even bother taking pictures in the Ninth or Lower Ninth Ward, where the Industrial Canal levee broke. You just can't imagine. I thought I knew what to expect, but I didn't.

Astounding how much force had to be at play to cause that sort of damage.

that the flood lifted the roof and dropped it on the bricks. Both the lifting and the dropping destroy the integrity of the bricks. You can see on the left side that the bricks collapse outward at the bottom, as though something pushed down on them. Also, the roof is not sitting where it should be, so that's what I think happened.

This house was got "rising water" damage, which is what you see off the coastline, when bayous and rivers flood (or levees break). The houses that are washed away or washed "through" (where the frame is there but the water obviously flowed through the house) is usually surging water along the coastline. Right beneath the levee break in the Lower Ninth Ward you see that type of damage, which indicates how fast the levee broke.

The water by this brick house was probably thirty feet high. A friend of mine lived a couple blocks from there, and her house was on twelve foot stilts, so the floor of her house was probably sixteen to twenty feet above the water level. Katrina flooded over her roof. That's at least thirty feet. She almost didn't evacuate, but decided almost during the hurricane to go three miles north to Kiln, Mississippi. She would have died otherwise--she's in her seventies.

sturdy construction techniques. FWIW :)

Katrina didn't hit these folks as badly as Ivan did. Location is Gulf Shores, Alabama.

http://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/DAC-ART/hurricane-katrina.html

is awesome, and it's even worse in Mississippi.

In New Orleans, the Ninth and Lower Ninth Wards are wastelands of empty houses and piles of debris. There are no lights at night, few cars, very few residents. It's one of the most chilling effects I've ever experienced, being there after dark. It was every bit as powerful as seeing Ground Zero in NY, but it goes on and on and on, and leaves a sense of hopelessness and anger that I didn't feel in New York (then again, I grew up near New Orleans, so it was more personal).

On the other hand, there is tourism and business in the French Quarters and in uptown streets near the river, like Magazine Street. And across the 17th Street Canal in Metarie everything seems normal. If you get down there, drive down Veteran's Highway across the 17th Street Canal bridge. On the Metarie side, where the levees held, you can eat and dine and see kids playing in their yards. Just across the bridge there is a city of empty houses, piles of debris, and no electricity. Traffic lights are out, traffic is gone--you go from a city to a ghost town in thirty yards.

And the worst part is, you can see it doesn't have to be. Many of the houses flooded by the slow rising water of the 17th Street break can be salvaged, and even many in the Ninth Ward could be saved (oak and cypress survive floods well, which is why so many old houses were built of those woods). There should be constant construction, and booming industry as people rebuild. But the state and city are bankrupt, the feds won't deliver on their promises or responsibilities, and the insurance companies are shutting their coffers.

As an example of what I mean, I visited the houses that my mother and father greww up in. My father lived on Forshey Street, near Carrolton and I-110 (or 10, I get confused). The house is now in a predominately black district. You could see the waterline where the water reached about three feet above the floor. The houses are livable, and many seemed to be lived in, and there were only a few piles of debris. But there is no work being done on them. My mother's house never flooded. She lived on Magazine Street in a small hardware store that is now a grocery. The street was open and busy.

The town doesn't have to die. It's not even on life support. But it is not receiving the attention it needs to fully recover, and I have to agree that it is because the city is Democrat, and black. Bush knows what he's doing.

Now, cross the Pearl River into Mississippi, where FEMA is trying to pull out because they claim all of the debris has been removed and they are not needed. The cities of Bay St. Louis, Waveland and Pass Christian are flat gone. People are living in tents in Waveland (where I lived until I was four), but they aren't even trying to live in Pass Christian (where I went to high school for a couple of years, and where many of my friends lived, and still live). The town is a pile of rubble. Back off the beach there are streets where you can't even tell where the houses were. There is just debris washed into huge piles, like driftwood at the tideline. Boards, bricks, trees, kids' bikes and toys, clothes, mud, appliances, and no telling what else are just piled up like a landfill, and even the roads aren't passable. FEMA has no intention of finishing their job.

Bush is hated in these areas, btw. People spit and curse when his name is mentioned, even some of his former supporters. He visited the area nine times after the hurricane and made promise after promise, and has not kept one of them. He won't visit again. His Secret Service wouldn't allow it.

Anyway, just my observations.

and FEMA did a wonderful job there, and becaus ehtere was good cooperation with state/local/federal...not like in NOLA where that woman democrat governor and the black democrat mayor screwed it up.:sarcasm:

He won't blame Bush directly, but he is criticizing the federal government's response. Trent Lott is barely civil when he talks about Bush's response. Lott has never liked Bush, but it's all he can do now to not blast away at Bush the way the Democrats do.

I'm sure the corporations have their eyes on the 9th Ward

I think it is part of BushCo's ideology. They want to kill government assistance for anything, and they believe that by letting this area die, the poor people in that area will have to move somewhere else. In their stupid little minds, to them that gets all these people off welfare, and forces everyone else to pay for their own recovery. To them, that's "tough love," or whatever euphamism they use to justify their greed.

They also want to force people to pay for their own recovery, rather than using government assistance. They know the longer they wait, the fewer people they will have to pay for. They tend to forget that we paid taxes to the federal government so that the feds could assist people in emergencies such as this. They believe all the money was there for them to give to Halliburton.

It's a wrong ideology, even if there was any moral justification for it. These filthy dogs aren't good enough to live in America.

I'm sure there are people with plans for this land, but I don't think that's Bush's main goal. I think, frankly, it's just basic ethnic cleansing, where you drive a group of people off the land by every means necessary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/international/africa/01nigeria.html


But much of that oil will come from places like Obioku, and with it a tangled and often bloody web of conflict marked by poverty and a near abdication of responsibility by government.

Even though Nigeria elected a democratic government in 1999, which raised hopes for the long-suffering delta region, almost none of the enormous wealth the oil creates reaches places like this. The isolation of Obioku is total. With no fast boats available, the nearest health center or clinic is a day's journey away. No telephone service exists here. Radio brings the only news of the world outside. Nothing hints that the people here live in a nation enjoying the profits of record-high oil prices.

"It is like we don't exist, as far as government is concerned," said Worikuma Idaulambo, chairman of Obioku's council of chiefs.

Nigeria is a longstanding OPEC member that exported nearly $30 billion of oil in 2004, the United States Department of Energy said. Nigeria sends 13 percent of revenues from its states back, a hefty sum for the underdeveloped ones where oil is produced. Much of that is siphoned off by corrupt regional officials who often pocket the money or waste it on lavish projects that do little, if anything, for ordinary people.