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Commentary Too - Sep 1, 2005 - Printable Version
- It Ain't the Big Easy...It's Dunkirk!
by Down the Middle
No food! No water! No medicine and no improvisation! These are the sore realities of post Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding area. All local, state and federal agencies are now beginning to move, but the problem is not tomorrow.......it was yesterday! As the skies cleared, we caught our first glimpse of the apocalyptic nightmare that was once the Big Easy, with the first videos depicting desperate citizens who were lucky enough to live near a freeway, trying to walk out of the city with the few worldly possessions they could carry in a trash bag, slung over their shoulders.
The fortunate ones had already made their way to the shelter of the Superdome, the convention center and the area hospitals before the hurricane made landfall...but then the levies broke, inundating more than 80% the city with flood waters, and leaving many these islands of refuge with no electricity, no sanitary facilities...and little food nor water.
Although evacuations have begun with buses picking up thousands of refugees at the Superdome and transporting them to the Astrodome, in Houston, TX, area hospitals are still trying to evacuate their more seriously ill patients. It was reported yesterday, hooligans sank small boats that were being used in a hospital evacuation, and today, there have been reports of sniper fire on staff members and the medi-vac helicopter at the New Orleans Charity Hospital.
The picture is absolutely frightening! Families in waist high, moccasin infested water, floating their elderly and infirmed down the street on air mattresses. People waving T-shirts and towels from apartment windows, with bodies floating in the water below. Women and children holding up home-made cardboard signs that simply state, "Help Us", and men painting messages on roof tops like, "Diabetic. Only three pills left!"...all of them hoping to be the lucky few rescued by helicopter.
Lawlessness broke out, with looters emptying stores of their food and water (New Orleans has thousands of poor on government assistance. Welfare checks are received at the beginning of each month and the hurricane struck at the end, leaving most with no way of purchasing goods)...but hundreds were seen carrying away anything they could grab, including an armed security guard, videotaped as he rolled his freshly filled shopping cart out of the store. Indeed, there are reports that all the storefronts are smashed and all the the stores are now completely void of goods.......including the gun shops!
Fires are beginning to break out in the city, and there are rumors of murder and widespread rape by roving teen-age gangs, amid additional reports that the local prison has now been taken over by the inmates who are in possession of the prison armory. There was even a drive-by shooting on the refugees, standing outside of the convention center (the man was arrested) and indeed, the officers of the New Orleans Police Department, taking up positions on the roof of the Police Department, are now admitting that they are losing control of the city.
Estimates of people still stranded in New Orleans range from 50,000 to 250,000. The mayor has put out a desperate SOS for food, water and more buses for the refugees at the Super Dome...but no plans have been announced to go after those still trapped inside the city, other than the slow and arduous helicopter rescue.
Why were we not prepared to drop food and water to some, as we rescued others? Is there no one at FEMA with intuitive enough to come up with a simple double bucket system containing life sustaining water with a length of rope and MREs (meals ready to eat) on the outside, so that the ones left behind could be given a measure of food, water, and a miniature sanitary unit?
Why is our President coming on TV, in the midst of this tragedy, just to tell us that gasoline is going up, as a result of the storm (Let's see.....what was the reason before the storm?) and that they are doing everything possible to get the pipelines up and running again, while giving us the profound advice to only buy gas, IF we need it??? If that wasn't enough, while asking Americans to donate money to the relief effort, Daddy Bush and Bill Clinton pointedly defended the Administration's slow reaction and lack of coordination to the disaster, saying now is not the time to lay blame.
Maybe the poor people of New Orleans would have been better off if the President taken the bold Churchillian step two days ago, of calling on his Southern brothers to bring their prized bass boats to the rescue of their fellow Americans, as the British had done at the beginning of World War II, when their entire expeditionary force was almost driven into the English Channel by the Germans at Dunkirk.
The situation is truly overwhelming. There are thousands of Americans stranded and dying in this swampy hell-hole, while anarchy spreads throughout the city. Elderly people are dying, unattended in their wheel-chairs. Young women, holding their infants in their arms, stand crying for food and water to sustain their babies, and grown men are begging for the lives of their families.
Why is it that we can spend billions of dollars to go half way around the world and take over a foreign country...but we can't protect and serve our own citizens in their most urgent time of need?
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