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October 2005                                                                                Volume 9 - Number 1

Hurricane Katrina Related Activities...

      Survivor’s Stories from Hurricane Katrina

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/weather/orl-bk-katrinasurvive091705,0,469396.story?coll=orl-home-headlines

Trapped Katrina survivor alive after 18 days
Amazed rescuers find 76-year-old man, trapped for 18 days with only a gallon of water.


NEW ORLEANS -- Day after day, for more than two weeks, a 76-year-old man sat trapped and alone in his attic, sipping from a dwindling supply of water until it ran out. No food. No way out of a house ringed by foul floodwaters.

Without ever leaving home, Gerald Martin lived out one of the most remarkable survival stories of Hurricane Katrina. Rescuers who found him on Friday September 16 as they searched his neighborhood by boat, were astounded at his good spirits and resiliency after 18 days without food or human contact.

In previous recent days, search crews had been finding corpses by the dozens in the still-flooded neighborhoods of New Orleans, but not trapped survivors. The FEMA search-and-rescue boat navigating through the Eighth Ward didn't expect to find anyone alive at 6010 Painters St., but they planned to search the premises of a one-story wood house.

As they were searching the neighborhood, they heard someone calling out from the house.Using a sledgehammer, a FEMA rescuer broke down the front door and went inside with another team member, struggling through a living room jumbled with overturned, sodden furniture.

They found Martin sitting in a chair in the sludge-covered kitchen, partially undressed in an effort to keep cool. After 16 days in his attic, he had descended to the ground floor two days earlier when the floodwaters -- once up to the ceiling -- finally drained, even though the house remained surrounded by several feet of water.

Incredibly, Martin -- who ran out of his gallon-and-a-half water supply on Thursday -- was able to walk out of the house with just a bit of assistance.  He was given water to drink, then taken to Ochsner Foundation Hospital, where he was treated for dehydration.

Martin's family left before the storm, but he stayed to attend church, later took a nap and woke up to find that his home was filling with water.  He only had time to grab some water and get to his attic, which he described as feeling like an oven during day-after-day of mid-90-degree heat that followed the storm. Madden said the heat in the attic might have been even worse, perhaps fatal, except for shade provided by a fallen tree.

While they were putting him in the chopper, he asked if they could stop on the way at Taco Bell to get something to eat.


Survivor Story: (names have been changed)
Ted Brown knew a storm was threatening the town his 81 year old father, Paul, lived in. His father grew up in Louisiana, had attended Tulane and Ted himself was born in New Orleans.
On August 29th, Ted received a phone call from the assisted living facility that his dad lived in, telling him that his dad was evacuated to a local hospital because of his medical condition. After that call Ted did not hear from his father. He tried contacting the Red Cross, the assisted living facility and even tried getting information from FEMA to find his father.
Finally on September 4th Ted received another call, only this time it was from a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. It was a doctor who had been taking care of his father for the past few days, since he was airlifted to their medical facility. His father had suffered from a little heat exhaustion, but other than that he was doing well. Ted immediately booked a flight to Atlanta to be with his father until he could be released and brought home with him.


Survivor story:

In Jackson, Mississippi, where 20-year-old Sarah, a junior at Mississippi State University, lives with her family, the flooding was not as widespread, but much of the city is without power. "The burning heat is almost too much to bear," she said.

Sarah, who did not give her last name, has seen some fighting and looting in Jackson, but is mostly proud of the calmness her neighbors have shown. Her biggest disappointments have been with the media and the government.

"Quit covering only New Orleans, CNN and FOX," she said. "We got hit too!"

She wondered why there's not more food, water, gas and security from the government.

"I A.M. very disappointed with the rest of this country," she said. "This is a catastrophe that compares to 9/11, but nobody seems to care. I think it is because the people throughout the country think we are a bunch of Mississippi rednecks and don't see the need to help out, don't realize the economic support New Orleans did give to the country, and, most importantly, don't have that 'I could be next' attitude that the terrorists gave them in 2001."

Source: MTV Survivor Stories
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1509005/09062005/id_0.jhtml?headlines=true/6/05 (accessed 9/22/05)


Survivor Story
Four days after Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans, seven children were seen walking down Causeway Boulevard.  The oldest was only six and the youngest was five months.   These children made it safely to rescue headquarters and slowly the details of their plight began to emerge.  It took days for the authorities to locate their parents, all the while assuming that they were either dead or had abandoned their children.  The truth was that these parents had decided to evacuate the city by helicopter after living for four days with no food, air conditioning or light.  However, the helicopter could only hold so many.  They made the decision that most parents would, and put their children’s lives ahead of their own.  They sent their babies into the helicopter and hoped that they would see their children alive again.  The families were reunited the following Sunday.
Full story can be found at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9230423/



Left in the Path of Destruction
By Harvin Perez

We usually depend on the media to provide us with detailed, informative pieces of journalism to help us better understand experiences and events we might not otherwise be exposed to.  Rarely do journalists get a chance to tell a story of their own.  Alice Jackson, a part-time report for People, wrote about her experience of underestimating Hurricane Katrina, like so many others, failing to evacuate and surviving the catastrophic hurricane.
On August 27, 2005, Alice evacuated to the home of her friend with her mother and niece to ride out the storm making sure that she brought along the equipment and supplies that would allow her to survive should anything happen. On the evening of August 28, Alice felt that she had made a mistake by not evacuating out of the Gulfport, Mississippi area. Facing a grim situation, she confessed to everyone, “I want you to forgive me now, because I think I made a mistake. I’m afraid we’re all going to have to fight very hard not to die.” At 1 a.m., it became apparent that they would face the worst of Mother Nature as they learned that all three of the emergency operations centers in the area were washing away before radio communication was also lost. Throughout the rest of the night, the tempest roared outside and they were quick to move out of the way as a giant pine tree came crashing into the house. Finding a second refuge in the master bedroom closet, they rode out the storm. They were witnesses to their neighbor’s house exploding.
The next day, they returned to their home to see what was left. A few women were standing around pointing in the direction of a slab that used to be home to a family with children. The women were distressed and looking for the children. As Alice walked towards them, she stepped on a little shoe. The shoe was on the foot of a child. The child was buried in the mud. She calmly told them, “Please don’t’ pull this out; let the rescue crews do it.
When she arrived at her mother’s home, she realized nothing was left but another empty slab. Finding only her mother’s wedding band and her father’s paratrooper bracelet from WWII, she knew that it was her mother had left. Her home was completely gone. Overcome by emotion, Alice knelt down and cried out, “I am so grateful that the people I love have lived.” Alice may not have experienced the dramatic events that unfolded in New Orleans, but by no means did she experience anything less powerful.

Source:
Jackson, Alice. "Inside People – Survival Story" People 19 Sept. 2005: 10.




Survivor Story
Kristin Edwards
Sept. 26, 2005

Katrina survivor back in Melbourne
 From: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16725245-29281,00.html

 September 26, 2005

A MELBOURNE man who rode out Hurricane Katrina while locked in a Louisiana jail plans to return to New Orleans next year.

 Ashley McDonald arrived back in Melbourne this morning, a fortnight after his release from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Centre in Baton Rouge.

 The 30-year-old machine operator from Narre Warren, in Melbourne's south-east, had been arrested for public drunkenness in New Orleans' French Quarter the day before Hurricane Katrina hit the city on August 29.

 Mr McDonald, who had gone to the US to visit his sister in Tennessee, continued his holiday after he was released and flew back on his originally scheduled flight today.

 He said he was glad to be home, but hoped to revisit New Orleans next Easter.
 He was on his third trip to the US, but his first visit to New Orleans, when arrested.

 He had been in the city for less than 12 hours before he being picked up at 3am on August 28 for refusing to leave a bar in the famed Bourbon St.

 He was held in the city's Parish Prison when the storm hit the city, but was transferred to Baton Rouge after the New Orleans jail was abandoned because of flooding.

 Mr. McDonald said he was still surprised that he had been locked up for 12 days over such a minor charge alongside hardened criminals, gang members, and people on death row with a hurricane approaching.

 Inside the jail, he saw bashings and muggings as inmates armed themselves with smuggled knives and screwdrivers, or fashioned weapons out of bits of metal.

 "I got mugged with a screwdriver for my shirt, I'll never forget that," Mr. McDonald said.

 "I am actually lucky, especially when people were holding screwdrivers and knives to your ribs, wanting shirts and blankets. It could've ended up pretty bad to be honest."

 His credit cards were also stolen while he was in jail and thousands of dollars of fraudulent purchases were made on them.

 While Mr. McDonald was undergoing an ordeal inside the jail, a storm was beating on its walls outside.

 "We could hear the wind, hear the rains, it must have been hailing like golf balls almost, the rain was that heavy," he said.

 "You could hear all the roofing iron or sheet metal flapping around, you could hear breaking glass.

 "The only thing we didn't know was the level of the water, we didn't know if it was a foot deep or 10ft deep."

 He said he got "a bit of a dressing down" for going missing from his parents Doug and Sharon McDonald, who had flown over to the US to search for him.

 Mr. McDonald will go back to work next week, but is already planning his next trip.

 "New Orleans has always been a place I wanted to go to," he said.




Katrina Survivor Story
Submitted By Susan McNamara

The following story was taken from:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/02/health/webmd/main814573.shtml
(Accessed Sep 26, 2005)

Theresa Mamon, 34, New Orleans
Mamon, a mother of six children, arrived at the center on Sept. 1. She hadn't been able to get her family out of New Orleans before Katrina struck. Before Katrina, she had just found work at Wal-Mart.

Hurricane Katrina was "horrible, real horrible," Mamon tells WebMD in the center's makeshift health clinic. The stress and anxiety of the situation had been getting to her, setting off panic attacks. Plus, Mamon says she had had been having chest pains before the storm.

When the winds died, the floods swept in. Mamon made the lifesaving choice to brave the waters and walk east to drier ground with four of her children, including sons who can't swim. Somehow, she got them lifejackets and marched them through the water to safe ground.

Mamon says faith and God got her through it. "I knew I was going to be all right. I knew! Even when I was walking through the water, I knew me and my family was going to be all right because of the power of prayer. It helps."
Chest-High Water

Mamon points to her chest to show how high the water was. "That was over my sons' head," she says.

"Our house was under water. We couldn't get out. We didn't have any food, any water. That's understandable due to the storm, but there were Army trucks that was passing us by. We walked from New Orleans east to across the river in order get transportation to leave out of the city of New Orleans," she says.

"My sons have blisters on their feet. They have rashes between their legs from their clothes being wet. It's just ... I mean, it was horrible, horrible. I haven't been able to locate my family," she says, speaking of her sister, who has five children who also didn't know how to swim. "I don't know if she's alive."

Mamon says her 18-year-old daughter, a deputy sheriff in New Orleans, doesn't know that Mamon is all right since the phone lines are down.
"My poor sister," she says through tears. "This is so hard to even talk about it. I think everybody who's healthy, if they want to do anything, just ... please, look after those kids. There are children out there. And those people who are making matters worse, I just wish they'd stop so that they can get the help that they need to get out of there."

"I don't have any money. I don't have any clothes for my children," says Mamon. Still, she says "life is precious, very precious. You only have one life to live, and you need it to the fullest, meaning that you don't need to be out here looting and raping and killing people. For what? Your day is coming."


Survivor Story from Hurricane Katrina
By: Stacey L. Schultz

A social worker from Wisconsin wanting to help Hurricane Katrina survivors did just that in helping re-settle thirteen evacuees in the Madison area. Social worker, Rita, went with four adults and a bus to the Houston Astrodome in hopes of impacting at least a few lives.  Instead what she came across were inhumane living conditions and the reality of survival instincts as hurricane victims claimed Red Cross money cards.  Here’s a snapshot of those who made the journey.

Darryl, 28, Air conditioner installer – Spent five days on a roof due to lack of money to evacuate.  Now he has a furnished apartment in Madison and a job thanks to his doctor.

John, 44, laborer – New to the area and wanted to experience a hurricane, in his words, ‘bad mistake’.

Peggy, 50, Came with her two college age daughters – Spent three or four days in her attic and was evacuated by Army boats to the bridge and eventually the Dome. Witnessed children being raped and Army members standing by with rifles.  She’s left speechless in regards to what the hurricane took from her.

For further details check out:
Daily Kos: The State of the Nation
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/20/112523/225

New Orleans – Katrina Survivor Story
Compiled by Sarah Greenwood

The following is taken from “Our Experiences By Paramedics Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky” and from “SF paramedics tell a firsthand story of individual action amid official neglect in New Orleans” by Tali Woodward, SF Bay Guardian.  Bradshaw and Slonsky are paramedics from California that were attending the EMS conference in New Orleans.

On August 31 Slonsky and Bradshaw waited at their hotel for buses that were never going to come.  Frustrated, they left the hotel and “roamed the streets, approaching police officers and National Guard troops for help. But rather than offering any useful advice, Slonsky and Bradshaw say, most of the officers were snide, muttering that they should have gotten out before the storm.”

“Finally a police commander told them that all they had to do was follow the freeway to the Greater New Orleans Bridge and cross the river into Gretna, where buses would be waiting. They set off gleefully, gathering some people from the convention center on their way, but every one of them was turned away at the bridge.”

“After they were turned away, Slonsky and Bradshaw joined a couple of dozen people to build a small camp on a freeway median shaded by an overpass….Some of the youngest evacuees constructed an impromptu bathroom stall around a storm drain. Someone drove up in a water delivery truck and dropped off large jugs of the precious commodity.”  Close by, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn and they moved the food back to their camp in shopping carts.  “They established a system for divvying up the food: coffee for adults, candy for kids, applesauce for babies…. Their camp grew to 80 or so people. But at nightfall, they said, a cop drove up and shouted at them to disperse.”

Bradshaw, Slonsky, and six others took shelter in an empty school bus for the night. Using precarious cell phone connections, they contacted fellow paramedics in the Bay Area who were able to get them picked up by helicopter the next day.”

On a different note, they said,  “what you will not see [in the media], but what we witnessed, were the real heroes…of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.  Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.”

(http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18427.shtml)
(http://www.emsnetwork.org/artman/publish/article_18549.shtml)




HURRICANE KATRINA’S SURVIVOR STORY: CHARMAINE NEVILLE
Compiled by Carmelo Melendez

Charmaine Neville is a member of the well-known Neville musical family from New Orleans.  She is an accomplished singer and songwriter and is well-known in musical circles. Her account is chilling, shocking and a story of true courage and heroism (including commandeering a bus, a vehicle she has never driven). But, most importantly, she repeats time and time again that many New Orleans residents did not have the resources to get out of town. Her first-hand account of surviving the hurricane is truly heartbreaking and powerful. Her desperate attempts to save others and herself afterward provide one of the most gripping first person accounts of the disaster yet heard.
________________________________________
“I was in my house when everything first started. I was in my house. Yes, I live in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. When the hurricane came, it blew over the left side of my house from the north side of town, and the water was coming in the house in torrents. I had my neighbor, an elderly man who's my neighbor and myself in the house, and with our dogs and cats, and we were trying to stay out of the water but the water was coming in too fast, so we ended up having to leave the house. We left the house and we went up on the roof of a school. I took a crowbar and I burst the door open on the roof of the school to help people to get them up onto the roof of the school. Later on we found a flat boat and we went around in the neighborhood in the flat boat getting people out of their houses and bringing them to the school. We found all the food that we could and we cooked and we fed people. But then, things started getting really bad. By the second day, the people that were there that we were feeding and everything, we had no more food, no water. We had nothing, and other people were coming into our neighborhood. We were watching the helicopters go across the bridge and airlift other people out, but they would hover over us and tell us, "Hi," and that would be all. They wouldn't drop us any food, any water, nothing.”
“Alligators were eating people. They had all kind of stuff in the water. They had babies floating in the water. We had to walk over hundreds of bodies of dead people, people that we tried to save from the hospices, from the hospitals and from the old folks' homes. I tried to get the police to help us but I realized we rescued a lot of police officers in the flat boat from the district police station. The boat, the guy who was driving the boat, he rescued a lot of them and brought them to get to places where they could be saved. We understood that the police couldn't help us, but we couldn't understand why the National Guard and them couldn't help us, because we kept seeing them, but they never would stop and help us. Finally, it got to be too much. I just took all of the people that I could. I had two old women in wheelchairs with no legs that I rolled them from down there at Ninth Ward to the French Quarters, and I went back and I got more people. There were groups of us, you know, there was about 24 of us, and we kept going back and forth and rescuing whoever we could get and bringing them to the French Quarters since we heard that there was phones in the French Quarters and that there wasn't any water. And they were right. There was phones but we couldn't get through. I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come to the neighborhood where we were that were helping us to save people, but other men, and they came and they started raping women and they started killing them. And I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't, but what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened.
People are trying to say that we stayed in the city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this. We didn't have resources to get out. We had NO WAY TO LEAVE. When they gave the evacuation order, if we could have left, we would have left. There are still thousands and thousands of people trapped in the homes down in the down, in the downtown area.”
“In the Ninth Ward, and not just in my neighborhood but in other neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward, there are a lot of people who are still trapped down there. Old people, young people, babies, pregnant women, I mean, nobody's helping them. And I want people to realize that we did not stay in the city so that we could steal and loot and, and commit crimes. A lot of those young men lost their minds because the helicopters would fly over us and they wouldn't stop. We'd do SOS on the flashlights. We took everything. And it came to a point, it really did come to a point where these young men were so frustrated that they did start shooting. They weren't trying to hit the helicopters. They figured maybe they weren't seeing. Maybe if they hear this gunfire, they would stop then, but that didn't help us. Nothing like that helped us. Finally I got to Canal Street with all of my people that I had saved from back there. There was a whole group of us. I -- I don't want them arresting nobody else -- I broke the window in an RTA bus. I've never learned how to drive a bus in my life. I got in that bus. I loaded all of those people in wheelchairs and then everything else into that bus and we drove and we drove and we drove. And millions of people was trying to get me to help them to get on the bus with them.”
http://www.dailykos.com


Notes From Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
from Left Turn
I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge.

You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me "as someone who's been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don't want to be here at night."

There was also no visible attempt by any of those running the camp to set up any sort of transparent and consistent system, for instance a line to get on buses, a way to register contact information or find family members, special needs services for children and infirm, phone services, treatment for possible disease exposure, nor even a single trash can.

To understand the dimensions of this tragedy, its important to look at New Orleans itself.

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremacy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.

It is a city of kindness and hospitality, where walking down the block can take two hours because you stop and talk to someone on every porch, and where a community pulls together when someone is in need. It is a city of extended families and social networks filling the gaps left by city, state and federal governments that have abdicated their responsibility for the public welfare. It is a city where someone you walk past on the street not only asks how you are, they wait for an answer.

It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods. Police have been quoted as saying that they don't need to search out the perpetrators, because usually a few days after a shooting, the attacker is shot in revenge.

There is an atmosphere of intense hostility and distrust between much of Black New Orleans and the N.O. Police Department. In recent months, officers have been accused of everything from drug running to corruption to theft. In separate incidents, two New Orleans police officers were recently charged with rape (while in uniform), and there have been several high profile police killings of unarmed youth, including the murder of Jenard Thomas, which has inspired ongoing weekly protests for several months.

The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child's education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence.
Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portrayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race.

Louisiana politics is famously corrupt, but with the tragedies of this week our political leaders have defined a new level of incompetence. As hurricane Katrina approached, our Governor urged us to "Pray the hurricane down" to a level two. Trapped in a building two days after the hurricane, we tuned our battery-operated radio into local radio and tv stations, hoping for vital news, and were told that our governor had called for a day of prayer. As rumors and panic began to rule, they was no source of solid dependable information. Tuesday night, politicians and reporters said the water level would rise another 12 feet - instead it stabilized. Rumors spread like wildfire, and the politicians and media only made it worse.

While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.

No sane person should classify someone who takes food from indefinitely closed stores in a desperate, starving city as a "looter," but that's just what the media did over and over again. Sheriffs and politicians talked of having troops protect stores instead of perform rescue operations.

Images of New Orleans' hurricane-ravaged population were transformed into black, out-of-control, criminals. As if taking a stereo from a store that will clearly be insured against loss is a greater crime than the governmental neglect and incompetence that did billions of dollars of damage and destroyed a city. This media focus is a tactic, just as the eighties focus on "welfare queens" and "super-predators" obscured the simultaneous and much larger crimes of the Savings and Loan scams and mass layoffs, the hyper-exploited people of New Orleans are being used as a scapegoat to cover up much larger crimes.

City, state and national politicians are the real criminals here. Since at least the mid-1800s, its been widely known the danger faced by flooding to New Orleans. The flood of 1927, which, like this week's events, was more about politics and racism than any kind of natural disaster, illustrated exactly the danger faced. Yet government officials have consistently refused to spend the money to protect this poor, overwhelmingly black, city.

While FEMA and others warned of the urgent impending danger to New Orleans and put forward proposals for funding to reinforce and protect the city, the Bush administration, in every year since 2001, has cut or refused to fund New Orleans flood control, and ignored scientists warnings of increased hurricanes as a result of global warming. And, as the dangers rose with the floodlines, the lack of coordinated response dramatized vividly the callous disregard of our elected leaders.

The aftermath from the 1927 flood helped shape the elections of both a US President and a Governor, and ushered in the southern populist politics of Huey Long.

In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a "New Deal" for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be "rebuilt and revitalized" to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.

Long before Katrina, New Orleans was hit by a hurricane of poverty, racism, disinvestment, deindustrialization and corruption. Simply the damage from this pre-Katrina hurricane will take billions to repair.

Now that the money is flowing in, and the world's eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jordan Flaherty is a union organizer and editor of Left Turn Magazine. He can be reached at neworleans (at) leftturn.org. He is not planning on moving out of New Orleans.




Survivor Story:  A Child of New Orleans
By:  Deena Disraelly

The New Orleans Times Picayune headline on Sunday, September 25th, read “City to be almost childless”, but he’s a child of New Orleans.  He says so with a smile and pride, unusual for this otherwise quiet child.  He is twelve, and his family evacuated New Orleans the weekend before Hurricane Katrina made landfall.  They arrived in the town of Seguin and took a room in a roadside motel, which is now home to about 25 families originally from New Orleans.  

They evacuated by car, which meant that, unlike so many others, they could bring some belongings.  Mostly, they brought basic necessities: food, water, clothing.  They brought no toys, no games, no art supplies, none of the trappings of childhood.

He doesn’t act like a child, though.  He is a quiet, young adult, polite, kind, thoughtful.  That was the impression he left on a group of calligraphers from Houston and Seguin.  They baked cookies and collected art supplies and drove to local motels to deliver them.  Then, they walked through the motels, looking for Louisiana license plates.  When they found one, they knocked on the door and offered their packages.

That was how the artist met him.  She knocked on the door to the room his family had rented.  His mother opened the door and greeted the stranger with a smile.  The boy came to the door as well, thanking the artist for the cookies, but asking that she give the art supplies she offered to one of the younger children.  He told her that he had stopped using colored pencils and crayons years ago.  Elaborating, he explained that he used charcoals and oils now for his art.

The artist spoke with the boy for longer than she expected and promised to return with materials he was more accustomed to.  In exchange, he agreed to help the younger children learn to use the materials the artists brought.  He seemed excited at the prospect, pleased to share his gift.

The artists did return a few days later to bring more cookies and to bring this child his own art supplies.  He led a group of the children evacuees out to meet them.  The children were smiling and laughing and had a gift of their own for the artists.

Each artist was presented with a hand-drawn card.  The boy was shy about the offering, but the other children were proud of the cards.  He had made many of the cards, but he made certain every child signed them.

He is a child of New Orleans.  New Orleans, to him, isn’t a place.  Everyone around him, everyone in that small motel, is New Orleans.  He knows that they probably won’t go back, he and his family, at least not for a long time, but he understands.  New Orleans, he’ll tell you, is music and art, family.  The buildings may be underwater, but for this boy and in this boy, New Orleans is alive and well in a small town in Texas.


A Story of Seven Survivors
By Russel Kelson

With crowds churning at evacuation points, many children were accidentally separated from their parents. One of many stories includes a woman who handed her baby up onto a bus, turned around to pick up her suitcase and turned back to find that the bus and her child had left.  However, in the chaos that was New Orleans, one group of survivors stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, a 5-month-old in his arms, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.  The boy, later identified as Deamonte Love, led to safety his brother, Darynael Love, his cousins, Zoria and Tyreek Love, and three neighbors, Gabrielle Janae Alexander, Degahney Carter, and Leewood Moore, Jr.

Rescue workers battled with the tragedy of seven lost children.  Houston medical technician Pat Coveney said, “(It’s) the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life…”  Luckily the children were clean and healthy.  Coveney then put them in the back of an ambulance and drove them from New Orleans.

Later in the evening rescue workers received an encouraging report.  There was a woman in an evacuee shelter in Thibodeaux that was looking for seven missing children.  The elation was quickly suppressed when it became apparent that these seven children were not the children she was looking for.

The children were transferred to a Department of Social Services shelter, and for the next two days the staff did detective work.  Late on the night of Saturday, September 3, they found Deamonte's mother.  Catrina Williams, 26, and the four mothers of the other five children were in a shelter in San Antonio. Williams saw her children's pictures on a website set up by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. By Sunday, a private plane from Angel Flight took the children to Texas.

Williams described what happened the Thursday after the hurricane, saying that her family, trapped in an apartment building on the 3200 block of Third Street in New Orleans, began to feel desperate.  The water was not receding and they had been living without light, food or air conditioning for four days. There was no food for the baby.  She then decided they would evacuate by helicopter. When a helicopter arrived to pick them up they were told to send the children first and that the helicopter would return shortly.  Faced with a difficult decision, Williams' father, Adrian Love, told her to send the children ahead.  His daughter and her friends followed his advice.

"We did what we had to do for our kids, because we love them," Williams said.
Unfortunately, the helicopter did not return. While the children were transported to Baton Rouge, their parents wound up in Texas with no information about their children.
On Sunday afternoon, aid workers said good-by to the seven children   They were loaded on an airplane and flown to their families in San Antonio.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9230423/
WLEX-TV—Lexington, KY