Everyone I know from UNO is safe

http://hurricanepoetscheckin.blogspot.com/

Bill, Nancy, Kay, Lee Ali and her sister Rosa, Dave Brinks, John Gery and family, Andrei Condrescu

Red cross links- http://www.familylinks.icrc.org/katrina

SUsan Schultz sent this email:
I got this message from Laura Mullen, who teaches at LSU. I don't think
she'll mind my sharing it:

The extent of the catastrophe--and the lack of aid,
the slowness & smallness of the response--is
unimaginable. Friends have been bicycling medical
supplies form the local drugstores to the refugee
shelters! New Orleans is a war zone in a disaster
area...and Bush is anxious to save money for Iraq. At
every contact you have w/ people please try to make
them understand the extent of the betrayal--and ask
them to donate to the Red Cross, please. This is bad
beyond belief.... I was on the plane w/ two smug
Californians who were saying things like "People make
their own situations!" And even "Some people WANT to
be poor!" To my credit I didn't kill them--I must be
mellowing. They were headed to Houston, for vacations
(I can hope refugees hurt them). When they knew where
I was going they never even said "I'm sorry," or "be
safe" or...but maybe being in the South has raised my
expectations: no Southerner would act so utterly
heartless. Please write to your representatives, call
the White House, push for recognition and relief. I
hope this brings Bush down--but people are dying every
day here & change is a distant hope. start now making
sure that you & everyone you know expresses their
dismay and disbelief--and say that this will be
remembered for a long, long time!

Susan M. Schultz
Professor
Department of English
University of Hawai`i-Manoa
Honolulu, HI 96822




This was posted by Stan West in Vol:



Hello Vol,

It's so obvious, even Stevie Wonder can see FEMA, the president, governor
and mayor were not proactive and since the tragedy have not been
professional. Days before the storm hit, the mayor, to his credit, did say
this was "the real thing" and called for evacuation of most areas and
Saturday/Sunday called for New Orleans to evacuate. Prior to that he said
New Orleans was "recommended", which to me translated is "you better get
your ass outta here but I don't want to create a panic...yet!" Where were
the levee engineers BEFORE the flood? Where were the busses BEFORE the
flood? Where were medical supplies, food and water BEFORE the flood? Why was
the approach and execution in Louisiana and Mississippi different than the
approach and execution in Florida?

Again, I believe even Stevie Wonder can see the racial and political
implications here. Others chime in. You want to look at Black
Commentator.com and see the discussion there. I've been talking with an
Atlanta-based commentator named Bruce Dixon, who questions who will be
allowed back in New Orleans who will not and who will be allowed to rebuild
and who will not? New Orleans is 75 percent Black (DC, too). "How can
officials tell the difference between looters and citizens if both are
Black", is a question he raised. The fact I'm a reporter and I'm Black and I
was there makes it impossible for me not to inquire deeper into this
subject. I'm going to take a couple days to review clips, online stuff, and
newspaper reports and do a couple interviews for commentary on the medium
and the message we're getting about looters, loss and life itself. Another
six hours and me and my family would have been unable to get out. My wife, a
child and adolescent psychiatrist, is so rattled, she couldn't treat her
patients yesterday. She sat in the parking lot of her hospital for two hours
crying and then came back home after driving 90 minutes there and 90 minutes
back. And she's a professional. She's also a "professional paranoiid" like
you. I think you'd like Earlene. Anyway, she said "I could feel the pain of
the families of those whose relatives were floating on the streets of New
Orleans! The pain is overwhelming!" I think a large part of it is "survival
guilt," a post-traumatic condition I've reported a lot on from refugee camps
in Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Jordan, Colombia, Panama and the Occupied West
Bank.

Last point, officials tell displaced New Orleans citizens to "go across the
bridge" and when they get there, nothing and no one is there to help. No
food. No water. No housing. No loud speaker. No leadership. This gets to
your point. Is it me or is there a racial response to this tragedy? The
answer is so obvious even Stevie Wonder sees it!
- stan the man

Posted by Mitch-
Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food


Saturday, September 03, 2005

By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette





As the National Guard delivered food to the New Orleans convention center yesterday, American Red Cross officials said that federal emergency management authorities would not allow them to do the same.

Other relief agencies say the area is so damaged and dangerous that they doubted they could conduct mass feeding there now.

"The Homeland Security Department has requested and continues to request that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans," said Renita Hosler, spokeswoman for the Red Cross.

"Right now access is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities. We have been at the table every single day [asking for access]. We cannot get into New Orleans against their orders."

Calls to the Department of Homeland Security and its subagency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were not returned yesterday.

Though frustrated, Hosler understood the reasons. The goal is to move people out of an uninhabitable city, and relief operations might keep them there. Security is so bad that she fears feeding stations might get ransacked.

"It's not about fault and blame right now. The situation is like an hourglass, and we are in the smallest part right now. Everything is trying to get through it," she said. "They're trying to help people get out."

Obstacles in downtown New Orleans have stymied rescuers who got there. The Salvation Army has two of its officers trapped with more than 200 people -- three requiring dialysis -- in its own downtown building. They were alerted by a 30-second plea for food and water before the phone went dead.

On Wednesday, The Salvation Army rented three boats for a rescue operation. They knew the situation was desperate, and that their own people were inside, said Maj. Donna Hood, associate director of development for the Army.

"The boats couldn't get through," she said. Although she doesn't know the details, she believes huge debris and electrical wires made passage impossible.

"We have 51 emergency canteens on the ground in the other affected areas. But where the need is greatest, in downtown New Orleans, there just is no access. That is the problem every relief group is facing," she said.

"America is obviously going to have to rethink disaster relief," said Jim Burton, director of volunteer mobilization for the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Southern Baptists, who work under the Red Cross logo, are one of the largest, best-equipped providers of volunteer disaster relief in the United States. Most hot meals for disaster victims are cooked by Southern Baptist mobile kitchen units. Burton is a veteran of many hurricanes.

"Right now everybody is looking at FEMA and pointing fingers. Frankly, I have to tell you, I'm sympathetic. When in your lifetime have we experienced this? Even though we all do disaster scenario planning, we have to accept the reality that this is an extraordinary event. This is America's tsunami, that struck and ravaged America's most disaster-vulnerable city," he said.

Because New Orleans remains under water, it is different from other cities where Katrina struck harder, but where relief efforts are proceeding normally. Agencies place workers and supplies outside disaster areas before storms, to move in quickly. But there are always delays, Burton said, because nothing is deployed until experts survey the damage and decide where to most effectively put relief services.

The Southern Baptists operate more than 30 mobile kitchens that can each produce 5,000 to 25,000 meals daily, as well as mobile showers and communications trucks equipped with ham radios and cell phones. They are supporting refugee centers in Texas and Tennessee, and doing relief in Mississippi and Alabama. They have placed mobile kitchens around New Orleans to feed people as they come out.

Initially they tried to drive a tractor-trailer kitchen into New Orleans from Tennessee. It was stopped by the Mississippi Highway Patrol because the causeway it would have to cross had been destroyed, Burton said.

His agency has planned for missing bridges. The Southern Baptists' worst-case planning is for reaching Memphis after an earthquake on the New Madrid fault, which in 1812 whiplashed at a stone-crushing 8.1 on the Richter scale. Burton envisions the Mississippi without bridges.

So when state and local Southern Baptists raise money to build a mobile kitchen, he tells them to design it to be hoisted in by helicopter.

After Katrina, he thought he would have to airlift a feeding unit to one isolated town, but a road was cleared, he said. He doubts that dropping a kitchen into the New Orleans' poisoned waters, filled with raw sewage, dead bodies and possible industrial contaminants, would do any good. It made sense to prepare meals outside the area and truck them in or bring people out.

"The most important thing is to get the people out of that environment," he said.

He expects unusual problems to continue, because victims of Katrina flooding will need emergency food for far longer than the usual week or so. He's planning on at least two months.

Like the military, relief work requires a supply chain. Because business management favors just-in-time inventory, rather than stockpiling goods in warehouses, there isn't a huge stock of food to draw on, he said.

"When you go into a local area, it doesn't take long to wipe out the local food inventories," he said.

The Red Cross serves pre-packaged food, including self-heating "HeaterMeals" and snacks, that require no preparation. Yesterday the Red Cross was running evacuation shelters in 16 states, and on Thursday, the last day for which totals were available, served 170,000 meals and snacks in 24 hours.

While emergency shelters typically empty out days after a hurricane or other natural disaster, in Katrina's case they are becoming more crowded, Hosler said. People who had evacuated to the homes of relatives or hotels are moving in because they're out of money or want to be closer to what is left of their homes.




(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416.)

 

You know, I've tried to curb my usual tendency to Bush-bash for at least a few days, but I read stuff like this and I just want to scream. The Red Cross has more disaster experience than the patronage-infested morons at FEMA will ever have, but they're the ones being kept out.

 

And don't even get me started on the racial/class implications of this shit.

 

Mitch