This is another excellent account:
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2005/09/africa_in_our_m.php
Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina
Jared Taylor
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which blasted the Gulf Coast on
Aug. 29, the entire world has seen images that leave no doubt that
what is repeatedly called the sole remaining superpower can be reduced
to squalor and chaos nearly as gruesome as anything found in the Third
World. The weather=97a Category 4 hurricane=97certainly had something to
do with it, but the most serious damage was done not by nature but by
man.
Much has been and will be written about why the levees that are
supposed to keep the water out of below-sea-level New Orleans failed.
There will be bitter recrimination about whether the federal rescue
effort could have been launched sooner. Commissions will be set up to
ask questions and lessons will no doubt be learned. But there was
another human failing that was far more ominous and intractable. No
commissions will be set up to study it, and official America will
refuse to learn any lessons from it. In the orgy of finger-pointing
that is coming, it will be all but forgotten. That human failing=97
vastly more significant than the ones the commissions will investigate=97
is the barbaric behavior of the people of New Orleans.
New Orleans is 67 percent black, and about half the blacks are poor.
Of the city=92s 480,000 people, all but an estimated 80 to 100 thousand
left before the hurricane struck. This meant that aside from patients
in hospitals and eccentrics in the French Quarter, most of the people
who stayed behind were not just blacks, but lower-class blacks without
the means or foresight to leave.
Looters make off with a trunk full of beer.
Katrina hit on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29. Immediately after the
winds died down, the first reaction was one of relief. The hurricane
had jogged east, and the city was battered but still standing. Then
the levees broke=97apparently some time on Tuesday=97and the city began to
flood. Before long, 80 percent of New Orleans was under as much as 20
feet of water, and what had been only a storm became a disaster.
The city=92s 70,000-seat football stadium, known as the Superdome, had
been officially designated as a public shelter before the hurricane,
and several thousand people were already there the night before the
storm. It had some food supplies, cots, and medical supplies. But when
the waters began to rise, people poured in from all directions,
swelling its numbers to an estimated 25,000.
People came because their houses were under water, but also because
New Orleans very quickly collapsed in banditry. Looting began even
while the storm was still blowing. At first there was sympathetic
clucking about the need for food and medicine, but news clips of
blacks wading happily through waist-deep water with television sets
over their heads dispelled that view.
The day after the hurricane, a re****ter caught the atmosphere of high-
spirited chaos at a Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. People were
grabbing things as quickly as they could, sma****ng open jewelry
cabinets and scooping up double-handfuls. One man packed his van so
full of electronic equipment he could not close the rear doors. A
teenage girl passed out, face down, and people stepped on her. A man
stopped to roll her onto her back, and she vomited pink liquid. =93This
is f***ed up,=94 he said, and rolled her back on her stomach. An NBC
correspondent filmed black, uniformed police strolling through the
aisles, filling shopping carts.
One of the few whites at the Convention Center,
with her 11-month-old baby boy.
At one store, a police officer broke the glass on the DVD case so
civilians would not cut themselves trying to break it, but one man was
ungrateful. =93The police got all the best stuff,=94 he said. =93They=92re
crookeder than us.=94 One woman stocking up on makeup was glad to see
the officers. =93It must be legal,=94 she said. =93The police are here
taking stuff, too.=94
Violence of all kinds quickly spread through the paralyzed city, where
robbery, rape and even murder became routine. There were still
thousands of people trapped on rooftops and in attics, but on Sept. 1,
Mayor Ray Nagin called the entire police force off of rescue work and
ordered it to secure the city. The response form the force? An
estimated 200 officers just walked off the job. =93They indicated that
they had lost everything and didn=92t feel that it was worth them going
back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,=94 explained
Henry Whitehorn, chief of the Louisiana State Police. Many disappeared
without a word. Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans
also said his men were deserting. =93They want to be with their
families,=94 he said. =93Well, I want to be with my family too, but you
don=92t quit in the middle of a crisis.=94
Two police officers, including the department=92s official spokesman
Paul Accardo committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head. The
London Times estimated that one in five officers refused to work, and
some of those who stayed in uniform were useless. When Debbie Durso, a
tourist from Wa****ngton, Michigan, asked a policeman for help he told
her =93Go to hell=97it=92s every man for himself.=94
The collapse of security made rescue and relief nearly impossible. =93No
one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian
police force in New Orleans,=94 explained Lieutenant General Steven Blum
of the National Guard. He said the city was operating on only one
third of its pre-storm strength of 1,500 officers, and that the guard
had to switch from rescue to law enforcement: =93And that=92s when we
started flowing military police into the theater.=94
New Orleans has had only black mayors since 1978, and has spent
decades making the police force as black as possible. It established a
city-residency requirement for officers to keep suburban whites from
applying for jobs, and lowered recruitment standards so blacks could
pass them. Katrina blew away any pretence that the force was
competent.
Corpse left in front of
the Convention Center.
(On September 5, exactly a week after the hurricane, Mayor Ray Nagin
offered to pay for the entire police force, firefighters, and city
emergency workers to go on five-day vacations=97with their families=97to
Las Vegas or some other destination. He said there were enough
National Guard in the city to maintain order, and that his men =93have
been through a lot.=94 He brushed off suggestions that this was
dereliction of duty. He even asked the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA) to pay for the vacations, but FEMA refused. =93We haven=92t
turned over control of the city,=94 a city spokesman explained. =93We=92re
going to leave a skeleton force=97about 20 percent of the department=97for
leader****p and liaison with the troops while we get some rest.=94)
New Orleans has a high crime rate at the best of times=97it is usually
in top contention for the American city with the highest murder rate=97
and looted and stolen firearms spilled into the street. Some blacks
fired on any symbol of authority, blazing away at rescue helicopters
and Coast Guard vessels. Several days after the hurricane, with
desperate people still waving for help from rooftops, FEMA said
conditions were too dangerous to attempt rescues.
On Wednesday, along one stretch of Highway 10, hundreds of volunteer
firefighters, auxiliary coastguards and citizens with small boats were
anxious to reach people, but could not set out because of sniper fire.
=93We are trying to do our job here but we can=92t if they are shooting at
us,=94 explained Major Joey Broussard of the Louisiana State Fisheries
and Wildlife Division. =93We don=92t know who and we don=92t know why, but
we don=92t want to get in a situation of having to return fire out
there,=94 he said.
Perhaps the most chilling accounts were from hospitals, where staff
desperately tried to move patients up stairs as the water rose, while
blacks invaded and looted the floors below. Most hospitals had
emergency generators, but these began to fail or run out of fuel. Two
days after the hurricane, the city had no running water, and as food
ran out, doctors and nurses gave themselves intravenous feedings to
keep going.
Just outside New Orleans, gunmen held up a supply truck carrying food,
water, and medical supplies that were on their way to a 203-bed
hospital. Patients in hospitals all across the city eventually had to
be taken out, but rescuers met resistance. Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri
Ben-Iesan told re****ters at an emergency headquarters: =93Hospitals are
trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are re****ts that as
the helicopters come in people are shooting at them, saying, =91You
better come get my family.=92 =94 An effort to evacuate patients and staff
from Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans was stopped by sniper
fire. Other hospitals re****ted gangs of looters attacking and
overturning ambulances.
Chris Lawrence, a re****ter with CNN, filed a re****t from the roof of a
police station: =93Right now it=92s the only safe place to be in the city.
We were on the street earlier but the police said under no
cir***stances would you be safe on the street. They said anybody
walking in the streets of New Orleans is basically taking their life
in their hands=85 . They directed some of the young women to get off the
street immediately.=94
What may have been the most shocking headline of the entire crisis was
in the September 2 issue of Army Times: =93Troops Begin Combat
Operations in New Orleans.=94 The article was about the Louisiana
National Guard massing near the Superdome in preparation for a
citywide security mission. =93This place is going to look like Little
Somalia,=94 Brig. Gen. Gary Jones explained. =93We=92re going to go out
and
take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city
under control.=94 The amphibious assault ****p Bataan was in the area,
but kept its helicopters on board after pilots re****ted sniper fire.
Many soldiers came under gunfire from civilians. =93I never thought that
as a National Guardsman I would be shot at by other Americans,=94 said
Philip Baccus of the 527th Engineer Battalion. =93And I never thought
I=92d have to carry a rifle when on a hurricane relief mission. This is
a disgrace.=94 Cliff Ferguson of the same battalion added: =93You have to
think about whether it is worth risking your neck for someone who will
turn around and shoot at you. We didn=92t come here to fight a war. We
came here to help.=94
Michael Brown, head of FEMA, said: =93We are working under conditions of
urban warfare.=94 Lieutenant-General Steven Blum, of the National Guard,
said the 7,000 guardsmen arriving in Louisiana would be dedicated to
restoring order to New Orleans. He said half of them had just returned
from overseas assignments and were =93highly proficient in the use of
lethal force.=94 He promised to deal with thugs =93in a quick and
efficient manner.=94
Shoot-to-kill orders were supposed to have gone out, and Louisiana
Gov. Kathleen Blanco boasted that battle-hardened veterans would put
down the violence in no time. However, there were few accounts of
soldiers firing their weapons. The London Times re****ted that a New
Orleans policeman explained through tears that he had seen bodies
riddled with bullets, and one man with the top of his head shot off.
He said looters were armed with stolen AK-47 rifles, and that the
police were outgunned just like in Somalia. =93It=92s a war-zone, and
they=92re [the federal government] not treating it like one,=94 he said.
Hysterical woman in front of the Convention Center.
We will never know the full extent of the mayhem blacks loosed on
their own city. Many victims will not be found for weeks or even
months, rotted beyond recognition, their killers never found. Drowned
or murdered, the bloated, stinking bodies that turn up by the hundreds
will look much the same. In their haste to get cadavers off the
streets, the authorities may not worry much about cause of death.
=46rom Hurricane to Jungle
In the two main refugee centers, however=97the Superdome and the
Convention Center=97too many people witnessed the degeneracy for it to
be ignored. The first refugees had arrived at the Superdome the day
before the hurricane, on Sunday, August 28. The last finally left the
stadium on Saturday, Sept. 3, so some people may have spent nearly a
week in what, after the toilets began to overflow, became known as the
Sewerdome.
Preparation for refugees was pitifully inadequate. By day, as many as
25,000 people sweltered in temperatures that rose into the 100s.
Whatever order had been established soon melted away, and the stadium
reverted to the jungle. Young men robbed and raped with impunity.
Occasional gunshots panicked the crowd. At least one man committed
suicide by sailing off a high deck and splattering onto the playing
field. Bodies of the murdered, and of infants and the elderly who died
of heat exhaustion began to ac***ulate. Six babies were born in the
stadium. Charles Womack, a 30-year-old roofer, said he saw one man
beaten to death, and was, himself beaten with a pipe. Crack addicts=97
who had brought their most valuable possession with them=97smoked openly
and fought over drugs.
A group of about 30 British students were among the very small number
of whites in the stadium, where they spent four harrowing days. Jamie
Trout, 22, an economics major, wrote that the scene =93was like
something out of Lord of the Flies,=94 with =93people shouting racial
abuse about us being white.=94 One night, word came that the power was
failing, and that there was only ten minutes=92 worth of gas for the
generators. Zoe Smith, 21, from Hull, said they all feared for their
lives: =93All us girls sat in the middle while the boys sat on the
outside, with chairs as protection,=94 she said. =93We were absolutely
terrified, the situation had descended into chaos, people were very
hostile and the living conditions were horrendous.=94 She said that even
during the day, =93when we offered to help with the cleaning, the locals
gave us abuse.=94
Mr. Trout said the National Guard finally recognized how dangerous the
threat was from blacks, and moved the British under guard to the
basketball area, which was safer. =93The army warned us to keep our bags
close to us and to grip them tight,=94 he said, as they were escorted
out. Twenty-year-old Jane Wheeldon credited one man in particular,
Sgt. Garland Ogden, with getting the Britons safely out. =93He went
against a lot of rules to get us moved,=94 she said.
Looters with bags of clothing.
Australian tourists stuck in the Superdome had the same experience.
Bud Hopes, a 32-year-old man from Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, took
control and may have saved many lives. As the stadium reverted to
anarchy he realized whites were in danger, and gathered tourists
together for safety. =93There were 65 of us altogether so we were able
to look after each other, especially the girls who were being grabbed
and threatened,=94 said Mr. Hopes. They organized escorts for women who
had to go to the toilet or for food, and set up a roster of men to
stand guard while others slept. =93We sat through the night just
watching each other, not knowing if we would be alive in the morning,=94
Mr. Hopes said. =93Ninety-eight percent of the people around the world
are good,=94 he said; =93in that place 98 per cent of the people were
bad.=94
John McNeil of Coorparoo in Brisbane tells what happened to their
group, too, heard the lights were about to go out: =93I looked at Bud
[Hopes] and said, =91That will be the end of us.=92 The gangs had already
eyed us off. If the lights had gone out we would have been in deep
trouble. We were sitting there praying for a miracle and the lights
stayed on.=94 Mr. Hopes said the Australians owed their lives to a
National Guardsman who broke the rules and got whites out to a medical
center past seething crowds of blacks.
Peter McNeil of Brisbane told the Australian AP that his son John was
one of the 65 who managed to get out. The blacks were re****tedly so
hostile =93they would stab you as soon as look at you.=94 =93He=92s never
be=
en
so scared in his life,=94 explained Mr. McNeil. =93He just said they had
to get out of the dark. Otherwise, another night, he said, they would
have been gone.=94 No American newspaper wrote about what these white
tourists had gone through.
When guardsmen began to show up in force on Sept. 1 and take control,
some blacks met them with cheers, but others shouted obscenities at
them. Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air National Guard said 20,000
people were in the dome when the evacuation began, but thousands more
appeared from surrounding areas when word got out that there were
buses leaving town. Soldiers held their M-16s and grenade-launchers at
the ready, and kept a sharp eye out for snipers.
That same day, when it was time to board buses for Houston, soldiers
had trouble controlling the crowd. People at the back of the mob
crushed the people in front against barricades the soldiers put up to
contain the crowd. Many people continued to yell obscenities whenever
they saw a patrol go by. Some were afraid of losing their place in
line and defecated where they stood. The Army Times re****ted that Sgt.
1st Class Ron Dixon of the Oklahoma National Guard, who had recently
come home from Afghanistan, said he said he was struck by the fact
Afghanis wanted to help themselves, but that the people of New Orleans
only wanted others to help them.
Refugees at the Superdome.
By the evening of Sept. 3, the Superdome was finally evacuated, but
the state-of-the-art stadium was a reeking cavern of filth, human
waste, and an unknown number of corpses. It, too, had been looted of
everything not bolted down. Janice Singleton was working at the
stadium when the storm hit. She said she was robbed of everything she
had, including her shoes. As for the building: =93They tore that dome
apart,=94 she said sadly. =93They tore it down. They taking everything out
of there they can take.=94
If anything, conditions were worse at the Convention Center. Although
on high ground not far from the stadium, it had not been designated as
a shelter. It was, however, beyond reach of the high water, and soon
some 20,000 people were huddled in its cavernous halls. There were no
supplies or staff, and for several days neither FEMA nor the National
Guard seems to have known anyone was there.
Armed gangs took control, and occasional gunshots caused panic. There
was no power, and at night the center was plunged into complete
darkness. Degeneracy struck almost immediately, with rapes, robbery,
and murder. Terrible shrieking tore through the night, but no one
could see or dared to move. When Police Chief Eddie Compass heard what
was happening, he sent a squad of 88 officers to investigate. They
were overwhelmed by superior forces and retreated, leaving thousands
to the mercy of criminals.
It was not until Sept. 2=97four days after the hurricane=97that a force of
1,000 National Guardsmen finally took over from the armed gangs. =93Had
we gone in with a lesser force we may have been challenged, innocents
may have been caught in a fight between the guard and military police
and those who did not want to be processed or apprehended,=94 explained
Gen. Blum.
The evacuation begins.
Sitting with her daughter and other relatives, Trolkyn Joseph, 37,
told a re****ter that men had wandered the center at night raping and
murdering children. She said she found a dead 14-year old girl at 5
a.m. on Friday morning, four hours after the girl went missing. =93She
was raped for four hours until she was dead,=94 Miss Joseph said through
tears. =93Another child, a seven-year old boy, was found raped and
murdered in the kitchen freezer last night.=94
Africa Brumfield, 32, explained that women were in particular fear:
=93There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without
men. They are raping them and slitting their throats.=94 Donald
Anderson, 43, was at the convention center with his wife who was six
months pregnant: =93We circled the chairs like wagons because at night
there are stampedes,=94 he said. =93We had to survive.=94
The very few whites in the crowd were terrified. Eighty-year-old Selma
Valenti, who was with her husband, said blacks threatened to kill them
on Thursday, Sept. 1. =93They hated us. Four young black men told us the
buses were going to come last night and pick up the elderly so they
were going to kill us,=94 she said, sobbing. Presumably, the blacks
wanted to take their places on the buses.
The center was not entirely without a form of rough justice. A
National Guardsman re****ted that a man who had raped and killed a
young girl in the bathroom was caught by the crowd=97which beat him to
death.
Utility repair trucks on their way to New Orleans.
At one time there were as many as seven or eight corpses in front of
the center, some of them with blood streaming from bullet wounds.
Inside, there was an emergency morgue, but a National Guardsman
refused to let a Reuters photographer in to take pictures. =93We=92re not
letting anyone in there anymore,=94 he said. =93If you want to take
pictures of dead bodies, go to Iraq.=94 By Saturday, Sept. 3, the center
was mostly cleared of the living. Refugees pulled ****rts over their
noses trying to block out the smell as they walked past rotting
bodies.
By the weekend, there were an estimated 50,000 soldiers and federal
rescue workers in the city, but even the massive presence did not
bring calm. On Sunday, Sept. 4, contractors working for the US Army
Corps of Engineers came under fire. Their police escort returned fire,
in what became a running gun battle. Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley
said police killed four of the attackers.
By Saturday, police had set up a tem****ary booking and detention
center at the New Orleans train station. State Attorney General
Charles Foti said there were plans for a tem****ary court system, but
no one knew how they were going to assemble juries or call witnesses.
The grim business began of combing the drowning city for corpses and
the remaining survivors.
Reactions
The world reacted with astonishment to sights it never expected to see
in the United States. =93Anarchy in the USA,=94 read the headline in
Britain=92s best-selling newspaper, The Sun. =93Apocalypse Now,=94 said
Handelsblatt in Germany. Mario de Carvalho, a veteran ****tuguese
cameraman, who has covered the world=92s trouble spots, said he saw the
bodies of babies and old people along the highways leading out of New
Orleans. =93It=92s a chaotic situation. It=92s terrible. It=92s a
situation =
we
generally see in other countries, in the Third World,=94 he said.
The comparison would have been insulting to some Third-Worlders. =93I am
absolutely disgusted,=94 said Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, of the looters. The
Sri Lanka native added: =93After the tsunami our people, even the ones
who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering. Not
a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this
happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of
the world=92s population is.=94
In the United States, the stark contrast between endless scenes of
appalling behavior by blacks and rescue personnel who were almost all
white was greeted with the standard foolishness. Some people accused
the =93biased=94 media of suppressing footage of rampaging whites and
heroic black helicopter pilots.
Most blacks made excuses for looters. =93Desperate people do desperate
things,=94 said U.S. Rep. Diane Watson of California. Rep. Jesse Jackson
Jr., Democrat from Illinois, said we must not judge harshly: =93Who are
we to say what law and order should be in this unspeakable
environment?=94 Rep. Melvin Watt, North Carolina Democrat and chairman
of the Congressional Black Caucus, was perhaps the greatest ass of
all: =93Whatever is being taken could not be used by anyone else
anyway,=94 he said.
Many blacks took it for granted that federal relief was slow because
the victims were black. Rep. Elijah ***mings said =93poverty, age and
skin color=94 determined who lived and who died. Hilary Shelton,
director of the NAACP=92s Wa****ngton bureau, blasted =93disparate
treatment=94 of Katrina victims. =93Many black people feel that their
race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a
factor in the response,=94 explained Jesse Jackson, Sr. He said the
rubbish outside the Convention Center made the place look =93like the
hull of a slave ****p.=94 Black activist and reparations-booster Randall
Robinson said the relief effort was the =93defining watershed moment in
America=92s racial history.=94 He said he had =93finally come to see my
country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.=94
U.S. Rep. Carolyn Kilpatrick said she was =93ashamed of America and =85 of
our government.=94 The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, shouted and wept
on local radio, demanding of federal officials: =93Get off your *****,
and let=92s do something,=94 (and gave city workers a vacation when the
feds arrived). There was an undercurrent of fury at a meeting of black
leaders in Detroit. One audience member wanted to know whether the
slow federal response was =93black genocide.=94 Another shouted,
=93African
Americans built this nation. Descendants of slaves are being allowed
to die.=94
One black man, observing the chaos from abroad, took a different view.
Leighton Levy wrote in the Sept. 2 Jamaica Star: =93I am beginning to
believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are
cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create
mayhem.=94 He wanted to know why there was no footage of white looters:
=93Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and
robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting
to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks?=94
Most blacks and many whites fell into the usual assumptions about
omnipotent white government and helpless Negroes. If black people were
suffering it was because whites had not done enough for them. It did
not occur to them that it was the responsibility of New Orleans and
the state of Louisiana=97not the federal government=97to prepare for
hurricanes. Before the storm hit, Mayor Nagin issued a mandatory
evacuation only under pressure from the Bush administration. The mayor
then did nothing to enforce the order, leaving hundreds of city buses
and school buses to drown rather than use them to offer trans****tation
to people without cars.
New Orleans school buses that could have been used for evacuation.
Something of the mood of black New Orleans was caught by Fox News film
crews as late as Sunday, Sept. 4. White volunteers were trying to
persuade a black woman and her small children to leave her flooded
house. =93You=92ve got to get out,=94 they explained. =93The water isn=92t
g=
oing
away.=94 A black man at the top of a multi-story building told a
helicopter crew he didn=92t need to leave. All he needed was some
supplies.
These people could not understand something that was obvious to the
whole world: New Orleans had no electricity, no plumbing, no
trans****t, and no food. Blacks refused to leave their flooded homes,
even though to stay meant near-certain death.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff noted how crazy it was to
stay in the wreckage. =93That is not a reasonable alternative,=94 he said.
=93We are not going to be able to have people sitting in houses in the
city of New Orleans for weeks and months while we de-water and clean
this city.=94
FEMA re****ted that it had pulled three Carnival Cruise Lines ****ps
from commercial duty to shelter the blacks of New Orleans. Maybe the
chance of berth on the Ecstasy, the Sensation or the Holiday would be
enough to drag them out of the muck.
Lessons
Ninety-nine percent of the white people left New Orleans when the
evacuation order went out. Some 80,000 blacks could not or would not
leave. Whites did not =93leave them behind,=94 as the editorial-writers
keep telling us. No one could have gotten some of them to leave, but
if it was anyone=92s job to give them the option, it was that of the
black-run city government. Of the blacks who stayed, probably only a
minority committed crimes, but they were enough to turn the city into
a hell hole. Some did unspeakable things: loot hospitals, fire on
rescue teams, destroy ambulances. No amount of excuse-making and
finger-pointing can paper over degeneracy like that. Black people=97and
only black people=97did these things.
Military helicopter drops supplies.
The Superdome and the Convention Center were certainly unpleasant
places to spend three or four days, but 50,000 whites would have
behaved completely differently. They would have established rules,
organized supplies, cared for the sick and dying. They would have
organized games for children. The papers would be full of stories of
selflessness and community spirit.
Natural disasters usually bring out the best in people. They help
neighbors and strangers alike. For blacks=97at least the lower-class
blacks of New Orleans=97disaster was an excuse to loot, rob, rape and
kill.
Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of
Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks
and heartless whites, but pandering of this kind fools fewer and fewer
people. Many whites will realize=97some for the first time=97that we have
Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses,
cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our
shores.
To be sure, the story of Hurricane Katrina does have a moral for
anyone not deliberately blind. The races are different. Blacks and
whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own
devices, Western Civilization=97any kind of civilization=97disappears. And
in a crisis, civilization disappears overnight.
On Jun 5, 1:33 pm, EMBALMER <Embal...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> This is for you since your knowledge of Katrina events, by your own
> admission, are not from actually being there. You don't have to swallow
> this whole, or at all, but it's worth reading word-for-word just for the
> reputable references and to compare with other media materials and
> first-person accounts. I am not the author. ~~Embalmer~~
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> Why New Orleans Flooded
>
> Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
> Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2005
>
> A steel barge that came cra****ng into one of the levee walls, and not
> the failure of that levee to hold back an immense tidal wave, was to
> blame for much of the flooding that drowned parts of New Orleans.
>
> Lying an average of seven feet below sea level, surrounded by the waters
> of Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi River and Lake Borgne, which
> separates Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico, and protected by a
> series of sinking levees, the city of New Orleans was a disaster waiting
> to happen.
>
> It happened on August 29, 2005, just as the city was breathing a
> collective sigh of relief that hurricane Katrina had not been as bad as
> predicted.
>
> It turned out to be far worse, not because of the destructive winds of a
> Category Four hurricane, but because three massive walls of water
> spurred by those winds inundated many parts of the city after the winds
> moved away.
>
> As politicians play the blame game, many facts about the roots of the
> disaster have either been overlooked or deliberately ignored because
> they are inconvenient to those seeking to put the onus for the tragedy
> upon their political targets. One of them was the story behind the flood
> that turned a major disaster into a catastrophe of immense magnitude.
>
> In a fact-filled retrospective that told the full story, the Wall Street
> Journal explained in great detail just what happened when much of the
> Big Easy became an adjunct of Lake Ponchartrain.
>
> The Journal told the truth, but the truth hurts when you are seeking to
> put your spin on the assignment of blame. So the remainder of the media
> simply ignored a story the American people are entitled to know.
>
> Facts Ignored and Not Investigated
>
> Among the facts exposed of the Journal which the mainstream media has
> studiously ignored:
>
> # In two cases, storm-driven water, far higher than the levees were
> designed to hold back (up to 15 feet of tidal surge), overwhelmed them
> and went pouring down on parts of the city. According to the Journal,
> the waves inundated the mostly working-class eastern districts, home to
> 160,000 people. In some places, the water rose as fast as a foot per
> minute, survivors told the Journal. These levees did not break.
>
> According to engineers, scientists, local officials and the accounts of
> nearly 90 survivors of Katrina interviewed by the Journal, the first of
> the three waves swept from the north out of Lake Pontchartrain.
>
> The wave of undetermined height poured over 15-foot-high levees along
> the Industrial Canal, which were several feet lower than others in the
> central areas of the city. Wrote the Journal: "About the same time, a
> similar wave exploded without warning across Lake Borgne, which
> separates Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. It filled the
> lake, engulfed its surrounding marshes, raced over levees and poured
> into eastern New Orleans."
>
> # Another huge wave came across Lake Pontchartrain in the north. It sent
> a steel barge ramming through the Industrial Canal, a major ****pping
> artery that cuts north to south through the city, possibly creating a
> breach that grew to 500 feet, letting water pour into nearby
> neighborhoods of the city's Ninth Ward.
>
> The barge's remains were found lying on the bottom of the gap. An early
> eyewitness re****ted seeing the barge smash through the levee. His re****t
> was never followed up by the media.
>
> Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental
> Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that break was
> particularly surprising because one of the levee breaks was "along a
> section that was just upgraded."
>
> "It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland told the New York Times.
> "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."
>
> # Vital repairs for which a whopping $600 million had been appropriated
> by the federal government were stopped after residents of the Ninth Ward
> complained about the noise created by the repair project and sued to
> halt it.
>
> The Industrial Canal, now operated and maintained mostly by the federal
> government, which the Journal described as "the area's defining presence
> since it was built in the 1920s," has been damaged by the passage of
> time and heavy use.
>
> Barges and ****ps were routinely delayed because of growing traffic
> levels and the lock was "literally falling apart at the hinges" in 1998,
> according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers re****t, which called it an
> "antique" and recommended replacing it.
>
> The lock replacement project didn't get very far because Ninth Ward
> residents complained about noise and launched a legal fight that bogged
> down the work.
>
> Levees Not Tall Enough
>
> The levees along the Industrial Canal's eastern side are supposed to
> stand at a height of 15 feet, according to the New Orleans district of
> the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
>
> Joseph Suhayda, a retired Louisiana State University coastal
> oceanographer, who told the Journal he suspects the levees aren't
> actually that tall, partly due to sinking of the land beneath them. Mr.
> Suhayda now consults for a maker of flood-protection barriers. If he's
> right, that would mean the levees weren't high enough to handle even a
> Category 2 or 3 hurricane. Katrina was nearly a Category 5.
>
> The Corps of Engineers concedes some of its levees in the area "have
> settled and need to be raised to provide" the level of protection for
> which they were designed, according to a fact sheet on the Corps's Web
> site dated May 23, 2005. But federal budget shortfalls in fiscal 2005
> and 2006 "will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs."
> Even had sufficient funds been available the work could not have been
> completed in time to prevent the Katrina floods.
>
> Designed for the Mississippi, Not the Gulf
>
> In an earlier September 2 story the Journal noted that in Louisiana,
> coastal wetlands provide some shelter from surging seawater, but more
> than one million acres of coastal wetlands have been lost since 1930 due
> to development and construction of levees and canals. For every square
> mile of wetland lost, storm surges rise by one foot.
>
> "Moreover, the levees in New Orleans were built to keep the city from
> being flooded by the Mississippi, but instead caused it to fall below
> sea level. Now the Gulf of Mexico has moved into the city," says the
> Journal.
>
> As the hurricane rolled into New Orleans, scores of boats broke free or
> sank. In the Industrial Canal, the gush of water broke a barge from its
> moorings. It isn't known whose barge it was. The huge steel hull became
> a water-borne missile. It hurtled into the canal's eastern flood wall
> just north of the major street passing through the Lower Ninth Ward,
> leading officials to theorize that the errant barge triggered the
> 500-foot breach. Water poured into the neighborhood.
>
> When the storm was over, the barge was resting inside the hole. "Based
> on what I know and what I saw, the Lower Ninth Ward, Chalmette, St.
> Bernard, their flooding was instantaneous," said Col. Rich Wagenaar of
> the Army Corps.
>
> It didn't help that the Mississippi River, which runs along the southern
> border of these neighborhoods, rose 11 feet between Sunday and Monday
> mornings. Coastal experts say that could have worsened flooding by
> limiting the water's escape route.
>
> As the water roaring out of the Industrial Canal turned the streets of
> eastern New Orleans into rivers, the same areas were hit from the other
> side by the storm surge coming off Lake Borgne. Engineers say the
> estimated 20-foot surge also appeared to overflow levees just north of
> St. Bernard Parish. Shrimp boats were dumped in a marshy section between
> Lake Borgne and the city.
>
> Responsibilities Unfulfilled
>
> The city of New Orleans issued a "Comprehensive Emergency Management
> Plan" for hurricanes well before Katrina arrived. The city accepted the
> responsibility for issuing a warning, ordering and managing evacuation,
> arranging for buses for those without any other trans****tation, setting
> up and maintaining shelters, and other critical duties.
>
> As one editorialist wrote, "Given the corruption in municipal agencies -
> one not necessarily cynical Louisiana politician (Billy Tauzin) said
> some time ago that "Half of Louisiana is under water and the other half
> is under indictment" - it was inevitable that a picture of
> responsibilities unfulfilled would emerge after a storm like Katrina."
>
> Among the city's self-proclaimed responsibilities was the job of the
> mayor to order an evacuation 48 hours before the hurricane came ashore,
> not 24, hours, as Mayor Nagin did; the New Orleans Regional Transit
> Authority was meant to "position supervisors and dispatch evacuation
> buses" to evacuate at least some of the "100,000 citizens of New Orleans
> [who] do not have means of personal trans****tation," but it did not, and
> the flood claimed the buses.
>
> Moreover, the city was responsible for establi****ng shelters
> co-ordinated with "food and supply distribution sites" which the
> American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and others were to provision, but
> the city did not.
>
> Both agencies provided the supplies but as Fox cable News correspondent
> Major Garret revealed, they were barred by local authorities from
> delivering them to those stranded in the city at places such as the
> Superdome who most needed them in the immediate aftermath of the storm.
>
> As the Journal re****ted on September 2, city officials appear to have
> been well aware of their responsibilities. As late Aug. 1, officials
> close to the planning confirmed to the New Orleans ...
>
> read more =BB
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