off topic, old topic: use of (crickets) to denote "no one is responding to my post" here.
- tom moody 8-29-2005 8:36 am [add a comment]

Power failed in the Superdome around 5 a.m. Monday, triggering groans from the crowd. Emergency generators kicked in, but the backup power runs only reduced lighting, not the air conditioning.

As the wind pounded the dome early Monday, it could be heard only along the second-floor concourse - not farther into the dome.
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The refugees were not allowed to spread out on the football field, sitting instead in stadium seats in case of flooding. "We don't expect to take any water," Thornton said. "But we wanted them up higher in case."

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Morris Bivens, 53, a painter, came to the dome with his wife, daughter and five granddaughters ranging in age from 1 to 9. "I had to come," he said. "Not for me. I ride these out all the time. But I knew I couldn't save those children in this one if something happened."

"On Sunday outside the Superdome, which holds 70,000 people, security forces searched everyone entering for drugs, weapons and other contraband."

Just because everyone's scared for their lives is no reason to relax violations of their civil liberties!


- tom moody 8-29-2005 7:21 pm [add a comment]

they had some trouble with the membrane covering the dome being skinned back by the wind.

and other interesting entries from this no blogger.
- bill 8-30-2005 1:04 am [add a comment]

how bushs policies doomed new orleans

in addition to :
* denial of global warming
* sending and overextending the national guard to a premptive war in iraq
* diverting levee upgrade funding set up by clinton to homeland security

and where is the 65% of the freaking national guard that isnt in iraque. a little help here with the rescue mission ?


- bill 9-01-2005 12:04 am [add a comment]

the problem with fema and the problem in the white house

Leisurely Bush, Bumbling Feds - Only the Coast Guard looks good after Hurricane Katrina

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But bluntly, however, what government does and does not choose to spend money on for the essential safety of its citizens is a political issue, and a very basic one at that. The administration willfully reduced the budget for the protective levees around New Orleans to a level where even maintaining the current levee height was impossible, in order to shift that Corps money into Iraq.

This president, who flew away on Monday to fundraisers in the west while the hurricane blew away entire towns in coastal Mississippi, is very much his father's son when it comes to the kinds of emergencies that used to call forth immediate White House action before its Bushite captivity. When he was president, his father did not visit Miami after Hurricane Andrew, nor for that matter, did he mind being photographed tooling his golf cart around Kennebunkport while American troops died in the first Iraq war. Now the younger Bush seems determined to show his successors how to holiday through an apocalypse. Consider the visible federal leadership presence in Louisiana on the day that the levee broke, a full day after the hurricane first hit. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the US government department charged with disaster preparation and response, issued the usual promises. Bush, for his part, urged people not to stay where they were, even if their evacuation residence might be the roofless, toilet-clogged Superdome.

Meanwhile, in Baton Rouge, an army colonel seemed to be the most senior federal official at a televised news conference called to announce a Corps of Engineers plan to drop sand bags into the raceway of the broken levee. The proposed drop did not take place because the shortage of helicopters was such that the aircraft had to be diverted to rescue work. Twenty-four hours later, on Wednesday, as Bush met by intercom with his emergency team and considered a return to Washington, as Pentagon and Homeland Security promised relief by the weekend, intensive care patients were dying at Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They had languished for two full days because the overworked coast guard helicopter crews available in New Orleans did not have time to reach them. As for the Superdome refugees, it finally fell to the governor of Texas to announce that they could come to Houston's Astrodome. What other American president, one wonders, would fail to house these people in the decent barracks available at the closed and active military bases scattered throughout the South? The plain fact is that Jimmy Carter did a better job of housing the Mariel refugees from Cuba than Bush has done with the citizens of New Orleans.

whats with the news blackout from inside the dome. on cnn i just heard a first hand report that special medical needs people are dying and not being removed from the convention center. an expired old woman in a wheelchair with a blanket over her head. someones mom some ones grandmother.
- bill 9-01-2005 8:53 pm [add a comment]

on september 12th 2001 emergency vehicles with out of state plates one after another dozens and dozens drove down montgomery street here in new jersey heading down to the waterfront in anticipation of triage support for ground zero. as we know they soon returned home unused. where is that type of help now? ems crews to the convention center. meat wagons to haul off bodies. busses to shuttle people to houston. people are just showing up at the astrodome via bread truck. i assume hitchhiked there. why arnt the governors shouting bloody murder for federal help. where are the aphibious military vehicles ? they have had sine tuesday to get there?
- bill 9-01-2005 9:16 pm [add a comment]

Sorry to keep being so cynical, but NY is minorities, artists and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world, while NO is just minorities and artists, Republican perception wise. Bill Clinton would have been working round the clock to save NO.
- tom moody 9-01-2005 9:29 pm [add a comment]

i went to sleep with cnn still running last night and was just woken up by an audio rerun of mayor nagin being interviewed by local am radio wwl. i found it referred to here :

Mayor Nagin blasted federal relief efforts as woefully inadequate and said the initial slow response to rising floodwaters was the cause of unnecessary deaths over the past four days.

In an interview broadcast on New Orleans radio station WWL-AM last night, an angry Nagin said federal officials, including President Bush, were too slow to respond to the city's worsening problems — both as flooding worsened on Tuesday as a key drainage canal caved in near the city's lakefront and later as thousands of desperate people waited for buses to get out of the collapsing city yesterday.

"They are feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying," Nagin said .