Churches started assembling comfort kits 500,000 hot meals a day are being prepared by Red Cross disaster volunteers. And I should play for them.”Īround the country, people watched the scene in growing horror, as babies and old people and diabetics and those worn out surviving the storm died on live television for all to see. “These people have nothing,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter. In the wretched Superdome, where several people died before they could get out, a young violinist took out his instrument and played a Bach adagio. As the floodwaters rose, EMS technicians told TIME they were left stranded at the downtown Hampton Inn by panicking cops who jumped into their private cars to flee the city. Some police officers battled the looters others joined them. Hijackers shot the tires of fleeing vehicles, slapped the spares on after the owners escaped and drove the cars away themselves. So nurses hand-pumped the ventilators of dying patients after the generators and then the batteries failed, while outside the hospitals, snipers fired at ambulances, and invading looters with guns demanded that doctors turn over whatever drugs they had. Stripped of safety and comfort, survivors made their choices: greed, mercy, mischief, gallantry, depravity or a surrender to despair. Mother Nature behaved as everyone warned one day she would, but human nature never fails to surprise. The overstatement is forgivable, for at some point suffering becomes immeasurable, reduced to a hopeless search for a place to sleep, or a bottle of water or a body to bury. “This is our tsunami,” said Biloxi, Miss., Mayor A.J. The problem with putting it all into numbers is that they stop speaking clearly once they get too big: an estimated half a million refugees, a million people without power, 30,000 soldiers, up to $100 billion in damage. No matter what the final tally, the treatment of the living, black and poor and old and sick, was a disgrace. “Baghdad under water” is how former Louisiana Senator John Breaux described his beloved city, as state officials told him they feared the death toll could reach as high as 10,000, spread across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. These things happened in Haiti, they said, but not here. Watching helpless New Orleans suffering day by day left people everywhere stunned and angry and in ever greater pain. But it may take even longer than that before the nature of this American tragedy is clear: whether the storm of ’05 is remembered mainly as the worst natural disaster in our history or the worst response to a disaster in our history. It may be weeks before the lights come back on and months before New Orleans is mopped out, a year before the refugees resettle in whatever will come to function as home, even without anything precious from the days before the flood. Is it really possible, after so many commissions and commitments, bureaucracies scrambled and rewired, emergency supplies stockpiled and prepositioned, that when a disaster strikes, the whole newfangled system just seizes up and can’t move? Shattered too was a hope that four years after the greatest man-made disaster in our history, we had got smarter about catastrophe, more nimble and visionary in our ability to respond. But by the time President Bush touched down in the tormented region on Friday, more than just the topography had changed.
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