Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Safer, Safe, Not Safe At All...The Diminuendo Effect

Good place to start this evening on the Gulf Coast catastrophe is The American Street - posts there are hitting the failures to plan and deal from many angles.
Then follow Neddie's lead (I can't make Skippy's Challenge threshold myself - I'd probably be in the Dome if I was there), but add that $0.01 so they know where it came from.

[Addendum: Rox has a heart-breaking post from Michael Tisserand at altWeeklies about the flight from NOLA. It reminds me that New Orleans was my grandmother's favorite city, one in which she would have been happy to stay if the climate hadn't been bad for her health (she had to leave it in the 1920's), and if my vagabond Grandad hadn't fixed his eyes West and dragged her along with. She would have adopted it, and it would have adopted her (she was the natural queen of her Women's Clubs, wherever she was, and I am confident she had hundreds of stories she wouldn't have told to a mere boy). But she recalled to me the spectacle of a banana boat burning on Lake Pontchartrain, the wonder of it and of the city around it, and I know she would weep for the loss we are all witnessing now.]

[Addendum 2: Good wrap-up of Bushie responsibility for the scope of the Katrina disaster - and associated catastrophes in the making - from Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.]

[Addendum 3: Lance has a comment post from Houston with an extensive list of agencies, outposts, contact numbers, etc., and what they need (besides funds, of course), so go look at that. This is so clearly going to be a long haul, and it is not just New Orleans, so more info like this from the region will help even more people. Son of one of my best friends graduated from Tulane this last spring - wrote to see if he has any special knowledge from his years there. C'mon, all of us rootless cosmopolites, pitch in!]

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