Good God.  It's like Lord of the Flies down there.

(Or Baghdad-on-the-Mississippi.)

From NOLA.com's hurricane blog:

5851. BAPTIST HOSIPTAL EMERGENCY
by Jillybean82, 8/31/05 16:52 ET
Baptist hospital has been taken over with guns. it is horrible. I talked to my friend who is a nurse. she was screaming that is terrible. there are bodies just everywhere. people are stealing all there supplies.

i don't know how to get this information to the news station. This is first hand information.

there is 25ft of water in the hospital. Please please help.

And, of course, Nero is fiddling strumming while Rome burns.  Too bad he's dismantling FEMA and cutting money from hurricane damage prevention efforts and levee construction.

We need good leadership.  Too bad it'll take at least another three years to get here.

ADDENDUM:  Shots fired at Superdome evacuation helicopters:

The scene at the Superdome became increasingly chaotic, with thousands of people rushing from nearby hotels and other buildings, hoping to climb onto the buses taking evacuees from the arena, officials said. Paramedics became increasingly alarmed by the sight of people with guns.

The operation to bus more than 20,000 people to the Houston Astrodome was suspended  “until they gain control of the Superdome,” said Richard Zeuschlag, head of Acadian Ambulance, which was handling the evacuation of sick and injured people from the Superdome.

He said that military would not fly out of the Superdome either because of the gunfire and that the National Guard told him that it was sending 100 military police officers to gain control.
“That’s not enough,” Zeuschlag. “We need a thousand.”

He said medics were calling him and crying for help because they were so scared of people with guns at the Superdome.

Lt. Col. Pete Schneider of the Louisiana National Guard said the military — which was handling the evacuation of the able-bodied from the Superdome — had suspended operations, too, because fires set outside the arena were preventing buses from getting close enough to pick up people.

Zeuschlag said shots were fired at a military helicopter over the Superdome before daybreak, adding that when another evacuation helicopter tried to land at a hospital in the outlying town of Kenner overnight, the pilot reported that 100 people were on the landing pad, and some of them had guns.

“He was frightened and would not land,” Zeuschlag said.

ANOTHER ADDENDUM:  Did craven political maneuvering and Bush budget cuts make this disaster worse than it could have been?

"I'm not saying it wouldn't still be flooded, but I do feel that if it had been totally funded, there would be less flooding than you have," said Michael Parker, a former Republican Mississippi congressman who headed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from October 2001 until March 2002, when he was ousted after publicly criticizing a Bush administration proposal to cut the corps' budget.

That from the Chicago Tribune.  (More on Michael Parker's firing here.)

Bush on GMA this morning:  "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees."

Really?  The first four grafs of the Trib story (emphasis mine):

WASHINGTON -- Despite continuous warnings that a catastrophic hurricane could hit New Orleans, the Bush administration and Congress in recent years have repeatedly denied full funding for hurricane preparation and flood control.

That has delayed construction of levees around the city and stymied an ambitious project to improve drainage in New Orleans' neighborhoods.

For instance, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers requested $27 million for this fiscal year to pay for hurricane-protection projects around Lake Pontchartrain. The Bush administration countered with $3.9 million, and Congress eventually provided $5.7 million, according to figures provided by the office of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.).

Because of the shortfalls, which were caused in part by the rising costs of the war in Iraq, the corps delayed seven contracts that included enlarging the levees, according to corps documents.

Or how about this Houston Chronicle article, from 2001?

New Orleans is sinking.
And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Mississippi River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city perilously close to disaster.
So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country.  The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically,
a terrorist attack on New York City.  The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all.  In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city's less-than-adequate  evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one  of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees  could land in Houston. 

Economically, the toll would be shattering.  Southern Louisiana produces one-third of the country's seafood, one-fifth of its oil and one-quarter of its natural gas. The city's tourism, lifeblood of the French Quarter, would cease to exist. The Big Easy might never recover.

More on the cronyization of FEMA, from a September 2004 article in my hometown's Independent Weekly (again, emphasis mine):

Among emergency specialists, "mitigation"--the measures taken in advance to minimize the damage caused by natural disasters--is a crucial part of the strategy to save lives and cut recovery costs. But since 2001, key federal disaster mitigation programs, developed over many years, have been slashed and tossed aside. FEMA's Project Impact, a model mitigation program created by the Clinton administration, has been canceled outright. Federal funding of post-disaster mitigation efforts designed to protect people and property from the next disaster has been cut in half, and now, communities across the country must compete for pre-disaster mitigation dollars.

As a result, some state and local emergency managers say, it's become more difficult to get the equipment and funds they need to most effectively deal with disasters. In North Carolina, a state regularly damaged by hurricanes and floods, FEMA recently refused the state's request to buy backup generators for emergency support facilities. And the budget cuts have halved the funding for a mitigation program that saved an estimated $8.8 million in recovery costs in three eastern N.C. communities alone after 1999's Hurricane Floyd. In Louisiana, another state vulnerable to hurricanes, requests for flood mitigation funds were rejected by FEMA this summer. . .

In addition, the White House has pushed for privatization of essential government services, including disaster management, and merged FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security, where natural disaster programs are often sidelined by counter-terrorism programs. Along the way, morale at FEMA has plummeted, and many of the agency's most experienced personnel have left for work in other government agencies or private corporations.

In June, Pleasant Mann, a 16-year FEMA veteran who heads the agency's government employee union, wrote members of Congress to warn of the agency's decay. "Over the past three-and-one-half years, FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where funds are being misspent, employee morale has fallen, and our nation's emergency management capability is being eroded," he wrote. "Our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors." . . .

In case Congress hasn't gotten the message, former FEMA director James Lee Witt recently restated it in strong terms. "I am extremely concerned that the ability of our nation to prepare for and respond to disasters has been sharply eroded," he testified at a March 24, 2004, hearing on Capitol Hill. "I hear from emergency managers, local and state leaders, and first responders nearly every day that the FEMA they knew and worked well with has now disappeared. In fact one state emergency manager told me, 'It is like a stake has been driven into the heart of emergency management.'"

It seems as if the chickens are roosting all around us. 

(And as I'm writing this, at 2:45pm, Bush is speaking from the Oval Office.  And he seems way more concerned with oil and gasoline than the thousands of stranded, starving, dying people down in the Gulf.)

YET ANOTHER ADDENDUM:  Yep.  Two paragraphs about saving lives; six paragraphs about oil and gas.

Comments

[Ayelet]

Remember when you sent me an email saying you didn't think it was healthy to be so angry over such a prolonged period of time?

I will need to see a doctor after this latest appalling display from our dear leader.

P.S. I stole some for my site... thanks!