(Untitled)

[sparkleyapple]

I'm watching CNN right now, and ya'll know that little scrolling news thing at the bottom. It just said there is a massive fire on Canal and Bourban streets. I'm having a hard to grasping a fire in the middle of a flood. My head just can't swim around it

Comments

[fixedearth]

But see, New Orleans is a massively old city. Everyone staying, especially if they lived in the older section of town which is the only section above sea level just assumed, my place stood up to Camille and everything else to hit this city since 1700, so it'll probably be ok. And honestly, it would have been, had those levies not broke and the pumps gone. The damage done by Katrina herself was done in Gulfport and Biloxi. New Orleans didn't have really bad damage done in the storm, this has all happened after the storm. The quarter is in that part of town that is above sea level. So there's not a whole lot of massive flooding going on there. But there are still live wires and broken lines chilling about in all that water, which is where the fires are coming from.
And evacuating those people, no. There are people there poorer than anything most people have ever seen. I can't begin to describe the poverty I've seen in New Orleans and the surrounding areas. They make my welfare clients look well off. They have nothing. No money to shore up in a hotel, no car to leave the city in. And the people who live in the swamp, forget it, a lot of them have no contact w/ the outside world, tv's, phones, all that jazz.
The damage done here isn't so much the same as the tsunami death toll, more like it's the tsunami financial toll. Sure there are a lot of poor people down there, but there's also a crap load of rich people and it's one hell of a vacation spot on the Gulf. That area is so densely populated and a lot of it is just gone. It's just good we had warning. The tsnami was the diaster it was because it came from nowhere. Had this come from nowhere it would have been far far far worse.