lederhosen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lederhosen) wrote2005-09-02 09:17 am
lederhosen) wrote2005-09-02 09:17 am
Entry tags:
Swearing it is, then.
Fucking hell.
Rescue services yesterday began the huge task of evacuating the arena and the rest of the city, although the plan to remove thousands of survivors had to be suspended when shots were reportedly fired at helicopters.
Most of the people waiting to be saved told remarkable stories of fear and desperation but none more than those who had been in the Superdome.
"We pee on the floor. We are like animals," said Taffany Smith, as she cradled her three-week-old son, Terry. In her right hand she carried a half-full bottle of formula provided by rescuers. Baby supplies were running low; one mother said she was given two nappies and told to scrape them off when they got dirty and use them again.
At least two people, including a child, were reportedly raped in the night and at least three people died, including one man who jumped 15 metres to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for.
The hurricane left most of southern Louisiana without power, and the arena was not spared. An emergency generator kept some lights on but quickly failed. The sanitation gave out early as well, and the dome soon filled with the overpowering stench of human waste, made worse by the swampy heat.
"There is faeces on the walls," Bryan Hebert said. "There is faeces all over the place."
And here:
The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted after the facility came under sniper fire, while groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find.
...A police officer working in downtown New Orleans said police were siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles in an effort to keep their squad cars running.
The officer said police are "on their own" for food and water, scrounging up what they can from anybody who is generous enough to give them some -- and that they have no communication whatsoever.
...President Bush, in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," said that their [sic] should be "zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this."
You *fuckwit*. By all means, if they're threatening others or ripping off TVs, jewellery and the like, the National Guard and the cops can shoot on sight as far as I'm concerned. But a lot of the people who've been looting have been doing it for food, water, medical supplies, diapers, because you gouged the levee programs so badly the city flooded, and you gouged National Guard and FEMA so badly that they can't even keep order in the designated emergency shelter or keep people fed. And this is with several days' *notice* of impending disaster. Earthquakes and terrorists don't give that kind of warning. No bloody wonder many of those who couldn't get out of the city preferred to take their chances in their own homes.
Congratulations, George W. You're the first president in living memory to lose a major US city.
Rescue services yesterday began the huge task of evacuating the arena and the rest of the city, although the plan to remove thousands of survivors had to be suspended when shots were reportedly fired at helicopters.
Most of the people waiting to be saved told remarkable stories of fear and desperation but none more than those who had been in the Superdome.
"We pee on the floor. We are like animals," said Taffany Smith, as she cradled her three-week-old son, Terry. In her right hand she carried a half-full bottle of formula provided by rescuers. Baby supplies were running low; one mother said she was given two nappies and told to scrape them off when they got dirty and use them again.
At least two people, including a child, were reportedly raped in the night and at least three people died, including one man who jumped 15 metres to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for.
The hurricane left most of southern Louisiana without power, and the arena was not spared. An emergency generator kept some lights on but quickly failed. The sanitation gave out early as well, and the dome soon filled with the overpowering stench of human waste, made worse by the swampy heat.
"There is faeces on the walls," Bryan Hebert said. "There is faeces all over the place."
And here:
The evacuation of patients from Charity Hospital was halted after the facility came under sniper fire, while groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find.
...A police officer working in downtown New Orleans said police were siphoning gas from abandoned vehicles in an effort to keep their squad cars running.
The officer said police are "on their own" for food and water, scrounging up what they can from anybody who is generous enough to give them some -- and that they have no communication whatsoever.
...President Bush, in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," said that their [sic] should be "zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this."
You *fuckwit*. By all means, if they're threatening others or ripping off TVs, jewellery and the like, the National Guard and the cops can shoot on sight as far as I'm concerned. But a lot of the people who've been looting have been doing it for food, water, medical supplies, diapers, because you gouged the levee programs so badly the city flooded, and you gouged National Guard and FEMA so badly that they can't even keep order in the designated emergency shelter or keep people fed. And this is with several days' *notice* of impending disaster. Earthquakes and terrorists don't give that kind of warning. No bloody wonder many of those who couldn't get out of the city preferred to take their chances in their own homes.
Congratulations, George W. You're the first president in living memory to lose a major US city.
no subject
No, 'gouged' - in the 'forcibly scooped money out of' sense. I think this idiom's more common in US English than it is over here, and I'm a bit of a mongrel in that regard :-)
no subject
no subject
As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:
"That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount. But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.""
Congress may well have played a part in that; I don't know the details. But Iraq and tax cuts were Bush's babies, and while levees could always have done with more, they were *savagely* cut in the last couple of years, because those things had to be paid for.