Dear friends and family,
We’re through with Rita safely. No more tornado warnings and a couple of nights of fairly decent sleep, and I feel about as close to okay as I have in a long time. We were lucky in East Baton Rouge because we didn’t even lose power. All of West Baton Rouge did. We received about 9 inches of rain, but didn’t get any flooding this side of the city.
It’s the poor little towns like Cameron, Creole, Port Arthur, Sulphur, Lake Charles and Holly Beach that bore the brunt and have been left in bad shape. Beaumont in Texas, a much bigger place, got roughed up badly as well. Cameron and Holly Beach are almost completely wiped out. In Cameron and Creole, the sole usable building is the courthouse, which was also the solitary survivor when Hurricane Audrey flattened the town back in 1957.
In New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal held but the Industrial Canal didn’t, pouring up to 10 feet of water back into eastern sections of the city. And water piled up in some areas of the West Bank (which happens to be on the southern side of the Mississippi) inundating areas which Katrina had left almost untouched. Still, Mayor Nagin seems hell bent on rushing people back into the city. What a pile of mistakes they’re going to make doing so.
The self-congratulatory back-patting continues from the Texas, FEMA and White House officials, who appear to regard the evacuation of Galveston and Houston as a huge success. Their collective cluelessness is chilling. Had Rita stayed on her original course straight towards the big Texan cities, the woeful nature of the evacuation would have been exposed to all. As it was, more people died in the evacuation than in the hurricane itself (at least 28 evacuating, compared to 9 deaths attributed directly to the storm).
Many of Lillie’s colleagues remained behind in Houston, having tried to evacuate and then realising, after a mile or two, that it was an impossible task. Some 15,000 people ended up in Houston shelters after having run out of petrol on the highways. Many of those people had gone only a few miles, but used up a full tank of petrol in the process because it took them so many hours to get that far.
Clearly, it’s no easy thing to evacuate 3 million people on the roads. In fact, it may not even be possible given the timetable laid down by most hurricanes. But it is possible to predict the gridlock and to ensure motorists aren’t stranded without fuel, water, medical help or guidance.
The real danger of this botched evacuation is that next time tens of thousands of people won’t evacuate because they can’t bear to face the same nightmare. And next time, the hurricane may not change course.
While we were trying to get the hell out of Houston we surfed the airwaves in order to distract ourselves from the demoralising press of traffic. The most diverting and certainly the most surreal station we found was one which featured a seemingly interminable call-in featuring a UFO “expert”, who at one point expounded in all seriousness for a good 20 minutes about a “one legged snorkel monster”, a being evidently documented through the ages (if you know where to dig up the right sources). He also educated us about a 2nd century particle accelerator. It was extraordinarily eerie to be sitting on the elevated 610 loop roadway, jammed in by traffic on all sides, at 3.30am with this on the radio.
Still, it was not all that much more surreal than listening to another station where city officials were bemoaning the fact that the evacuating Houstonites had failed to mimic the computer models they’d used for disaster planning purposes. Evidently, had we all abided by the models, the evacuation would have been a very smooth-run affair. Instead, people insisted on getting out as soon as they could rather than waiting for their “turn”. Pesky humans.
A couple of images in particular from the past month have stayed with me. One was a TV shot of nursing home residents being loaded into buses on camp stretchers five deep and four across during the Rita evacuation. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to be in those buses for 15-20 hours or more.
The other is this photo from this week’s Time. It’s of a woman who has just been evacuated by helicopter from New Orleans during the post-Katrina flooding. Her anguish – even though she has just been rescued – feels like a fitting summary of the disaster.
Love,
Rose
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