KATRINA

Instapundit has a huge linkfest of charities and ways to help.

At the other end of the Blogosphere, MoveOn.org has a really interesting program to help people get temporary housing HurricaneHousing.org.

Now that I'm blogging again I'll link to this once a day for the next week.

Dead Pelican is a Drudge style screamsheet that seems to be run by locals it has lots of New Orleans Katrina news.

It is Saturday, 5 days since the storm hit and 4 days since the levee broke. An area roughly the size of the island of Great Britain has been clobbered. It includes several good sized cities (Biloxi, Pascagoula, Mobile) and a major US city, New Orleans. Despite being hit with the full force of the storm and suffering far greater initial damage, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida seem to be doing as well as can be expected after being flattened. That is, things suck in those places, but there is no pandemonium. The sheer magnitude of this disaster dwarfs the sort of Hiroshima/ Bhopal/9-11/ style calamity that FEMA and DHS seem to have prepared for. 4 cities in 3 states are flattened and roads, infrastructure and small towns were destroyed inland a hundred miles or more.

The news is (understandably) focusing on the fact that New Orleans has gone to hell in a handbasket.

The horrors we've all seen in New Orleans the last few days are sickening. People sent to the Superdome only to be left there. The city filled with sewage tainted water, and worst of all gangbangers firing on rescuers which stymied the relief efforts.

Last night help finally arrived at the Superdome. Hopefully, the worst is behind us.



Stephen Green, the VodkaPundit, is from the area and posts his observations here.
The Anchoress, who is even farther to the right than me, has a really swell and astute series of observations here .
She is much easier on the New Orleans Mayor and Governor of Louisiana than this Junkyard Blog article would seem to warrant, but points out that both inherited nearly intractable problems.

Note though that the busses in the aforementioned article WERE THE KEY to getting the people out of the Superdome hellhole.

It is also telling that the much maligned POTUS had to personally plead with*the Governor to get her to order an evacuation, an evacuation that stared several hours too late, and was, at any rate, rendered much less effective by the lack of busses....busses that were available but not used.

Note that none of this Monday morning quarterbacking matters a hill of beans to people who are dehydrated, sunburned, hungry and getting sick. This is the biggest natural disaster to hit the USA since....ever. It is bigger than the SanFransisco earthquake of 1906, it is bigger than the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, it dwarfs the Labor Day storm of the 1930s and is bigger than the Chicago fire. It is bigger than Andrew or Camille. It is bigger than Sherman.

It is orders of magnitude bigger than any of those, the worst disasters that have ever hit the country.

This is a disaster that many Americans still can't grasp. The astonishment that this sort of thing is not being dealt with belies an acute lack of understanding of just how BIG a problem this is. The roads are out.
Whole towns are missing.
The power plants are out.
The power lines are down.
The water systems are polluted or nonfunctional.
There is debris , some dangerous, EVERYWHERE.
There is a whole city (New Orleans) full of 10-20 feet of water THAT WILL NOT DRAIN ON ITS OWN!
5 days after the storm, there are still people being found in trees or buried under slides in the mountains.
There are thousands of square miles from the Gulf of Mexico to Tennesee to look for survivors and fix all this in.

And people wonder why it hasn't been kissed and made all better yet.

This is going to take months or years to fix.
...And tough questions have to be asked.

Do we continue to insure people who build on barrier islands?
Should we even rebuild New Orleans, or should it be moved to higher ground.....or should it be moved to the Atchafalaya, where the Mississippi is trying to move to anyway? Or do we make it a scifi-style domed city to preserve it as it sinks into the swamp?

And what, in the meantime of the TREMENDOUS ammounts of commerce that pass through the port of New Orleans? This is absolutely vital to the economy of the central US, completely independent of the refinery question, the Mississippi is about the most important transport net in America handling bulk goods on a par with the interstates.

No there are real problems both short term and long term that need to be solved, in the meantime, as I watch other Coasties do what we all signed up for (I'm undeployable due to the knee). I'm simply going to give blood again next week.


UPDATE: It is important to remember that not all news is bad. The Mighty Michelle has posted a multipart roundup of GOOD news concerning the storm and its aftermath.