Katrina

I used to love violent weather.
Back when I was single, you could fit all my possessions into the trunk of a taxicab. I did so, more than once. A few of these had sentimental value, but there was nothing I couldn't, strictly speaking, abandon in the blink of a hurricane's eye. So I would get tremendously excited whenever the weather threatened to...well, threaten. And if somebody else was getting the nasty weather, I'd hover around the Weather Network, picking up vicarious thrills. St. John's got six feet of snow yesterday! Woo-hoo!
I must hasten to admit that when the weather turned truly bad--lethal--there would be an instant and total attitude adjustment. The shell-shocked image of the family emerging from their cellar to find open air where their house used to be has a way of slapping the silly grin off a face.
The really bad weather still fascinates me, and probably always will. But that fascination is muted, now. The excitement has largely leached out of it. I'm uneasy at just how pissed off Nature seems to be of late. Has anybody on the planet seen a two-year run of perfectly normal, unremarkable weather? Droughts. Monsoons. Blizzards. Ovenish temperatures. And hurricanes.

I've followed hurricanes for years. They offer a compelling mix of extreme climatology and human psychology, the latter as interesting to me as the former. What goes through the mind of a human being who builds his home in a cyclonic bullseye, over swampland, and then stays in it, daring the wind and water to do its worst?

As Katrina skittered over Florida, a mere Category One on the Saffir-Simpson scale, it seemed safe to make jokes. 'What a great name for a hurricane', I mused. 'Katrina and the Waves.' Not exactly 'Walking on Sunshine', are we now, South Florida?
Then the Gulf got hold of Katrina and turned her into a bitch-monster. That 80s group had one other minor hit, called 'Do You Want Crying?' Well, crying we got, whether we wanted it or not.

In the hours before Katrina made her second landfall, the newscaster on Global National made a point of saying this isn't the sort of hurricane where pretty-boy newscasters go out and stand on the beach, getting blown around a bit and making stupid remarks. This is a life-or-death situation.' This was shortly followed, of course, by pretty-boy newscasters crouching behind concrete garbage cans, screaming inanities: "This is the wind of a hurricane!" Really? Whodathunkit?

New Orleans was founded in 1718 by a man named Bienville. He must have taken his name--French for, roughly, 'good-town'--seriously, because he ignored the advice of his cadre of engineers, who pleaded with him not to build on the marshy, sunken site. If only he had listened. If only Bienville could have understood how vulnerable his city would be.

The Louisiana coast is no stranger to tropical storms and hurricanes, and several of them have done damage to New Orleans in the past century. Each successive hurricane after 1947 caused an improvement to be made in the levee system. For some reason, though, by the time Katrina came ashore, the levees were only rated for a Category 3 hurricane (max 130 mph winds). This despite Camille (1965) , a Category 5 weather-bomb that narrowly missed the city proper, but still caused over $2 billion (2005 dollars) damage in Louisiana alone...and killed 258.

At practically the last minute, Katrina wobbled off to the east and weakened slightly, sparing N'awlins a direct hit from a Category 5. (This hurricane was officially a Cat-4...just barely...on landfall.)
Little good that did, as it turns out.
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By now we've all seen the pictures. We've all heard anchors for various newscasts acting so very concerned, and you can just tell they're imagining their nice comfortable bed in the nice dry home that's waiting for them at the end of the day. The mayor of New Orleans dubbed Katrina 'our tsunami' and I must admit, at first that struck me as an incredibly arrogant comment. When your death toll reaches a couple hundred thousand, then you can make that comparison, okay?
Then the images started to leak out.
Damned if they didn't look eerily similar to the horrors that filled the newspapers after Boxing Day last year. And the scary thing was, most of these buildings weren't Third-World tarpaper shacks.

The death toll continues to rise. There have been stories out of New Orleans that have affected me even more strongly than did the tsunami saga. The man, stuck for three days on a roof with his dog, told he couldn't bring his friend along when rescue finally came. (I wouldn't have gone.)The dogs howling for help in abandoned and all but submerged houses. (Who would be so heartless as to leave a pet to die that way?) The poor and infirm, trapped to drown like (and with) rats in houses they were unable to leave. People actually starving to death while they wait for someone, anyone, to do something, anything. Most of these people, needless to say, are black. If a freak hurricane was ever to devastate Boston, do you think the emergency response would be a little faster? I sure do.

The litany of terrors confronting the refugees of the Gulf Coast staggers the mind. Starvation. Dehydration. Heatstroke. The much-enlarged Lake Pontchartrain is now home to industrial and human waste, hundreds of toxic chemicals, poisonous snakes, alligators, and probably ten or more potential deadly diseases. I was naive enough to imagine a death toll in the low hundreds from this. Now I think it likely we'll see tens of thousands of casualties.

Bush was on television, saying all the right things...I wonder if he's even considered bringing his soldiers home from Iraq to help. I wonder how many Southern boys from Biloxi and Gulfport and Baton Rouge and New Orleans itself are tossing and turning in Tikrit tonight. I wonder.

Meantime, survivors are pitching their own little Mardi Gras in the flooded streets, looting anything and everything they can find. I can excuse the food--in point of fact, I'd encourage everyone down there to steal any food, clothing, and medical supplies they can--but what the hell do people think they're going to do with the shiny new plasma TV they dragged home? Plug it in?

I even heard, tonight, that medics are coming under sniper fire. If that's true, I shudder for the human race.
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What to do:

Donate, donate, donate. Give until it hurts, say, one thousandth as much as they're hurting. You can start by cleaning out your closet--there are millions of people on the Gulf Coast who need your clothes more than you do.
I would strongly urge our federal government to take the GST on our Katrina-elevated gas prices and donate it to the relief effort.
I'd strongly urge the oil industry to take some of the record profits they're making on our Katrina-elevated gas prices and donate them to the relief effort. (Not to bitch or anything, but with 92% of our gasoline coming from Alberta, how exactly did Katrina drive our prices up 30 cents a litre in three days? I'd really like somebody to explain this to me. If the money's going to to victims of Katrina, fine. Somehow I kind of doubt it is.)
I'd strongly urge any company with a sense of music, history, or social justice--which should be about all of them, no?-- to donate a percentage of its profits to the rebuilding effort.
I've heard cruise ships are being brought in to serve as floating hospitals. Great idea. More, please. If you had a cruise booked on the Lap of Luxury anytime in the next three months, so solly, Cholly, you've been pre-empted.

And when the streets dry out in about six months, level them. Level them all. Rebuild twenty or thirty miles inland, where New Orleans should have been all along.