|
It should be pointed
out that much of the failure attributed to the on the ground efforts to date
has been lack of working radio/cell phone communications. Guard troops arrived
yesterday far in advance of supplies they were to distribute and/or guard. As
one incredulous report said, after 9/11 we thought getting agencies to talk to
each other was a top priority. Oil spilling into the Mississippi A huge oil spill was spotted near two storage tanks on the
Mississippi River downstream from New Orleans, state officials said Friday. The oil was seen in a flyover to the
Venice area by the Department of Environmental Quality. “Two tanks with the capacity of holding
2 million barrels appear to be leaking,” the department said in a statement. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9175553/ Long Term Unemployement will rise “Not only do people not have a place to
live. They don’t have a place to go to work. I think this will be felt long and
hard,” said Tom Gimbel, chief executive officer of The LaSalle Network, an
employment firm. He thought that some employment implications of the storm
could be longer lasting as some people and companies might opt to permanently
move elsewhere. Gimbel said that
Chicago-area companies that have operations in New Orleans are moving mostly white-collar financial type
of jobs temporarily to Chicago. He expected an increase in demand for temporary
blue-collar workers for jobs in hurricane cleanup and rebuilding efforts. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9170134/ Blasts add to New Orleans’ misery: President Bush has called the relief effort the biggest in
U.S. history. The House was to convene at noon Friday to send the aid bill to
Bush’s desk for his signature. The Senate gave the measure voice-vote approval
late Thursday. But New Orleans
officials and stranded residents said the response should have been quicker. “This is a national disgrace,” New
Orleans’ emergency operations chief Terry Ebbert said Thursday. “We can send
massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can’t bail out the city of
New Orleans.” At New Orleans'
airport, hundreds waited their turn for medical attention. NBC's Kerry Sanders
spent the night there, waking up to find two others next to him had passed
away. At the hot and
stinking Superdome, where 30,000 were being evacuated by bus to Houston,
fistfights and fires erupted amid a seething sea of tense, suffering people who
waited in a line that stretched a half-mile to board yellow school buses. After a traffic jam
kept buses from arriving for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the
scramble to get on to the buses that finally did show up, with a group of
refugees breaking through a line of heavily armed National Guardsmen. Nearby,
about 15,000 to 20,000 people who had taken shelter at New Orleans Convention
Center grew ever more hostile after waiting for buses for days amid the filth
and the dead. At the same time,
after accepting more than 11,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees, Texas officials
said the Astrodome was full and at least temporarily halted the flow
of evacuees into the shelter. It
was decided early Friday to begin housing people in the adjacent Reliant
Center, where the Houston Texans play football, said Houston press secretary
Patrick Trahan. Texas Gov. Rick
Perry announced that Dallas would host 25,000 more refugees at Reunion Arena
and 25,000 others would relocate to a San Antonio warehouse at KellyUSA, a
city-owned complex that once was home to an Air Force base. Houston estimated
as many as 55,000 people who fled the hurricane were staying in area hotels. Outside a looted
Rite-Aid drugstore, some people were anxious to show they needed what they were
taking. A gray-haired man who would not give his name pulled up his T-shirt to
show a surgery scar and explained that he needs pads for incontinence. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “I feel bad
going in there.” Hospitals struggled
to evacuate critically ill patients who were dying for lack of oxygen, insulin
or intravenous fluids. But when some hospitals try to airlift patients, Coast
Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan said, “there are people just taking potshots at
police and at helicopters, telling them, ‘You better come get my family.”’ To make matters
worse, the chief of the Louisiana State Police said he heard of numerous
instances of New Orleans police officers — many of whom were from flooded areas
— turning in their badges. “They
indicated that they had lost everything and didn’t feel that it was worth them
going back to take fire from looters and losing their lives,” Col. Henry
Whitehorn said. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9156612 |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
