Ok. So I’ve been going through being in Baton Rouge during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. One of the ways I have been dealing with the whole thing is that I have been writing e-mails. I thought at first that it would just be for family (both personal and the SITI family), and a few friends, but the thing began to expand.
I have been reluctant to put these posts on my new blog, because there are people who might be hurt or piss-off at some of the things I’m saying, but a very good friend said the magic words to me today. He said “Don’t edit yourself.” So here they are. I will post the first six all today (9/16/05) as different posts but I will timestamp them as if they were blogged on the day they were written. Blah blah blah (or Blog blog blog…)

KATRINA I

Forgive the mass e-mail. I realize that some of you have been trying to reach me and have been concerned about whether or not everything is ok. I’m fine.

Here’s the deal as far as I can tell:

I drove into Baton Rouge on Sunday night. I had looped around to the North so that I could avoid the evacuation of New Orleans which I knew would shut down almost everything, but I still ran into road-blocks and a huge flow of refugees heading north through Mississippi. I decided that if I didn’t get into Baton Rouge on Sunday there was no telling when I’d be able to get in, so with some advise from a picturesque gas station attendant and by keeping the sun in the right hand side of my sun-roof, I was able to improvise my way across southern Mississippi on back-country roads that they weren’t sealing up yet. The atmosphere was eerie to say the least. It was kind of like Road Warrior but with more green. Every church I passed had a “Shelter” banner on it.
Of course I had my Palm based GPS navigation system but I hadn’t loaded any detailed maps of Mississippi, so I was quite relieved to see the “Welcome to Louisiana” sign that meant that I had been guessing right. I did have detailed maps of Louisiana so there was much less trouble dodging the increasing number of road-blocks. At this point Baton Rouge was still on the projected track of a category 5 hurricane which meant that we were looking at losing over a million trees (those of you who have been here know how big some of them are) and everything underneath them. Not to mention that if the surge came up the river, the low-lying areas would be under water. We “battened down the hatches” and “hunkered down” (hunker down! I barely know her!).
As you may know, the storm did two things which saved a great many lives: It turned to the East just enough to spare New Orleans the center and the brutal East side of the storm, and it downgraded to a category 4 as soon as it made landfall. Relatively speaking it came nowhere near Baton Rouge. Nevertheless, we lost power at about 9 am Monday. Suddenly everybody is Amish. There’s no internet, no lights, no TV. I was charging my cell phone in my car but the network was overloaded so it was spotty at best. Battery and hand-powered radios were the only source of information but as things got worse in New Orleans, less and less information came out.
Around two in the afternoon I drove about 6 blocks through the broken trees and smashed power-grid to my friend Tom’s house. Tom is one of the founders of the Hanger theatre who is now an entrepreneur making software for first-responder units. He is very plugged into the emergency response system so I figured he would know what was going on. The only thing he knew was that everybody was very grim about New Orleans. We sat around for a few hours as the weather continued to clear, and then we climbed in his SUV and drove around doing our own damage assessment. There was a good deal of scattered tree damage (nowhere near what it could have been but that’s no consolation to the people standing outside their smashed houses and cars), and the power was spotty.
We ended up at huge cafeteria of a pizza place that Tom said was a cop and fireman hang-out, and was open. The place was packed with refugees and the two owners were making pizzas as fast as they could while one of the refugees organized orders and payment. After awhile a group of cops came in wearing an assortment of agency tee-shirts and uniforms. A family, obviously from New Orleans asked one of them if rumors of a curfew were true. He said he didn’t know. That they had been in New Orleans and were having to pull all the way back to BR to re-group. The mother asked how does it look? And the cop said “It’s bad.” There is no punctuation mark in the English language to indicate the mixture of devastation and sadness in his eyes. Someone rigged up the large-screen television and a hush came over this huge room as we saw that first military helicopter footage. The cops were as captivated as we were and you could tell which refugees were from where because they would react when their neighborhoods came up. Mostly underwater.
I suddenly got a text message from one of the LSU PHDs who had power and invited us over. We went over and watched the TV coverage the rest of the night.

A few things that don’t seem to be getting out into the national news:

The evacuation of New Orleans was a miracle of civic organization. Last year they evacuated for Ivan and it was a mess. There were moments of messiness this time, which the national media focused on, but they got far more people out, in far less time. They learned the lessons of Ivan well. Really well.

The big story seemed to be about relief, and that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Despite this being true, it is still REALLY BAD! The red cross is in the middle of the largest scale mobilization they have ever made in the US.
As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, the waters are RISING in New Orleans. They have no idea why, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of people still out there. There is very little information and the refugees are being INCREDIBLY patient. New Orleans is sealed off. No one can get in, and they are urgently trying to get the word out to people who are still there to leave if they can, because it’s still getting worse. Far from turning around, the evacuation isn’t over yet. Meanwhile people in Mississippi and Alabama are still getting hit. Part of the issue is that I’ve heard several reports that government agencies are modulating their reports about how bad things are to stave off panic.

People down here are a bit pissed off at the national media. There are numerous cases of correspondents deriding the people who stayed behind despite the fact that most people who stayed had, literally, no way to leave. There is also a sense that, given the fact that most people here lost power almost immediately, the pretense, on national television, that they were performing a public service and giving information to people who needed it, was a bit disingenuous. Maybe it is idiotic to build a city below sea-level on the gulf coast. Nevertheless, the borderline racist, condescending tone of much of the coverage I saw was deplorable.

There is a big controversy about the use of the word “looting”. I think I’d be doing it too. Most people I know consider what the NY Times and others are calling “looting” as an intelligent early part of the clean-up effort. Not that there haven’t been deplorable incidents, but grabbing a couple packs of diapers out of a flooded store, hardly seems like a crime.

Many neighborhoods in BR have power and are very slowly getting back to normal. I still have no power and spotty cell-phone service. I’m writing this in my office at the theatre. LSU has it’s own generators so we’re off the grid. I’m lucky. It’s hot out there and without power there’s no AC. At least BR still has potable water, and the toilets flush. I can’t imagine what those people in the Superdome are going through right now. I hear they’re letting them outside for brief periods. It’s supposed to be near 100 degrees tomorrow.

I know disasters like this are always reality checks. And if I was in Darfore I’d be writing about that with scales falling from my eyes, but in addition to letting you know not to worry about me, I wanted to let you know that there are people deserving of your concern in my community. And that part of the media is just fitting this into the news cycle in ways that serve them, not ways that help necessarily help the situation or educate us. I hope there are many exceptions to this accusation.

Hope you’re all well.

Thankful for the silence of a couple days thout ‘lectricity…
Leon.