KATRINA II

If you get this and didn’t get my first post, let me know (assuming you’re interested).

The effects of this thing are taking deep roots and starting to affect everything in this area.
Media is announcing that the estimated cost is going to be in the 20 to 25 billion dollar range. I had some meetings today with people in the know and they said that the actual estimates are closer to 90 billion.
The population of Baton Rouge will officially double within the next three days. The majority of these people are not expected to ever leave. Consequently, there will be 0 available housing within the next two weeks. Apparently there are already NO rental units available in BR.
LSU is going to have to restructure itself in a major way. They have turned the big basket-ball arena/convocation center (where Bush spoke at graduation 2 years ago) into a critical care facility. We have families moving into their children’s dorm rooms. The thing is that on top of not knowing how many students are dead, when those families that are in the dorm rooms leave, there is no reason to expect them not to take their student with them. Add this to the fact that all of the New Orleans schools are gone and the rest of the system is going to have to absorb them somehow, and we have a situation that features a critical level of uncertainty.
On the level of our department and Swine Palace. All of our funders have essentially told us that we will not get our money this year. We are going to be cutting back in a drastic way. Ironically it is very possible that I would have been cut in December even if I hadn’t quit. This has also meant that much of the season, including my planned production of Big Love has been cancelled.
There is the possibility that the entire semester will be cancelled.

It’s weird. There are these brand-new trucks running around that look like truncated semis. Increadibly high-tech, with glossy purple/silver/white paint jobs, with “FedEx: Charter Express” logos. In the windshields they have messy xerox copied “FEMA” signs. Apparently they are refrigerated medical supply trucks. They look like Donald Trump’s entry at a tractor pull.
Every once in awhile one of those red rescue choppers you might have seen on the news, screams overhead.
There are many people here who still have no idea what’s actually going on because they haven’t seen the news, because they don’t have power.

It’s a good thing we haven’t sent our military, reserve and the infrastructure building hardware necessary to do this sort of thing off on some fools mission somewhere on the other side of the world. Good thing Haliburton is available to take up the slack here. I don’t know what we would have done if the president hadn’t cut his vacation short.

Here’s a slice:
One of my undergraduate students, Alaina Dunn (Third Witch in Macbeth), is from New Orleans. I finally got ahold of her today and she came into my office and explained her situation.
On top of all the stuff that the rest of us here in BR have had to deal with (no electricity in her apartment, bad cell phone service etc), her family home is underwater. Both of her grandparent’s homes are underwater. She wasn’t able to reach anybody until last night. Everyone is alive and in the process of being evacuated.
She went to meet with FEMA and after several hours of paperwork she was told that her family was not eligible for a cent because they had homeowner’s insurance (a policy which of course did not cover flooding).
Meanwhile her friend, who is deployed in Iraq, keeps calling (hers is the only number he can get through to) and she doesn’t know what to tell him because she can’t find his father.
Tonight she has to go down to the refugee camp at the River Center (where I usually go to hear the Symphony), and try to find her family. She has to skip work at the Olive Garden to do this and she is scared that she’ll lose the job…
Think about what it means to lose a job in her situation, in a job market that has a doubling population.

Meanwhile: I got my electricity back. I have to go home now and clean out my fridge…

Just talked to my afore mentioned friend Tom, who has been talking to the Mayor and the director of FEMA etc.
The assumption is that the death toll is between 15 and 40 thousand.
Although the announcement today was that no one gets back into NO for three months, the reality will probably be more like nine. The airport is being turned into a morgue.
There was already an attack on a NO police station by folks armed with AK47s. The police have shot a number of people and then just let the body wash down the street. They can’t declare Marshall Law because the Napoleonic code doesn’t allow it (although there is a de facto state of Marshall law exists in several areas), but they are either going to change this on the legislative level of the state government or Bush will take control of the State so that the cops can shoot on sight.
The FEMA guy described his frustration with a situation in which cops and rescue personal can’t find their way around their own streets because amongst other things, the street signs are underwater. To get into a building, they have to get into scuba gear and go into houses they don’t know etc. It’s just too dangerous and they are going to have to wait for the water to go down. If it ever does.

Baton Rouge has no idea how to handle the stress to it’s infrastructure that will be caused by the hundreds of thousands of new citizens in the next couple of days. We’re no where near out of this yet.

Holy-moly.