And the counting begins
It’s gotten better.
Or at least that is what New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told the nation
on Tuesday, a week after all hell broke loose along a 30-mile stretch
of the Mississippi coast. “I’ve gone from anger to despair
to seeing us turn the corner,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”
But as with everything else about Hurricane Katrina, around Nagin’s
corner is even more blues — bodies.
And lots of them. Nagin said he wouldn’t be surprised if as
many as 10,000 people in New Orleans alone were found under the
muck and mire now being cleared in part by the 82nd Airborne Division.
As of Tuesday, only 234 bodies had been identified. Two of them
were New Orleans police officers. They committed suicide.
If pictures of the living were already prompting national debate
on words like “refugees” and “poverty,”
no telling what pictures of the dead will do.
It’s already caused a little stir in the tiny town of St.
Gabriel, Louisiana, the tiny town near New Orleans where a makeshift
morgue was constructed next to City Hall. The makeshift morgue was
only the latest indignity many town residents have endured over
the years. Also near the town are two prisons and a former facility
that houses leprosy patients.
“Put it this way,” Fenolia Green, 88, told the Associated
Press. “Would they put it in a rich (area)? They always dump
on the poor.”
And therein lies the real debate. The poor were always among us,
but not like those surviving the floods. And the federal government
failed them at their time of greatest need.
No one is happy. Even President George Bush is calling for congressional
hearings to determine blame in the poor federal response to Hurricane
Katrina and its aftermath.
“What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out
what went right and what went wrong,” Bush said. “We
still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond
properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack
or another major storm.”
But critics are already lining up against Bush. To them, nothing
went right, particularly his dismantling of the Federal Emergency
Management Agency
“Government at all levels failed,” Sen. Susan Collins.
R-Maine, said during a conference to announce the launch of hearings
by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. “It is difficult
to understand the lack of preparedness and ineffective initial response
to a disaster that had been predicted for years and for which specific,
dire warnings had been given for days.”
Of course, the loudest critics live in New Orleans. “We’re
angry Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved
city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry,” read
an open letter to President Bush in the Times-Picayune, Louisiana’s
largest newspaper. “Our people deserved rescuing. Many who
could have been were not. That’s to the government’s
shame…No expense should have been spared. No excuses should
have been voiced.”
As it is now, it’ll take at least three weeks to remove water
and another few weeks to clear the debris. It could take as many
as eight weeks to restore electricity. The good news is that billions
of dollars are flowing in to start the reconstruction projects.
In the meanwhile, thousands of displaced Americans are heading across
the country, including as many as 2,500 to Massachusetts.
“We’re just holding our breath and we’re prepared,”
Gov. Mitt Romney told reporters. “At this stage, flexibility
is our watch word.”
The State House is expected to appropriate at least $265 million
in state funds to help those efforts at Otis Air National Guard
base on Cape Cod.
Also involved in the state’s efforts is the city of Boston
and the Black Ministerial Alliance. Gilbert Thompson, BMA president,
accompanied Gov. Romney during a press conference. “We recognize
as communities of faith that people, as the governor said, have
lost everything, but they have not lost their faith,” Thompson
said.
Faith is about all that many have left. But from where Nagin was
sitting on Tuesday, things had gotten better: Engineers had fixed
the levee.
(Compiled from wire and news services)
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