my small contribution
to Katrina reportage: Click on the
video link
here, then on the "Mayor" link in that window. Straight from the horse's mouth; not much for trainwreck images, if that's what you're looking for, but very good for information. Simply amazing. My favorite city I've never visited has been set back years, perhaps decades.
Early on, during a list of damage, the Mayor mentions that the twinspans, the huge bridges coming into New Orleans from the north, were damaged. Later, one of the newsguys asks him just how bad: "Totally destroyed. Totally. It's gone." Pause. More pause. Nobody knows what to say, it's just dead, shocked airtime for a good five seconds while everybody stares at the desk and tries to absorb that.
Disasters like this, bad as it is, always make me glad we live in a country like the US, with the resources we have. Most of the people evacuated before hand, and those that stayed have the full force of the US trying to save them, which is nothing to scoff at. Same goes for the rebuilding effort: large portions of New Orleans have just been wiped off the map, but that won't last for long. Beats the hell out of hiding in your plank hut in someplace like Haiti or Cuba. Sucks, no doubt, but at least we have the ability to limit the human toll of a catastrophie like this.
Ace has a list of ways to make a donation, and some more news coverage.
And Michele has a growing
list of positive stories out of New Orleans, as a reminder to the doom and gloomers out there. As Andrea Harris puts it:
Man up, Nancy.
