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Hurricane Katrina Thread: Any LA Gaffers?

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http://www.wdsu.com/news/4915310/detail.html
http://www.wben.com/newsroom/fullstory.php?newsid=03633



MARTIAL LAW DECLARED: Situation Deteriorating


New Orleans, LA (CBS) - Martial Law has been declared in New Orleans as conditions continued to deteriorate. Water levels in The Big Easy and it's suburbs are rising at dangerous levels and officials stated they don't know where the water is coming from. Residents are being urged to get out of New Orleans in any way they can as officials fear "life will be unsustainable" for days or even weeks.

Gulf Coast residents were staggered by the body-blow inflicted by Hurricane Katrina, with more than a million people sweltering without power, miles of lowlands under water and unconfirmed reports of as many 80 people dead in Mississippi alone.

"We heard one report of 30 dead at just one apartment complex on the beach in Biloxi," said CBS News Correspondent Jim Acosta. Much of the devastation is being blamed on a storm surge.

"It's not like when you see big tornadoes or hurricane force winds come through and the house is blown away," said Acosta. "A storm surge rises up to the house and clears out everything in its path, moving furniture and cars around."

The Ohio Valley could see severe flooding from Katrina Tuesday.

"Katrina is now moving to the north," said CBS News Hurricane Analyst Bryan Norcross. "It is a tropical storm now moving into Tennessee. But the big rain event today is going to be in the Ohio Valley, all the way from Missouri on up to Louisville towards Cincinnati and then it will spread through the northeast."

Even with Katrina swirling away to the north, two different levee breaches in New Orleans sent a churning sea of water coursing through city streets.

Col. Rich Wagenaar of the Army Corps of Engineers, said a breach in the eastern part of the city was causing flooding and "significant evacuations" in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. He did not know how many people were affected by the flooding.

Authorities also were gathering information on a levee breach in the western part of New Orleans. Jason Binet, of the Army Corps of Engineers, said that breach began Monday afternoon and may have grown overnight.

Emergency personnel faced flooding problems of their own.

"We had a 30-foot rise from the bay, which came into the building, about 12-foot high," Capt. Houston Dorr of the Mississippi Highway Patrol, based in Biloxi, said on CBS News' The Early Show. "It never got to the second floor but we were on our way up to the third floor if it came in higher."

Dorr told co-anchor Harry Smith the patrol did what it could, despite its own problems.

"The water downed trees, houses moved. We were mostly worried at the time who we could rescue, so many people were trapped in their houses, but it was just total devastation," Dorr said.

"It's bad," agreed Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown. "This storm is really having a catastrophic effect throughout the South."

Brown cautioned the emergency won't end once the waters recede.

"We will find a lot of structural damage in those homes, disease from animal carcasses, the chemicals in homes, that sort of thing," he told Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen. "It's going to take a long time to clean up and make it safe for people to get back to their neighborhoods."

The federal government began rushing baby formula, communications equipment, generators, water and ice into hard-hit areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, along with doctors, nurses and first-aid supplies.

The Pentagon sent experts to help with search-and-rescue operations.

"This is our tsunami," Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway told the Biloxi Sun Herald.
Katrina knocked out power to more than a million people from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, and authorities said it could be two months before electricity is restored to everyone. Ten major hospitals in New Orleans were running on emergency backup power.

"It will be unsafe to return to the coastal area for several days," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told evacuees Monday. "Be patient. Don't be in a hurry to go back."

According to preliminary assessments by AIR Worldwide Corp., a risk modeling firm, the property and casualty insurance industry faces as much as $26 billion in claims from Katrina.

That would make Katrina more expensive than the previous record-setting storm, Hurricane Andrew, which caused some $21 billion in insured losses in 1992 to property in Florida and along the Gulf Coast.

Mississippi's economy was also dealt a blow that could run into the millions, as the storm shuttered the flashy casinos that dot its coast. The gambling houses are built on barges anchored just off the beach, and Barbour said emergency officials had received reports of water reaching the third floors of some casinos.

After striking the Gulf Coast as a Category 4 hurricane, Katrina was later downgraded to a tropical storm as it passed through eastern Mississippi, moving north at 21 mph. Winds early Tuesday were still a dangerous 60 mph.

At New Orleans' Superdome, where power was lost early Monday, and holes opened in the roof a few hours later, some 9,000 refugees spent a second night in the dark bleachers. With the air conditioning off, the carpets were soggy, the bricks were slick with humidity and anxiety was rising.

"Everybody wants to go see their house. We want to know what's happened to us. It's hot, it's miserable and, on top of that, you're worried about your house," said Rosetta Junne, 37.

A 50-foot water main broke in New Orleans, making it unsafe to drink the city's water without first boiling it. And police made several arrests for looting.

In a particularly low-lying neighborhood on the south shore of Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain, a levee along a canal gave way and forced dozens of residents to flee or scramble to the roofs when water rose to their gutters.

"I've never encountered anything like it in my life. It just kept rising and rising and rising," said Bryan Vernon, who spent three hours on his roof, screaming over howling winds for someone to save him and his fiancée.

"Let me tell you something, folks. I've been out there. It's complete devastation," Gulfport Fire Chief Pat Sullivan said Monday. He estimated that 75 percent of buildings in Gulfport have major roof damage, "if they have a roof left at all."

In Mobile, Ala., the storm knocked an oil rig free from its moorings, wedging it under a bridge. Muddy six-foot waves crashed into the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, flooding stately, antebellum mansions and littering them with oak branches.

"There are lots of homes through here worth a million dollars. At least they were yesterday," said a shirtless Fred Wright. "I've been here 25 years, and this is the worst I've ever seen the water."
Click to expand...

I never thought it would come down to MARTIAL LAW being DECLARED anywhere because of this hurricane, because it weakened significantly before landfall, and the worst of it missed New Orleans, dispite the total mess the city is in. I thought that only if the city was near-destroyed that MARTIAL LAW would be declared---and New Orleans is *far* from destroyed even though it's a disasterous mess down there.....I'm actually pretty shocked to know that they instated Martial Law.......it seems so surreal...
 
Desperado said:
"Must have been"? you mean "must be," right? They're stuck there, aren't they?

:/
Click to expand...

Doubt there's still anyone alive there. I'd like to be proven wrong.

Also--

CNN: Bourbon Street is dry.

God has a weird sense of humor sometimes.
 
Matlock said:



Although they're not "completely gone," they're pretty fucked. Also note the cars out there. :\
Click to expand...


Yeah, what they needed to do is turn the helicopter 180 and film because everything in that direction is tits up.
 
From a destruction point of view this is like a tsunami, there is not alot of Death like the one earlier this year, but the effects are the same... if there wasnt any warning like in the tsunami region, there would have probably been the same exact outcome... thousands of deaths... so the damage is a good relation, but the death side is not even a blip on the grim reapers radar... this will go down as one of the worst natural disasters though
 
Matlock said:
Doubt there's still anyone alive there. I'd like to be proven wrong.

Also--

CNN: Bourbon Street is dry.

God has a weird sense of humor sometimes.
Click to expand...
Is the French Quarter completely dry? What about the Garden District and the area around Tulane? Those are really the places I'd hate to see wiped out just since all that history is kind of irreplacable.
 
guess said:
I thought the internet had desensitized me to most everything, but this video was too much :(
Click to expand...

It's one of the most powerful things I've seen, serving as mere indication of the pain and suffering others in NO must be going through too.
 
Phoenix said:
Yeah, what they needed to do is turn the helicopter 180 and film because everything in that direction is tits up.
Click to expand...




Another part of the bridge. I keep seeing "pretty fucked, but eventually repairable" not "completely destroyed."

Of course, I'll never claim to be an engineer, so maybe you're right.

image08301646cvbs17am.jpg


:\
 
Phoenix said:
Much of the water will go away after the levees are shored up and the sewer system is functioning again. The flooding can be dealt with, but not as long as water continues to pour into the city.
Click to expand...

Well, NO is below sea level and right now the sewer system and the pumps they would normally use to pump out water are under hundreds of feet of that water so it's pretty fucked at the moment.
 
Matlock said:



Another part of the bridge. I keep seeing "pretty fucked, but eventually repairable" not "completely destroyed."

Of course, I'll never claim to be an engineer, so maybe you're right.

image08301646cvbs17am.jpg


:\
Click to expand...


This is what the other end looks like

twinSpan-1.png


twinSpan-2.png


The bridge spans for many many miles.
 
Malleymal said:
From a destruction point of view this is like a tsunami, there is not alot of Death like the one earlier this year, but the effects are the same... if there wasnt any warning like in the tsunami region, there would have probably been the same exact outcome... thousands of deaths... so the damage is a good relation, but the death side is not even a blip on the grim reapers radar... this will go down as one of the worst natural disasters though
Click to expand...


After looking at some of this I agree 100%. I think to Americans however the damage of Katrina is going to be far worse than what the Tsunami was. It is going to take the US financially to the tipping point. God forbid that another Hurricane hits another major costal city with the same force and causes the same damage.
 
Tommie Hu$tle said:
After looking at some of this I agree 100%. I think to Americans however the damage of Katrina is going to be far worse than what the Tsunami was. It is going to take the US financially to the tipping point. God forbid that another Hurricane hits another major costal city with the same force and causes the same damage.
Click to expand...

If that happens, the insurance companies may have some issues.
 
Not sure if anyone's mentioned, but anyone know what has happened to the Causeway? The bridge over Lake Pontchartrain? Is it broken up, or flooded over?
 
Jesus Christ... I had no idea it was anywhere NEAR this bad. Why isn't their structure more like Florida's, where they can just bear down and ride out the storm?

Christ, and that video of the guy losing his wife... holy shit.
 
Wikipedia's article on the Causeway says that there is some severe damage, but I haven't seen anything specific on the news.

Edit: According to the Houston Chronicle, the Lake Pontchartrain Cswy. and the Twin Spans are damaged. This does not bode well for aid.

bridges-katrina.gif
 
I just got home and I've been watching TV. Holy crap is this bad. I just saw some guy who lost his wife. He was completely lost. This is terrible. I wish I could go down there and help these people. I feel awful just sitting here.

Where in the hell is President Bush? Is that mother f***** still on vacation?

Where is the national guard? Oh... that's right! They are all in Iraq getting killed in some bullshit war instead of at home where they can help people.
 
Baron Aloha said:
I just got home and I've been watching TV. Holy crap is this bad. I just saw some guy who lost his wife. He was completely lost. This is terrible. I wish I could go down there and help these people. I feel awful just sitting here.

Where in the hell is President Bush? Is that mother f***** still on vacation?

Where is the national guard? Oh... that's right! They are all in Iraq getting killed in some bullshit war instead of at home where they can help people.
Click to expand...

Is this really the time for politics? Not only that, but you act as if the National Guard isn't around.
 
Amir0x said:
Is this really the time for politics? Not only that, but you act as if the National Guard isn't around.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry. I just get pissed off when I see stuff like this happen and it doesn't look like the people who are in a position to do something about it are doing as much as they could do.

There are still some national guard people around but there should be more of them. 40-50% of Louisianna's national guard is currently stationed in Iraq or other foreign countries right now. 40-50%!! And for what? Just think about how many more lives could have been saved if there were more of them here.

I'm looking at the New Orleans skyline and there don't seem to be many helicopters flying around. Don't get me wrong I'm sure there are a lot but its pretty clear that they could use a lot more.

ManaByte said:
And I guess he didn't see this before trying to derail the thread into a Bush bash thread
Click to expand...

Good!
 
Baron Aloha said:
I'm sorry. I just get pissed off when I see stuff like this happen and it doesn't look like the people who are in a position to do something about it are doing as much as they could do.

There are still some national guard people around but there should be more of them. 40-50% of Louisianna's national guard is currently stationed in Iraq or other foreign countries right now. 40-50%!! And for what? Just think about how many more lives could have been saved if there were more of them here.

I'm looking at the New Orleans skyline and there don't seem to be many helicopters flying around. Don't get me wrong I'm sure there are a lot but its pretty clear that they could use a lot more.



Good!
Click to expand...

See, there you go trying to derail the thread into a political bash fest.

However, can you please provide a picture of the magical machine the National Guard has that makes massive hurricanes just vanish into thin air?
 
ManaByte said:
See, there you go trying to derail the thread into a political bash fest.
Click to expand...

I was not trying to derail the thread. I was just venting. Consider the topic dropped.

ManaByte said:
However, can you please provide a picture of the magical machine the National Guard has that makes massive hurricanes just vanish into thin air?
Click to expand...

There isn't a roll eyes big enough for this remark.
 
Baron Aloha said:
There are still some national guard people around but there should be more of them. 40-50% of Louisianna's national guard is currently stationed in Iraq or other foreign countries right now. 40-50%!! And for what? Just think about how many more lives could have been saved if there were more of them here.



Good!
Click to expand...

I have heard about 3000 out of 11000 are in Iraq.

Good job bringing Bush into it.

Thats what the other 1000 anti Bush threads were for.
 
Damn, I hope that levee gets repaired soon. The last thing we need is flooding caused not from the hurricane, but a fucking hole in a wall.
 
AB 101 said:
I have heard about 3000 out of 11000 are in Iraq.
Click to expand...

You are right. Its 3000 for LA (but your denominator is too high). I was thinking of Mississippi or Alabama.

I found an article that talks a little bit about the deployments for anyone who is interested. A spokesperson for the Guard says they have enough people. But there's never enough in situations such as these IMO.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9117367/
 
MIMIC said:
:lol :lol :lol :lol I just saw that CNN video with the weather guy.

"LET ME TALK, CAROL!!!" :lol :lol
Click to expand...

I was laughing really hard at that, and then I just had a thought. What if he had family down there or something and was just super stressed? Sorry for being a total bummer, but that interview with the man on the street... Damn.
 
Culex said:
Damn, I hope that levee gets repaired soon. The last thing we need is flooding caused not from the hurricane, but a fucking hole in a wall.
Click to expand...
It doesnt look like it. WWL reports:

ALL RESIDENTS ON THE EAST BANK OF ORLEANS AND JEFFERSON REMAINING IN THE METRO AREA ARE BEING TOLD TO EVACUATE AS EFFORTS TO SANDBAG THE LEVEE BREAK HAVE ENDED. THE PUMPS IN THAT AREA ARE EXPECTED TO FAIL SOON AND 12-15 FEET OF WATER ARE EXPECTED IN THE ENTIRE EAST BANK.

:(
 
empanada said:
It doesnt look like it. WWL reports:

ALL RESIDENTS ON THE EAST BANK OF ORLEANS AND JEFFERSON REMAINING IN THE METRO AREA ARE BEING TOLD TO EVACUATE AS EFFORTS TO SANDBAG THE LEVEE BREAK HAVE ENDED. THE PUMPS IN THAT AREA ARE EXPECTED TO FAIL SOON AND 12-15 FEET OF WATER ARE EXPECTED IN THE ENTIRE EAST BANK.

:(
Click to expand...

They are saying two weeks for the water to drain, and they are estimating it'll be a couple MONTHS until power and commerce is fully restored.
 
BorkBork said:
I was laughing really hard at that, and then I just had a thought. What if he had family down there or something and was just super stressed? Sorry for being a total bummer, but that interview with the man on the street... Damn.
Click to expand...

Well, he sorta smirked it off in the end, so I didn't think of that.
 
Baron Aloha said:
There are still some national guard people around but there should be more of them. 40-50% of Louisianna's national guard is currently stationed in Iraq or other foreign countries right now. 40-50%!! And for what? Just think about how many more lives could have been saved if there were more of them here.
Click to expand...



Yes becaue Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, & Okalahoma would never mobilze their national guardsmen to help to maintain law and order and help in the recovery efforts.
 
Macam said:
"'Our tsunami,' Mississippi hurricane survivors say". Is this some of that infamous Mississipi math? 80 vs. 50,000 people?
Click to expand...

I think to the individual person it IS exactly the same as the tsunami. They lost everything and they're still by no means safe. Of course the survivors are going to say that. I would say that. Comparing deaths in natural disasters is just stupid.

Btw, your numbers are crap. Tsunami death toll was around 250,000 to 300,000 if I remember correctly. Plus I have a feel that death toll from Katrina are going to be in the hundreds if not thousands easily, with the coming days of trapped people, non existent sanitation, and the lack of drinking water. (MUCH like the tsunami).
 
BorkBork said:
I think to the individual person it IS exactly the same as the tsunami. They lost everything and they're still by no means safe. Of course the survivors are going to say that. I would say that. Comparing deaths in natural disasters is just stupid.

Btw, your numbers are crap. Tsunami death toll was around 250,000 to 300,000 if I remember correctly. Plus I have a feel that death toll from Katrina are going to be in the hundreds if not thousands easily, with the coming days of trapped people, non existent sanitation, and the lack of drinking water. (MUCH like the tsunami).
Click to expand...

The big difference is they had a warning about Katrina while there was no warning about the Tsunami. If Katrina hit with no warning, the death toll would've been just as bad if not worse.

Just look at the scale of the destruction.
 
Updates:

3 people shot near Superdome
Massive looting
People stealing cars to try to get out of town
Orleans Parish Prison may or may not be prisoner controlled
 
Note to Houston GAFfers: Time Warner Cable has put WWL-TV on channel 76. It's fairly awesome; basically three guys talking in a nondescript room, interspersed with random footage I haven't seen anywhere else. Check it out.
 
empanada said:
It doesnt look like it. WWL reports:

ALL RESIDENTS ON THE EAST BANK OF ORLEANS AND JEFFERSON REMAINING IN THE METRO AREA ARE BEING TOLD TO EVACUATE AS EFFORTS TO SANDBAG THE LEVEE BREAK HAVE ENDED. THE PUMPS IN THAT AREA ARE EXPECTED TO FAIL SOON AND 12-15 FEET OF WATER ARE EXPECTED IN THE ENTIRE EAST BANK.

:(
Click to expand...

Are you sure that's accurate? The Colonel of the US Marine Corps of Engineers just said on live TV 5 min ago that it's still being repaired as we speak.
 
Blanco want to evacuate the Superdome, over 30,000 people there currently. Water and food is almost gone. They don't know when(or if) they will be able to get the pumps back up and running. Police are telling reporters to stay away from Downtown. People on the highways are carjacking cars to try and get out.

I was born and lived most of my life in Metairie/New Orleans and most of my family still lives in the Baton Rouge area and its so sad to see my hometown destroyed.
 
Culex said:
Are you sure that's accurate? The Colonel of the US Marine Corps of Engineers just said on live TV 5 min ago that it's still being repaired as we speak.
Click to expand...

The above information is from the Mayor's office.

The news just keeps getting worse. The Crescent City can't buy a break.
 
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