Dear lord. Why bring people to fester at the Superdome for days and hours with no information? From the AP:

Fights and trash fires broke out at the hot and stinking Superdome and anger and unrest mounted across New Orleans on Thursday, as National Guardsmen in armored vehicles poured in to help restore order across the increasingly lawless and desperate city.

``We are out here like pure animals. We don't have help,'' the Rev. Issac Clark, 68, said outside the New Orleans Convention Center, where corpses lay in the open and evacuees complained that they were dropped off and given nothing...

At least seven bodies were scattered outside, and hungry, desperate people who were tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out pallets of water and juice and whatever else they could find.

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered up by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

``I don't treat my dog like that,'' 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. ``I buried my dog.'' He added: ``You can do everything for other countries but you can't do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can't get them down here.''

Just above the convention center on Interstate 10, commercial buses were lined up, going nowhere. The street outside the center, above the floodwaters, smelled of urine and feces, and was choked with dirty diapers, old bottles and garbage.

``They've been teasing us with buses for four days,'' Edwards said.

People chanted, ``Help, help!'' as reporters and photographers walked through. The crowd got angry when journalists tried to photograph one of the bodies, and covered it over with a blanket. A woman, screaming, went on the front steps of the convention center and led the crowd in reciting the 23rd Psalm.

Why not have buses taking people immediately to motels outside of the affected areas? Shouldn't a contingent of FEMA people be standing outside the Superdome putting people on buses non stop until the city is empty? Why shouldn't all the hotels and the motels be given guarantees from FEMA that they're picking up the tab and letting people be dispersed and not centralized in an area with no facilities to care for them to understandably become restive and turn into a situation that needs to be controlled by the National Guard? Who is running this? For how many days have they known they were going to have to move people out?

FEMA's advice to those afflicated just plain sucks. It was last updated in October 2004.

Wes Clark is right. Where is the leadership?

Posted by Laura at September 1, 2005 12:28 PM