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H04635

Headlines : Environment

Summary:

All day, thousands of active-duty and National Guard troops massed at staging areas in Louisiana and were trucked into positions around the city center and other facilities that had been patrolled for days by weary New Orleans police. “We are establishing security there,” said Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, who is heading the massive federal task force of active-duty and National Guard troops converging on the flood zones. Blanco and Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.) said Thursday that thousands had probably died after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. “We understand there are thousands of dead people,” Landrieu said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. “We know there are elderly people who died. We know children have died.” In Mississippi, bodies were stacked up in a temporary morgue in Biloxi. Rescue teams said they had saved some hurricane survivors after getting cellphone text messages from inside mounds of rubble. “It’s crazy what technology can do,” said Larry Fisher, director of homeland security for Hinds County, which includes Jackson. “At this point, I’ll take a smoke signal if it means we can save someone.“

[Posted By ShiftShapers]

By Ellen Barry, Scott Gold and Stephen Braun
Republished from LA Times

Snipers fire on rescue efforts, and corpses litter public areas as rage builds among refugees. Bush is visiting the stricken region today.

New Orleans – The rushed mobilization of federal troops to the storm-desolated Gulf Coast was outpaced Thursday by New Orleans’ rapid descent into chaos. Sniper fire threatened hospital evacuations and a mass bus caravan to Texas, corpses were found outside the city’s decaying convention center and weakened refugees collapsed amid enraged crowds on city streets.

At nightfall, heavily armed police and National Guard troops took positions on rooftops, scanning for snipers and armed mobs as seething crowds of refugees milled below, desperate to flee. Gunfire crackled in the distance.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin implored federal officials for immediate aid. “This is a desperate SOS,” Nagin said.

About 5,000 people filled the city’s convention center and the trash-strewn streets outside on a city plaza where tourists once strolled. Outside the dank, cavernous hall, where temperatures soared and lights winked out, seven corpses lay sprawled, covered by blankets. Other deaths were reported nearby, and there was an increasing number of accounts of rapes and beatings, city officials said.

The Mississippi River city’s swift downward spiral overwhelmed beleaguered New Orleans emergency officials and posed a stark crisis for the Bush administration and federal troops converging on the flooded Gulf Coast region.

“I know this is an…

[end excerpt]

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Posted by ShiftShapers
Warning: Anyone who takes this blog seriously will be shot. Anyone who does not take it seriously will be buried alive by a Mitsubishi bulldozer. Welcome to (A)utonomous Resistance, GNN’s exclusive one-stop infoshop for radical resources and information....

RECENT COMMENTS

HOW TO CREATE A CRISIS – Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Pacific News Service – The deplorable looting in New Orleans puts an ugly public face on a crisis that Bush administration policies have made worse.

Displacement of Historic Proportions – The largest displacement of Americans since the Civil War reverberated across the country from its starting point in New Orleans yesterday, as more than half a million people uprooted by Hurricane Katrina sought shelter, sustenance and the semblance of new lives.

Democracy Now! coverage:

Nightmarish Scenes at New Orleans Convention Center

Daily News Reporter in New Orleans: Scope of Destruction Much Worse Than 9/11

White House Response to Gulf Coast Disaster Sparks Criticism

Race in New Orleans: Shaping the Response to Katrina?

ShiftShapers @ 09/02/05 11:44:45

The Democracy Now! report is disturbing at best. they showed stock piles of food and water locked up but they can’t get at it….check it out!

here’s another article:

Black lawmakers angry at Bush response to Katrina
CTV.ca News Staff

African American lawmakers have expressed outrage and blamed U.S. President George W. Bush for the “slow and incomplete response” to the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with members of the Black Leadership Forum, National Conference of State Legislators, National Urban League and the NAACP, told a news conference in Washington D.C. Friday that the response from the federal government was slow because most of those left behind were poor.

Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md, said residents of the stricken areas had gone far too long without clean drinking water and asked why “the differences between those who live and those who die are poverty and skin color?”

The comments came as Bush, who earlier admitted his government’s response was “unacceptable,” began a tour of the storm-damaged areas.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Illinois., said too much focus had been placed on the looting which detracted from the main priority of getting food, water and stability to the tens of thousands of displaced victims.

Jackson asked why the federal government could not airlift thousands out of the Gulf Coast to New York, Chicago and Washington.

He also called on U.S. companies to take action, asking: “Where are the hotels of America, the airlines?”

Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif., asked the media to stop describing the hurricane victims as “refugees.”

“‘Refugee’ calls up to mind people that come from different lands and have to be taken care of. These are American citizens,” Watson told the news conference.

“The issue is not about race right now,” added Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio. “There will be another time to have issues about color.”

Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., praised the city of Detroit for offering housing, food and clothing for 500 families displaced by Katrina and urged other cities to follow suit.

Rep. Cummings concluded by calling for citizens and governments to come together “with a force equal to that of Hurricane Katrina” to meet the needs of the hurricane victims.

alpinestar @ 09/02/05 13:58:05

I heard a story by a BBC reporter about a sick, African American woman who approached a newly arrived police car at the superdome because she was in need of help. It was already a while since they last saw a police car or anything else that could mean rescue. The (white) policeman came out and pointed his roitgun towards the woman and told her to back off. the guy was frightened. she collapsed and had to be helped by other people stranded there.

the reporter told that there was so much mistrust between the poor, mainly African American population of N.O. and the police that it was hampering all rescue and relief efforts.

can you believe that? race being an issue here? now?

BurningMonk @ 09/02/05 14:23:37

I think race is the biggest issue now! and that is absolutely crazy…

alpinestar @ 09/02/05 14:45:31

ShiftShapers @ 09/02/05 16:54:31

A man holds his baby as he shows a deady body outside the New Orleans Convention Center in New OrleansEvelyn Turner cries alongside the body of her common-law husband, Xavier Bowie, after he died in New Orleans, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.