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Katrina: A Freight Train Screamin’. Cary Black
Читать онлайн.Название Katrina: A Freight Train Screamin’
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780975427965
Автор произведения Cary Black
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Destroyed houses and destroyed lives were reflected by the infamous ‘X’ markings on the house fronts or on vehicles near the structures, telling the story in shorthand. The markings recorded the grisly tasks of the search and rescue teams as they went house to house looking for the living and the dead. On most structures still standing, spray painted X-graffiti recorded the number of bodies, the conditions of the structures, the search date, and the search team’s identification markers. The markers were being placed as a check off to indicate a completed search and to help the body removal squads as they followed the searchers removing what lay within.
St. Bernard Parish had been destroyed. Many houses stood on their foundations in complete destruction; raging waters had transplanted others. Throughout the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish, the same silence and emptiness still reigned. The neighborhood I walked through was clearly a white collar, higher income area. Once beautiful brick homes were gutted or in the process of being gutted. “For Sale by Owner” signs were posted on lot after lot like a bad joke, with graffiti on the garage doors reading “We are OK and are in Georgia,” “Have you seen my Irish Terrier? Call me!” or, “If you loot I will shoot!” or, “Hungry? Serving dog gumbo!”
I observed the tell tale black-yellow colors on the sides of the houses indicating the level of the water reaching 10 to 20 feet in height, drawing a thin line crowning the make-shift billboards people left on their former homes as they hurriedly left the area.
Guess what? 6 months after Katrina struck, New Orleans was not back as the media would have liked us to believe. New Orleans had been irrevocably altered. Bourbon Street may have projected an aura of normality, but 10 minutes away, the traffic lights still did not work. The empty homes of some 900,000 people still lay vacant and destroyed.
Almost 5 years after the storm, New Orleans appears to have recovered and is coming back to her original grandeur. There are still many destroyed and unoccupied houses. The Lower Ninth has been mostly cleared of debris, but it exudes a feeling of emptiness. St. Bernard Parish is still recovering…Most who have stayed and re-built have not completely recovered from the raging waters of Katrina’s wrath. Most still are rebuilding and trying to recover from what has been described as an atomic bomb type of destruction.
Noted as well is that something in the human collective spirit requires a scapegoat. It has to be somebody’s fault. This book is about a hurricane and the mass of destruction she breathed into being. This book is an attempt to communicate the magnitude of her fury and her destructive reach. This book has been written to tell the story of the people of Katrina. The tales are told through the voices and eyes of the people who lived and continue to live through Katrina’s wrath.
The stories are of the people who were on the ground, saving lives, saving animals, recovering from total destruction, and providing all manner of support during the chaos.
This is not a political book. However, for a subject of this nature, political influences and perspectives may require discussion. This book may reflect the politics of the people who have generously shared their perspective…and, as it is their right, these politics will be presented. This is not a book being written to pass blame or to jump on any number of bandwagons or political agendas.
This book is, in every way an attempt to speak to the truth of Hurricane Katrina. This book is an attempt to put the magnitude of the event into perspective. This book’s purpose is to share the pathos of the human story that exists for those people who directly experienced the storm.
Unlike other books which have come out since the hurricane, this book does not have an agenda. Many will likely be disappointed that it doesn’t cast blame to the federal government and that it probably will be useless as a slinger of political ideology. Katrina was a hurricane. She did what hurricanes do--she weaved destruction. Could New Orleans and the Gulf Coast have been better prepared? Probably! Will people learn from the past and try to be better prepared? Some will and some won’t. There were no surprises during those weeks in August and September of 2005. Maybe we need to learn how to respond quickly when an entire social infrastructure is brought to its knees. If anything, the toll that Hurricane Katrina took on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast was significantly less than what had been predicted.
Never before in the history of the United States had so many people been rescued so quickly through the efforts of the largest local, state, and federal governmental rescue effort in history. Not embellishment, not spin…just a fact. Could all involved have done better? Probably! Will all concerned deal with it better in the future? Hopefully!
This book is about the people, their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences, and future concerns. This book is written for the people of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast and those special souls who spent many months away from home trying to help strangers. It is written for those special men and women in the New Orleans and local Gulf Coast Fire and Police Departments who were at ground zero and began rescue efforts before the winds had abated.
This book is about the pendulum of human behavior swinging from the most heroic to the most deplorable and everything in between. This book is about American people living through the greatest natural disaster this country has ever seen.
This book is about our humanity, our society and our culture. This book is about a freight train screamin’.
Cary Black
To fully grasp the impact of Katrina on the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, many factors need to be considered. The region’s uniqueness from historical, geographical, political and socio-cultural perspectives plays a critical role when one tries to wrap their arms around an event as significant as Katrina and the affect she had on the people who experienced her.
Like many other cities whose locations are determined by geography and proximity to resources, the site of New Orleans has been constrained by the nuances of the Mississippi River and the Delta system which she feeds and modifies.
In the 17th century, the French had secured much of northern North America in the northeastern United States and Canada through occupation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Great Lakes. In an effort to prevent the English access to the eastern coast, a French strategic objective of controlling the Mississippi and her tributaries was established. For control of the Mississippi, controlling the access to the Gulf was required. The key to securing the Mississippi was the ability to secure access to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico.
Fathers Joliet and Marquette reportedly traveled down the Mississippi nearly to the Delta and upon their return spoke about the Great Stream in the South. 9 years later, the first French official to explore the lower Mississippi was Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle in 1682. La Salle claimed all lands from the river basin from the Appalachians to the Rockies. He named the land Louisiana after King Louis XIV. For 17 years, there was little French initiative to explore or establish the lands claimed by La Salle.
When rumors in the northern French colonies arose suggesting that England intended to colonize the areas claimed by LaSalle, Minister Pontchartrain dispatched Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville, a reputable naval officer, was told to explore the Gulf Coast areas. Iberville's instructions were to relocate the mouth of the Mississippi and to establish a colony at some strategic point. Iberville and his brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, sailed from Brest with a tiny fleet in October of 1698. They anchored in Biloxi Bay 6 months later accompanied by about 200 colonists. In April of 1699, Iberville selected the site of present-day