Lest we forget - updated

Mimi writes today:

I remember the more than 1800 people who died and all those who loved them. I remember the 275,000 who lost their homes. I remember those who survived, but suffered through horrendous conditions in the days after Katrina. I remember those who have not returned to their home towns, and who want to, but can't find affordable housing. I remember those in Louisiana and Mississippi still struggling to recover and rebuild their homes and their lives.

Katrina - August 29, 2005

Please see her post with the story, photo, and poem of Our Lady of the Driveway.



I remember leaving New Orleans four days ahead of schedule at roughly this time last year, beginning my vacation early to avoid Hurricane Gustav and wondering if we would have a terrible replay.


I remember driving to work each morning last summer past shells of buildings, gutted structures, empty lots, boarded up homes and business places.



I remember walking past empty businesses cheek-by-jowl with open downtown offices as I went to and fro between the office and the car park.



I remember co-workers telling me how one of the buildings we worked in had six feet of water on the ground floor and it took a couple of years to restore and other co-workers recounting matter-of-factly how their family fled and what they still do to survive.



I remember the first day I arrived and drove from the airport to downtown, approaching the Superdome and the Central Business District while visualizing photos I had seen of the same area under water.



I remember thinking on many mornings, as I drove past the Superdome, that after Katrina the spot where I waited at the light was way under water.



I remember wondering what it must be like for those whose lives were yanked from one reality to a drastically different other reality.


And as I ponder how humans have built cities in uninhabitable spaces from the beginning or history, how those who simply say "don't built below sea level" can be so unempathetic toward others. As a species we would not cover the globe if we only built where it was safe and convenient. And last time I checked I did not choose where I was born.



That this engineering disaster occurred brings shame to our nation. That the response was so FUBAR should haunt us all.

Господи, помилуй

Señor, ten piedad

Seigneur, aies pitié

Κυριε, ελεησον

Senhor, tem piedade

Lord, have mercy

The flood photos are from online sources. The others are my own from summer 2008, three years after Katrina.

UPDATE:
Bill in Portland Maine has collected a serious list of quotations from the Katrina period that remind us how shamefully the Bush regime and its enablers behaved and spoke at the time.

--the BB