Katrina - The Aftermath and the Plight of the Poor

Just in:

Blogger Chuck Simmins, who began tracking tsunami donations last December after a UN official described the United States as "stingy," has started tracking the major donations made toward the New Orleans relief effort.  The tally so far - a little over $10 million.

Update:

From a humanitarian point of view, things are looking much worse.  Reports of wide-spread looting are coming in, including reports of looters shooting a police officer and continuing to loot even when police or National Guard troops are in sight.  Michelle Malkin passes on this AP quote:

Looters filled industrial-sized garbage cans with clothing and jewelry and floated them down the street on bits of plywood and insulation as National Guard lumbered by.

Mike Franklin stood on the trolley tracks and watched the spectacle unfold.

"To be honest with you, people who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society," he said.

A man walked down Canal Street with a pallet of food on his head. His wife, who refused to give her name, insisted they weren't stealing from the nearby Winn-Dixie supermarket. "It's about survival right now," she said as she held a plastic bag full of purloined items. "We got to feed our children. I've got eight grandchildren to feed...."

The looting was taking place in full view of passing National Guard trucks and police cruisers.

One man with an armload of clothes even asked a policeman, "can I borrow your car?"

Some in the crowd splashed into the waist-deep water like giddy children at the beach.

Sadly, this is not unexpected.

As I explain further down in this post, the poorest neighborhoods of New Orleans, the ones with the most blighted and dilapidated housing and the ones with property costs low enough for the poor to afford, are the ones which will suffer the most flood damage.  ABC News is reporting on this tonight.

What New Orleans will experience is the vengeance of a group of people, who have been chronically generation-upon-generation working poor and indigent and under-educated, suddenly discovering that their entire safety net -- community, neighbors, family, jobs, and home -- is suddenly gone.  That is a blow that virtually no one can survive without massive hardships and without trying to lash out at some intangible, incomprehensible "system" that can be made into the scapegoat for their suffering.

Again, please pray for the peace of God to descend on these people, and for Christians to show extraordinary mercy and grace toward them.

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This aerial photo from MSNBC seems to say it all:

Even though the city was not swept away by a massive storm surge wave, the wind damage and flooding brought by hurricane Katrina has utterly devastated New Orleans.

Currently there is a two-block-wide levee breach in the 17th Street Canal, which is draining Lake Pontchartrain.  The lake is due north of New Orleans and normally serves as the reservoir for the water that is continually pulled from the city by its complex drainage system.  In some areas of the city, water was reported to be rising at the rate of one inch every five minutes.  Reports indicate that portions of I-10, which carries traffic into the city from the west, are entirely missing.  There is also concern that the high-rise bridge which carries traffic east out of the city may not be structurally sound, as it was struck by a barge.  And the causeway over Lake Pontchartrain is currently flooded and may be seriously damaged.  For the time being, there appears to be no way in or out of the city except by air or boat.

The most serious problem that New Orleans will face in the upcoming weeks will be the plight of those who have lost their homes due to the flood.  New Orleans has a disproportionately high number of poor minority residents, and many of the city's poorest neighborhoods lie directly in the path of the water coming from Lake Pontchartrain.  Many of the residents in these areas live in subsidized housing, and most of them do not have the financial resources to relocate to a safer area of town.

Minority neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth Ward (which is located east of the French Quarter, along the Mississippi River) have continually struggled with housing and employment issues, and I fear that this storm will be such a devastating blow that their communities may never fully recover.

Major flooding produces critical sanitation problems because the flood water is polluted with industrial waste and biological contaminants such as sewage and rotting organic material (animal carcasses, etc.).  For this reason alone, hundreds of thousands of residents will not be allowed to return to their homes for some time.  Cleanup will be expensive, and for many homes it will involve literally tearing the home down to the frame and rebuilding it.  Others will simply see their already-dilapidated homes swept away by bulldozers.  Considering the poverty level of these neighborhoods, it is highly unlikely that most residents would have bought flood insurance. 

Government-subsidized housing will be yet another problem, as residents will have to wait on government red tape in order to be relocated.  It is probably a good bet that much of the run-down housing will not be rebuilt, and those who lost their homes will be forced -- by one means or another -- to relocate to another part of town, or to another city.  Losing your home and your community is a burden that anyone would find extremely difficult to bear.  My prayers will be with these people for some time.

And I haven't even touched on the impact that city-wide destruction will have on the thousands of working poor who rely on hourly-wage jobs in the city's bustling tourist and service industries.  Looting is already being reported in New Orleans.  Stealing is wrong, but it is difficult not to partially sympathize with the utter desperation and hopelessness that the city's poorest residents must be feeling now.

The best blog news roundup is at BrendanLoy.com.

Michelle Malkin provides a link to a wiki that has been established for Hurricane Katrina aid.

More from Wikipedia:  Dams -- Causeways -- Lake Ponchartrain Causeway