HURRICANE KATRINA
Monday, September 19, 2005.
Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day!
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/
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Arrr! I be gettin' a call that be tellin' me that them skurvy roofers be on the way. I'll be waitin' fer those dogs.
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Well, the roofers finally came. Very nice guys. Three men braver than I. Of course, the first thing one of them did was nearly fall off the roof, which didn't inspire me at first. They finally got into it and did a beautiful job. One thing I thought was strange was that the foreman asked me if I had any old sofa cushions - which I didn't. He got in the truck and drove around until he found a flooded sofa out on the curb, and took the cushions. Then he took the covers off the cushions, and used them to stand and work on the roof. Simply brilliant. I helped them from the ground, and it was definitely something that needed four guys - even if most of the time I was just standing on the bottom of the ladder to keep it steady.
Finished! Here's the back.
We ran out of the asphalt paper, so we had to use a tarp over the north face roof. They tucked it in nicely and tacked it down well.
In the area over the dormer, they just put some of the old shingles back in place. Very nice.
Once they put the cap back on, you can hardly tell that there was ever anything wrong with it. Well with the exception of the slow leaks in the front. But, as they say, it doesn't leak when it isn't raining.
The cypress tree in my front yard will have to come down before it falls on Tony's house.
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Someone else has an evacuation blog. Not as good as mine.
http://nobulletin.blogspot.com/
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I see that the kooks are restless:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/9/14/201055.shtml
Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005 8:06 p.m. EDT
Louis Farrakhan: Levees Were 'Blown Up'
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is telling his followers that the levees in New Orleans may have been deliberately "blown up" to kill the city's black population.
The influential preacher was in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday, where he detailed his Hurricane Katrina conspiracy theory.
"I heard from a very reliable source who saw a 25 foot deep crater under the levee breach," Farrakhan explained. "It may have been blown up to destroy the black part of town and keep the white part dry."
Farrakhan didn't say who he thought was behind the plot to blow up New Orleans' levees.
The Muslim minister also blasted both FEMA and the Red Cross, saying their response to Katrina victims after the levees were blown up was inadequate.
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Yeah. Someone saw a crater under the levee breech. Um, dude, the levee breach was under 25 feet of dark water...
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OTOH, my friend Ashlee Gunter (who is now famous) posted this on one of the eLists:
"Let me tell you a story...
"Wednesday, August 24, I was sitting in a meeting with Department of Health and Hospitals. We were discussing TMOSA. TMOSA is the plan to triage people rescued from New Orleans before placing them in shelters or hospitals "if" NO ever flooded. Keep in mind, this is Wednesday. Katrina was still hitting Florida and was projected to go to the panhandle. We were watching the storm, but were not overly concerned. This was a regular plainning meeting that had nothing to do with Katrina.
"This was just a part of my everyday job. Even if you know the rest of the story, keep reading. As I was sitting there, I thought to myself, "I understand why this is important to plan for, and it will probably happed one day, but I will never see this plan go into effect in my lifetime."
I remember thinking this so clearly, like it was just today. A plan like TMOSA just seemed so unreal. August 29, 10:00 PM... my phone rings... East Baton Rouge Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness... We're activating TMOSA. This notice was then followed by a list of requests.
I will never make an assumption like that again. At this point, I'm waiting for the aliens to land in my backyard. I learned a valuable lesson both personally, and in Emergency Management, and I will tell this story for the rest of my life." - Ashlee
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We then had a discussion about the people we've been seeing:
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[SHANE]
Wargames. It's all wargames. "Pretending", like Tracy says. I've noticed that a lot of people very obviously didn't beleive it would ever happen - and certainly never happen to them. It's all about mindset, and you've obviously had a lot of thinking about this before it actually happened, and you had a mindset ready for it.
Now that we're three weeks out, I've noticed that there are predominantly two types of people.
The first type ranges from "OK, so let's get it back together and keep going.", to, "Well, that wasn't so bad."
The second type, though, is very troubling. They seem to be totally lost. They don't know what to do from day to day. Shock has started to set in, and it's got some folks bad...
[ASHLEE]
I've noticed a third type...the angry ones. There are a lot of people that are pissed off at the world right now. I think they just don't know how to deal with what they have been through.
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I'm going back to Houston tomorrow to bring my family back. I may be out of touch for a day or two. Rita is currently headed for Houston. It's bizarre that three weeks ago we evacuated from New Orleans to Houston, and now we're about to evacuate from Houston to New Orleans.
The irony is very deep...
