News Intelligence Analysis
at 5:03 AM PST on September 1
Eye Witness to FEMA'S Obstruction to Rescue
I just got back from New Orleans.
Earlier, I posted an AskMeFi about how to volunteer. Here's what happened:
I walked into the local Red Cross office after noon yesterday, and found a guy on the phone trying to find boats to help people get out of N.O. I called a friend who put our request on the local TV station. We soon had more calls and boats than we could handle. I led a small group out at 3:00 p.m., and we stopped at Jimmy Swaggart Ministries in Baton Rouge to check in with the Red Cross there. They gave us papers that let us past the roadblocks. Another group left at 6:00 p.m.; we ended up bringing probably 100 boats.
We arrived at the intersection of Causeway Blvd and I-10 around 6 p.m. The Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries [LaDWF] crews were shutting down for the night. On the way in, we had seen a couple of people unhurriedly looting a convenience store, amid a scene of calf-deep flooded streets, damaged roofs and downed trees. We decided to stay put for the night, after some back and forth over whether we would be overrun after the LaDWF left. The helicopter traffic from inside the city to the intersection was constant, and an ambulance service was running a triage center under the overpass. Evacuees from the helicopter flights were assembled there and put on buses.
Around midnight we were asked to move to a staging area in a Sam's parking lot a couple of miles away. The night sky's beautiful there now; there's no power anywhere.
This morning we waited for someone to arrive to tell us where to go and what to do, but the few law enforcement officials that finally came around asked us to stay put. One guy, who had stayed in the city in his boat after the LaDWF left, seized the initiative and led a charge for where highway 610 ran into the floodwater near Canal Street. We all piled on. I think we were all in the water by 7:30.
The area we were in was bounded by levees, and had been pretty well covered yesterday, but some people with small boats found ways across into further reaches of the city. They found people and brought them back to points on the levee where the bigger boats met them and brought the evacuees to the landing. The last I heard when I came home this afternoon was that we had pulled about 1800 people out today.
When we brought in the first set of people, a local Sheriff's Office lieutenant started telling us to leave. He said this had come from FEMA. A lot of guys got upset by this, because we had all come over here with our own boats, paying for our fuel, food and water, and were in the water and working before anyone else. FEMA, while certainly able to do more than us, didn't get in the water until around noon.
We explained to the guy how this was going to look, and he finally relented. We had to take down everybody's names, and create an official badge with duct tape and an oversized red crayon. It turned out to be a good thing we didn't leave, because pretty soon some other FEMA guys were asking us to take their teams out. Which seemed to work out well.
I saw: Canal Street flooded six feet deep. Stores had been looted already. Homes were flooded right up to the top of the ground floor, but otherwise untouched. Apparently there are still a lot of people in there. Nobody's in charge in the beginning; the official organizations don't get there until later. At first, everyone's looking for someone to tell them what to do, and initiative is everything.
posted by atchafalaya
at 5:03 AM PST on September 1
The author of this blog report is an expert boater in Louisiana who works for Atchfalaya.
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