Hurricane Katrina.
The simple fact is, Shiva has a pet named Katrina. As she sits there stroking Katrina's head, she's looking at us, saying,
"Oppenheimer? Man was a rank amateur. Teller and Ulam came close, but their design, to your collective credit, was never actually used on anyone. If you want to see how destruction is done, children, take a close look at my friend here."
Her swath was 85 miles wide. Her storm surge flooded buildings as far inland in Bay St. Louis, MS, as two miles from the coast with two feet of water. The fucking monster took out a major U.S. city without even directly hitting it! Sure, our country's government reacted slower that we'd have liked. But guess what, folks. When the storm is this powerful, and this BIG, there's no such thing as soon enough. There's no such thing as having enough people ready to help.
I've seen more than 20 city blocks reduced to match sticks. I have the photos to prove it, but there's no way the photos or any video I could shoot could possibly convey the magnitude of this thing. Hell, I haven't even seen it all, but I know how far we drove after we saw the first traffic lights that weren't working. We got here six days after the storm passed and the power in most of Mississippi's Gulf Coast is still off. That alone tells me something really bad's going on, because there were restaurants open and power on far sooner than that after Ivan.
I've seen parts of Slidell because we took a wrong turn down U.S. 90 and almost ended up in Orleans Parish. The whole time we drove, we saw what used to be human dwellings. Now? Foundations. Piles of wood planks in the trees. Clothes in those same trees. Cars half stripped of their bodies, left in ditches, overturned. I saw the front end of a Peterbilt rig that had been picked up by the storm surge and dumped in a ditch up against a motor home. The captain I've been travelling with wondered if there were any bodies still in the rubble. They can't have had time to search it all yet. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were.
And the fucked up thing is, there are people back here rummaging through what's left of their lives already. Camping on the sites where their homes were. After Charley and Ivan, there were people back the next day, maybe 36 hours out. Here, it's taken a week because people had to go so far. Because this area has been so blitzed by this storm and with outside traffic.
New Orleans is going to remain the most costly result of this storm, but even without that, the swath that cut from New Orleans to Biloxi would be the worst thing to hit this country on its home turf since the Civil War. That damn flood is just icing.
Don't just blame Bush for this thing in NOLA. Our government, with Clinton at its head, cut funding for those levees too, and all sorts of other infrastructural projects. If you want to blame something, like I said a couple of entries back, blame the fact that our entire national government and huge chunks of our state governments have been bought and paid for by rich people and the companies they run. Those people don't like to pay taxes in life, death or dissolution, so our government's ability to do the things we need it to do, most especially at times like this, suffers. If we started running this country with people in mind instead of the oh-so-precious fucking economy, maybe we'd be better able to function in an event like this.
Dollars don't have kids. Or love. Or personal bonds that overwhelm us sometimes because they're so strong. Or laughter. Dollars have no fucking joy. Why, then, honestly, do we run our country like those dollars, those little green fucking pieces of paper, are the most important possible thing in the whole world?
I will post most of the photos I took but not just yet. Not enough bandwidth here.