Filed under: metrics
Ray in Austin
is my favorite blogger at the moment. He’s writing solely about NO; his anger is tangible and practical. He
provides a recap of Walter Maestri’s work in predicting hurricane
damage and evangelizing for preparedness, apparently in vain. An NPR story from last year describes how explicitly this very storm had been played out in the minds of people preparing for it.
Meanwhile, skilled volunteers are actively not being called in.
Chains of command are still worrying about looking good to others,
while the “related deaths” toll is steadily soaring. I’ve seen
this kind of careful negligence before, and cringe to observe it when
so much is at stake. 10,000 deaths doesn’t sound unlikely to me any more. According to
some sources (the NYT?), we’re up to 250k refugees in Texas, far more
than the 100k I predicted last week.
Meanwhile, the Army relief forces seem to have dived into NO from a standpoint of total war:
this city back” in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary
Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force
told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge
prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging
area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take
this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under
control.”
… next up : you didn’t know what when???