Irish Examiner
**I am posting a couple articles about the aftermath of Katrina because it is unbelievable what is happening to those people over there in one of the world’s richest countries with the mobility, money and expertise to mobilise for war across thousands of miles at a drop of a hat, but seemingly helpless to handle a natural disaster. But if you look at this photo from Reuters, I think you can begin to understand why Bush’s government has allowed things to deteriorate to such an extent. These are America’s poor. America is busy off overseas fighting a war against the people of the Middle East when it should be addressing its wealth and power to the issues in its own backyard such as poverty, gangs, high crime, homelessness, inequality, and prejudice. But it would prefer, as always, to throw a blanket of minimum social welfare over the squalidness and forget about it. Katrina has blown the cover off for all the world to see. These are not well-dressed office workers in a New York skyscraper involved in promulgating the great American economy such as you saw in 9/11. America will not rush to save them as it did in 9/11. America really does not even know how to deal with them except to point a gun and shoot. Do you think if Katrina had occurred in the business district of New York City you would be reading horror stories such as the following? I think not.
Reuters photo
“There have been rapes, there has been gang warfare because they have all the different street gangs in there”
By Charles Dawson, New Orleans
03/09/05
AS New Orleans disintegrated in lawlessness and mayhem, a horrifying picture emerged of the squalor, rape and gunfire battles in the stadium over the past four days.
Some 25,000 people - many of whom lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina - hunkered down with little food and little water, overflowing toilets, stifling heat and the unbearable stench of human waste.
Children slept in pools of urine. Crack vials littered the bathrooms. Bloodstains smeared the walls near vending machines that had been pried open. Gunfire has ricocheted down the corridors.
There were two reports of rape, one involving a child. Three people died - one a man who jumped to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for.
Irishman Jim Lally, whose son Conor was caught up in chaotic attempts to evacuate New Orleans, said he had been holed up in horrendous conditions in the city’s Superdome.
“They have seen sights which were indescribable to be honest.
“There have been rapes, there has been gang warfare in the Superdome because they have all the different street gangs in there.
“It is full of people off the street, people of the night, homeless people and alcoholics so on like that, drug addicts who are not getting their drugs and they are not getting their alcohol. You can only just think of what they could be getting up to you know.”
“We pee on the floor. We are like animals,” Taffany Smith, said holding her three-week-old son.
At one point, a desperate man, who had all the belongings he brought to the Superdome stolen, tried to escape and had to be calmed by National Guards.
Sgt Caleb Wells said: “We had to chase him down. He said he just wanted to get out, to go somewhere. We took him to the terrace and said, ‘Look.’ ”
He saw the floodwaters rising around the stadium. “He didn’t realise how bad things are out there. He just broke down. He started bawling.”
Police Chief Eddie Compass said there was such a crush around a squad of 88 officers they retreated when they went in to check out reports of assaults.
“We have individuals getting raped, we have individuals getting beaten. Tourists are walking in that direction and they are getting preyed upon.”
A military helicopter tried to land several times to drop off food and water. But the rushing crowd forced it to back off. Troopers tossed supplies to the crowd from 10 feet off the ground and flew away.
Daniel Edwards, 47, said: “There’s a lot of very sick people - elderly ones, infirm ones - who can’t stand this heat, and there’s a lot of children who don’t have water and basic necessities to survive on. We need to eat, or drink.”
Supplies were dangerously low, with one mother saying officials told her to reuse diapers.
The dome’s water supply gave out Wednesday, and toilets began to overflow, filling the cavernous stadium with a nauseating smell.
One man said: “There is faeces all over the place.”
No electricity in New Orleans meant no air conditioning in the dome, and a horrible, muggy heat. Emergency lights worked intermittently as engineers struggled to keep generators running.
Local legend has it the 73,000-seat stadium was built atop a cemetery, cursing the football team that calls it home - the Saints - to an eternity as cellar-dwellers. Some trapped inside believe in the curse.
April Thomas, there with her 11 children, said: “This is a nuthouse. You have to fend people off constantly. You have to fight for your life. I wake up in the morning, and the first thing I say is: ‘Where are my babies? Is everyone here?’ ”
A bustling black market has emerged, with cigarettes, at $10 a pack, and anti-diuretics, which help forestall going to the bathroom, hot items.
When buses finally arrived, a desperate group of refugees broke loose from a cordon of National Guards, but were stopped by police toting machine guns. Officer KW Miller said: “This is ready to break. We’ve been here since 6am, and this is getting worse and worse.”
Huge crowds jammed the concourse outside the dome hoping to get on the buses to the Astrodome in Houston, 350 miles away. Fights broke out. A fire erupted in a trash chute inside the dome, but did not affect the evacuation.
“I would rather have been in jail,” Janice Jones said while being taken out of the dome. “I’ve been in there seven days, and I haven’t had a bath. They treated us like animals. Everybody is scared.”
Terry Ebbert, head of the city’s emergency operations, criticised the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for not offering enough help.
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REUTERS
Rapes, killings hit Katrina refugees in New Orleans
By Mark Egan
03 Sep 2005 22:52:27 GMT
NEW ORLEANS, Sept 3 (Reuters) - People left homeless by Hurricane Katrina told horrific stories of rape, murder and trigger-happy guards in two New Orleans centers that were set up as shelters but became places of violence and terror.
Police and National Guard troops on Saturday closed down the two centers — the Superdome arena and the city’s convention center — but then penned in the storm victims outside in sweltering heat to keep them from trying to walk out of the city.
Military helicopters and buses staged a massive evacuation to take away thousands of people who waited in orderly lines in stifling heat outside the flooded convention center.
The refugees, who were waiting to be taken to sports stadiums and other huge shelters across Texas and northern Louisiana, described how the convention center and the Superdome became lawless hellholes beset by rape and murder.
Several residents of the impromptu shantytown recounted two horrific incidents where those charged with keeping people safe had killed them instead.
In one, a young man was run down and then shot by a New Orleans police officer, in another a man seeking help was gunned down by a National Guard soldier, witnesses said.
Police here refused to discuss or confirm either incident. National Guard spokesman Lt. Col Pete Schneider said “I have not heard any information of a weapon being discharged.”
“They killed a man here last night,” Steve Banka, 28, told Reuters. “A young lady was being raped and stabbed. And the sounds of her screaming got to this man and so he ran out into the street to get help from troops, to try to flag down a passing truck of them, and he jumped up on the truck’s windscreen and they shot him dead.”
Wade Batiste, 48, recounted another tale of horror.
“Last night at 8 p.m. they shot a kid of just 16. He was just crossing the street. They ran him over, the New Orleans police did, and then they got out of the car and shot him in the head,” Batiste said.
The young man’s body lay in the street by the Convention Center’s entrance on Saturday morning, covered in a black blanket, a stream of congealed blood staining the street around him. Nearby his family sat in shock.
A member of that family, Africa Brumfield, 32, confirmed the incident but declined to be quoted about it, saying her family did not wish to discuss it. But she spoke of general conditions here.
“There is rapes going on here. Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats. They keep telling us the buses are coming but they never leave,” she said through tears.
People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to the makeshift morgue.
People trying to walk out are forced back at gunpoint - something troops said was for their own safety. “It’s sad, but how far do you think they would get,” one soldier said.
“They have us living here like animals,” said Wvonnette Grace-Jordan, here with five children, the youngest only six weeks old. “We have only had two meals, we have no medicine and now there are thousands of people defecating in the streets. This is wrong. This is the United States of America.”
One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the center, “They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here.”
The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, “We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq.”
Across town at the Superdome, where as many as 38,000 refugees camped out until Wednesday night when evacuation buses first came, the 4,000 still there were corralled outside, hoping to get on four waiting buses with seats for only 200.
The scene at the sports stadium was one of abject filth. Crammed into a small area after the building was shut to them last night, those remaining sat amid heaps of garbage, piled in places waist high. The stench of human waste pervaded the interior of the now vacant stadium.
One police officer told Reuters there were 100 people in a makeshift morgue at the Superdome, mostly people who died of heat exhaustion, and that six babies had been born there since last Saturday, when people arrived to take shelter.
At the arena, too, there was much talk of bedlam after dark.
“We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom,” one National Guard soldier told Reuters. “Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death.”
'So venceremos, beidh bua againn eigin lá eigin. Sealadaigh abú.'
--Bobby Sands