Life is very *UN*easy in the Big Easy tonight. Hurricane Katrina is gunning for New Orleans.
Yesterday, she was a Cat 3 and counting. Less than 24 hours later, she's a Cat-5 and nearly unstoppable. There are all sorts of statistics out there I could quote right now....the fact that she would be the 4th Cat 5 in recorded history to slam into the mainland....that New Orleans has dodged this bullet for four decades...but there are two numbers that rise above it all for me:
1) New Orleans sits six feet below sea level.
2) As of midnight EDT tonight, nearly 100,000 people have not heeded the mandatory evacuation order, for one reason or another. EPodunk puts New Orleans' population at 469,000. That means, at a conservative estimate, 20% of people won't get out. One in Five people, stuck, trapped, stranded in that city to ride out a Cat 5.
I've been to New Orleans many times - one of my favorite vacation destinations in fact - and I've gone beyond the French Quarter. It is not a well-off area. It's the big city in an area where the surrounding parishes and states are not well-off financially. It's where people move to because they DON'T need a car to get around, or where people never leave because from birth to death they can't get a strong enough financial foothold to escape. That's exactly why these people are now stuck in the city - they don't own a car and have no way out of town.
Should New Orleans take a direct hit, the levees that hold back the River and the Lake will likely burst, turning the bowl in which it sits into a veritable cesspool of toxic chemicals, human waste, coffins, fuel, and anything else living or existing in the Crescent City at this point. That will likely also turn into a final resting place for a significant portion of the population...if they don't all make it to the Superdome first.
But for me, thousands of miles away, all I can do is write, and wait, because it comes down to this: This lady has a vendetta against my city. And all I can hope is that Lady luck is stronger than a bitch named Katrina.
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I have often been to New Orleans in the past 4 years, but on business. I can't say I'm terribly fond of the city, but I still hate to see her smashed as badly as she has been. There's an irrational fear creeping around in my head that they may just never go back, forever abandoning the whole below-sea-level disaster-target.
I've also posted a few thoughts about the New Orleans tragedy, if you'd care to have a quick read (and I'd love more people to read me...): www.farrago-mish-mash.blogspot.com
dassall
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