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Waiting for the Bus in New Orleans
August 30, 2008 - 4 pm
In the blazing midday sun, hot and thirsty little children walk around bags of diapers and soft suitcases piled outside a locked community center in the Lower Ninth Ward. Military police in camouflage and local police in dark blue uniforms and sunglasses sit a few feet away in their cars. Moms and grandmas sit with the children and wait quietly. Everyone is waiting for a special city bus which will start them on their latest journey away from home.
Hundreds of buses are moving people away from the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Gustave is heading for the Louisiana coast nearly three years to the day after Hurricane Katrina destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes across the Gulf Coast. Many now face mandatory evacuation. Dozens died in Haiti and the Dominican Republic after Gustave visited. After Katrina, few underestimate the potential of Gustave, now a Category 5 (out of a maximum of 5) storm.
Yesterday marching brass bands led commemorations for those who died and for those who lost so much in Katrina.
Today, Humvees crawl amid the thwack thwack thwack of plywood boards being nailed over windows.
Soldiers with long guns and police of all types are everywhere. Fifteen hundred police are on duty and at least that many National Guard are also here.
One estimate says two million people may be displaced.
In the lower nine, still no bus even after a wait of over two hours. Another mom clutching an infant walks up to the center with a small suitcase and adds another diaper bag to the pile. Children ask for water but nothing is provided. An African American nun named Sister Greta drives up with a few bags of ice and some water and paper cups and everyone happily shares.
This is the first step of displacement. Those with cars drive away. Those without walk to a community center with their children and wait for a bus. The first of many buses they will take in their journey to who knows where. The bus that people are waiting for will take them to the train station where people will get off the bus, be entered into computers, be given bar code bracelets, and then put on other buses for a trip to public shelters in places like Shreveport, Alexandria and Memphis.
New Orleans expects 30,000 people need help evacuating.
Many waiting for this bus were in the Superdome when Katrina hit. One of the men shows a picture of himself on a bridge surrounded by flood waters where hundreds waited for boats.
There are still big problems. A 311 call system for the disabled and seniors never properly functioned, crashed and has been abandoned.
Though the wait for the bus is rough, this appears to be a huge improvement. When Katrina hit, there were no buses and no way out of town for the 25% of the city who had no cars. As a result, nearly 100,000 people were left behind. This time the hospitals and nursing homes are emptying, the prisoners are already moved out, and there are buses to carry out tens of thousands. There are still big problems, but people do have a chance to get out.
Seniors worry about their social security checks, due the first of the month. Others worry about leaving behind pets. (One semi-rural area announced that each person getting on the buses could bring one pet, a dog or cat, no roosters, no pigs). Others worry about the looming 24-hour curfews. St. Bernard Parish promises that those out during curfew will be arrested and immediately transported to Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Back at the community center, the bus finally pulls up. No one complains that it is late. Holding bags and children, people line up quietly in the sun to climb into their first bus. A blind man is guided into the bus. Little kids pull smaller children. Forty-three get on the bus. There are three nine-year-old children, one seven-year-old, one six, four three-year-olds, three one-year-olds, one infant is 11 months, a 3 month old, and a couple of young teenagers. All the moms and grandmas and kids and bags and diapers make it onto the bus and it pulls away.
Across the Gulf Coast, another journey starts.
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17 Comments so far
Show All"When Katrina hit, there were no buses and no way out of town for the 25% of the city who had no cars. "
That is a lie. I saw the buses sitting in their yard flooded. Ray Nagin the mayor was too stupid to use them to evacuate the citizens before the flood.
You know, I just KNEW that the comments would be overloaded from the get-go with the usual reactionary tripe about the infamous school buses*, etc.
Stay tuned for the "tough love" and "tough s**t" lectures about how New Orleans should've been abandoned to Mother Nature long ago, such that only madness or badness can explain the folly of continuing to live there and working to preserve the city.
*which is not to say that Nagin isn't indeed a self-serving scoundrel and charlatan.
All people should be made to leave California because of wildfires and earthquakes. Sound stupid? Yes it is I admit, just like this assinine comment that I'm replying too.
What struck me were the ages of the children; and that in their short years they'd probably seen two life-threatening weather events challenge the stability of their lives.
Waiting for the bus carries such an existential feel to it, reminiscent of the play, "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Becket.
Sad for all...
Not to worry!
The George W. Bush 'I'm still relevant' tour is coming to the Gulf Coast!
He won't have to wait for a bus. So everything's okay, see?
Living below sea level is a risky business . . .
My family spent time in Holland one summer and bicycling on top of the huge dikes was really amazing . . . on one side, about four or five feet below the top of the dike, was North Sea . . . on the other side, at least THIRTY feet below the top of the dike, were roads, cars, towns, animals, all the trappings of civilization . . . remarkable but sort of spooky . . .
"Soldiers with long guns and police of all types are everywhere."
This is how people are evacuated to safety in this country.
At gunpoint.
The struggle to bring about Peace will be more difficult than merely ending the Iraq "war" or the insane "War on Terror". This kind of thing will also need to be dealt with.
When we read a story about an evacuation like this and find no mention of guns or soldiers, if the "rescuers" are actually welcomed by the People and therefore need no tools of violence or coercion.
Then we could be said to have Peace.
It feels like this is going to be a long and difficult road, but we can only just now faintly discern its beginning. So who knows?
Have Fun,
-matti.
We have a bus here locally that is not so affectionately referred to as the Hieronymus Bus, named after Hieronymus Bosch the Dutch painter whose largely religious works are characterized by grotesque, fantastic creatures mingling with human figures and often sticking them with pitch forks and others such torments. I can imagine the scene on some of these buses in New Orleans loaded with people who are broke, hungry, thirsty, upset, and whose children, like all children, cannot sit still for long, while dirty diapers are choking the atmosphere.
Bill Quigley was there for Katrina, with his wife, a nurse, in a hospital and was on DemocracyNow. It's sad. I was there for Hurricane Betsy, and the next two years. Why does the/each Hurricane approach, arrival get so much main stream news coverage and then, the folks' stories disappear. FEMA's trailers with formaldehyde hardly made a press/tv ripple. Followup? The housing story in NOLA pre and post Katrina was bad and then awful. Gustave, if it hits, may slow expensive condo buildup, which would be good. Keep up the pressure for displaced residents to get the aid they are entitled to and the right of return, if they want it....
Yet another unnatural disaster for the bloodthirsty elites to gorge themselves on. If our leaders truly had a conscience, they'd be doing something drastic about global warming and build some sort of dome for environmentally vulnerable areas such as NOLA. Dams alone 'aint gonna cut it.
For some reason I keep getting the feeling that they'd do it if Greenwich, Bel-Air, or The Hamptons were getting hammered like NOLA.
YOHOCOMA: In Caifornia it's bad brush fires AND earthquakes, all across the midwest are potentials for periodic tornado outbreaks (and recent flooding). Why target Florida? The nation has LOTS of weather patterns, each capable of causing havoc.
To the premier climate denier on this site, MIMICCS... I remember when LIFE MAGAZINE did cover stories of a great earthquake, or a tornado outbreak, or a bad hurricane. Seems about a decade passed between each MAJOR event, but in the past 5 years the world has seen the tsunami take out 250,000 in the blink of an eye, a bad earthquake in Kashmir (or that vicinity) took out about 50,000. Katrina killed some, but took out about 250,000 homes, and the recent California fires burned plenty of important real estate. These are just SOME of the climate events of the past 5 years that brought headlines, but there have been a great many... like the flood in India as I write this, or this latest hurricane aiming again at Louisiana. The FREQUENCY of violent weather events is where evidence of global climate change can only be refuted by a chimpanzee or someone who like the fundamentalist Christian, only cherrypicks lines taken out of context from his favorite authority's big book.
Thank you Bill Quigley for making this personal and trying to bring us together. Why are the most religious so opposed to "THE COMMON WEALTH FOR THE COMMON GOOD?"
The 'authorities' are getting paranoid about the consequences of another Great Flood since they have still not repaired the levees adequately. However God will give them a break since the storm path is to the opposite side of the city as compared to Katrina's path, and the city will not be hit by swells as big as those that hit the city then.
"real world August 31st, 2008 10:56 am
"When Katrina hit, there were no buses and no way out of town for the 25% of the city who had no cars. "
That is a lie. I saw the buses sitting in their yard flooded. Ray Nagin the mayor was too stupid to use them to evacuate the citizens before the flood."
HE SAID "When Katrina hit", while you said "before the flood", which is not the hurricane itself and is or was before Katrina really hit; therefore, you speak of a different time and a feature, consequence. And once the buses were flooded, I suppose they were no longer usable for rescue or anything else; until the water receded. So maybe (?) there were no buses available when Katrina hit; and if the flood wasn't expected, then perhaps New Orleans people didn't expect Katrina to be as bad as it turned out due to human negligence.
The mayor not using the buses to rescue residents of New Orleans [before the flood] is unfortunate, but is not bad judgement if there wasn't warning of such danger being at all likely. From what I recall, they did not expect or anticipate this flood, and perhaps had too little information on Katrina itself.
I'm suggesting these arguments due to 1, not being sure, and 2, they're possible.
I was hoping they would have their collective SH together for this round of bad weather. I have heard about this storm for about a week now. Do the math 30,000 as the story above said divided by 7 days = 85 bus trips a day with just 50 people on each bus. Now if the US military can move several war ships across the world that would hold the entire population of NO, 30,000 should be a snap.