I’m glad to see that Ernie, the soul I know from New Orleans, has escaped the devastation there. We visited New Orleans in, I believe, 1996, and had a fun time there.
Being somewhat distant from the wrack and ruin, my sadness is dispassionate. I feel poorly, but there it is: I laughed at Chris Gillen‘s Katrina and the Waves joke, and sang “When the Levee Breaks” for most of the day yesterday.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break,
When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay.
The New York Times has a graphic showing the levees and the extent of flooding in the city, as of Tuesday afternoon.
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
Ironically enough, New Orleans was built on a rise where the Mississippi didn’t normally flood.
I saw a headline today, “New Orleans Abandoned.” My current preoccupation with real estate immediately led me to think about all that cheap swampland, but what the photographs remind me of is Venice. Bill sees Atlantis.
The American Red Cross site is over-loaded, not being prepared for the upwelling of support that accompanies a disaster, but you can route a contribution through Amazon. After the initial shock wears off, some million souls will need a place to live and something to eat.