Everyone should be fired or impeached. Everyone.

Darcel Monroe, 21, a bakery cashier, stammered hysterically as she recounted seeing two young girls being raped in one of the women’s bathrooms. “A lot of people saw it but they were afraid to do anything,” she said. “He ran out past all of us.”

How often do young girls get raped at New Orleans Saints games? They had years to plan for this contingency, yet they had totally inadequate security.

Once inside the dome, refugees were told that for their own safety they could not leave – the flood waters climbed four feet up the walls outside – and many likened the shelter to a prison.

Michael Childs, 45 and a housepainter, went a step further.

“It’s worse than a prison,” said Mr. Childs, who knew something about the subject, having spent three months in the Orleans Parish Prison on a drunken-driving charge. “In prison you have a place to urinate, a place for other bathroom needs. Here you get no water, no toilets, no lights. You get all that in prison.”

No one thought about the need for port-o-potties or some other solution? No one thought of buying bottled water? Shouldn’t the dome have been supplied with these things at all times, as part of their contingency planning? How many days did they have to buy water?

By Wednesday the stink was staggering. Heaps of rotting garbage in bulging white plastic bags baked under a blazing Louisiana sun on the main entry plaza, choking new arrivals as they made their way into the stadium after being plucked off rooftops and balconies.

The odor billowing from toilets was even fouler. Trash spilled across corridors and aisles, slippery with smelly mud and scraps of food.

“They’re housing us like animals,” said Iiesha Rousell, 31, unemployed after four years in the Army in Germany, dripping with perspiration in the heat, unable to contain her fury and disappointment at being left with only National Guardsmen as overseers and no information about what might lie ahead.

I’m sorry, the mayor and governor cannot be let off the hook. This was a total disaster.

At the center of the dome, the field looked like a sprawling military aid station, littered with casualties from a major battle. Families huddled together on scraps of cardboard and torn sheets of vinyl ripped off the lower walls of the stadium. A few stretched out on cots. Piled beside them were plastic shopping bags and suitcases, holding a few clothes. Some people had arrived with nothing more than what they were wearing.

A humid, dusky haze hung over the football field, pierced by three angular shafts of light, as if from an old biblical movie, streaming through holes that the storm tore in the rubbery white fabric covering the dome.

As I said the day before the hurricane hit:

They expect the field level (4.00 / 3)
of the Dome to flood. I don’t know if the roof can hold. It’s a potential deathtrap. Panic is probably the biggest threat. I am very worried about the people in the Dome.

by BooMan on Sun Aug 28th, 2005 at 05:44:04 PM EDT

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