As the Raw Story said on September 13, and there is nothing now to indicate otherwise, that the Red Cross has yet to provide relief into a heavily militarized New Orleans, according to the NBC blog, the city is still desperate for supplies.
I’m tempted to say, “Don’t go back”. At least not now, and not when the city “reopens” on Sept. 26.
It’s going to be a logistical nightmare to aquire food and water and ice.
That’s exactly what it is right now. The producers of NBC were careful to phrase their wording, and it is anything but investigative journalism, but here is what they said:
My crew and I headed out early yesterday looking around for ice and water lines. Not for ourselves, but to find out if there is a continued need for the bare necessities like that here in New Orleans. It didn’t take long to find. As you’ll see tonight on Nightly News, Lisa Myers is reporting that many supply trucks and planes are criss-crossing the country or sitting on tarmacs, costing taxpayers money when people are still in desperate need down here.
Marisa Buchanan/NBC News
Pallets of water await distribution outside New Orleans.
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That is not to say that people here are without any help, but the message was clear from the people we talked to on the outskirts of the city: aid needs to keep coming. Pennsylvania National Guardsmen who are running the ice line told me that they call into a distribution point three times a day, reporting back how much they’ve given out, and how much more they need. Demand doesn’t seem to be waning. Cars are lined up down the street waiting for ice, water and MREs and they tell me its been like that everyday from open to close. People, with or without electricity, can’t drink their own water and need the supplies to keep food, water and even some medicines cold. Ice is a premium commodity for all of us here. It feels like mid-summer and it’s hot, really hot. Those who have the added burden of cleaning and sorting out their lives and homes will need aid for a long time to come.
Mayor Nagin is looking into creating a Wal Mart in the once House of Death, the Convention Center. Hope they work out what will be the parking nightmare of a lifetime.
In the meantime, it still needs to be asked, “Where is the Red Cross?”
I’ve seen the smug Nagin on Larry King Live recently, talking glowingly now about what he believes will be a New Orleans revitalized.
I hope he is right. In the meantime, we could use another get off your goddamed asses and do something speech to get food and water into residents who are already helping with the cleanup, and getting jobs to cleanup. Particularly since most of these people are the poor of the city. And particularly since the National Guard won’t be bringing in supplies anymore either. Read below.
Many helping clean the empty streets of vacant neighborhoods
‘Can’t nothing hurt me but God’
By Gwen Filosa
Staff writer
Throughout Central City, one of the roughest parts of New Orleans and home to the C.J. Peete public housing development, churches, barber shops, corner stores and hundreds of modest shotguns, John Lacey was a lone figure one day this week.
He was sweeping up the mess from the storm.
Lacey, who remains in his apartment off Jackson Avenue, said the National Guard has been checking on him regularly. “They got a nice attitude,” he said. “They dropped by the other day and gave me a cigarette lighter.”
That may be all he’s getting. The days of dropping off Meals-Ready-to-Eat and bottled water to holdouts in New Orleans are over, said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, spokesman for the National Guard.
“We can’t keep doing a supply mission,” Schneider said Wednesday in Baton Rouge. “The policy has shifted a tad. We tell them we can get them out, but we can’t keep dropping off provisions.”
That won’t help the remaining survivors, such as Alvira and Troy Theriot, a mother and son who rode out the storm.
“I could use some food,” Alvira said. “I don’t want to leave. I wasn’t afraid of the storm.”
Theriot, 67, on her front stoop Wednesday morning, said she was fine. She had a little food left and had water – tap water. In the 2200 block of Harmony Street, just blocks away from a National Guard headquarters at the Sophie Wright Middle School on Napoleon Avenue, Theriot and her son, Troy, 41, said they had been checked on by a military outfit.
Candles burned inside to light the rental. Theriot, a retired housekeeper, asked a visitor if the Wal-Mart was open. She hasn’t heard of the looting that went on directly after the storm and that the big box retailer was now a military compound.
The Theriots didn’t want to leave the city, nor did they consider taking shelter at the Superdome, which city and federal officials dubbed the shelter of “last resort.”
“No,” Alvira Theriot said. “With all those people?”
Now, the mother and son are stuck in New Orleans, their choice – as much of a choice as the working poor have these days.
Also stuck is Lacey, 51, who had a broomstick in his hand as he swept in front of Sadie’s Beauty Salon in the 2300 block of Jackson Street. Lacey rode out Hurricane Katrina in his apartment in the back of the building.
“Ain’t nobody stay but me and the dogs,” he said, wearing black gloves and a black visor sideways. “I’m just a lonely person living in a one-man house.”
The water rose, but it didn’t get into his house, he said. The neighborhood, a short drive from the tony mansions of St. Charles Ave., was dry last Friday, but in some places the water marks on homes rose to five feet.
Lacey returned to New Orleans four years ago after a 28-year stretch at the maximum state prison at Angola for what he called a “simple robbery.”
“Can’t nothing hurt me but God,” said Lacey, who added that he would take any job cleaning up New Orleans, a city he said he loved and would never leave.
Across the city, in Hollygrove, several New Orleans men already were working such jobs. Daral McNeil, 45, a bricklayer by trade, said his eastern New Orleans home was ruined.
“I lost everything,” McNeil said, taking a break from cleaning Monroe Street to watch a line of federal disaster team white vans – the symbol of dead-body recovery in New Orleans these days – and white-jacketed workers retrieve a body from a home. “That’s why I’m out here now, trying to regain.”
Raymond Guild, 54, of Algiers, is working too, earning $100 a day for 10 hard hours. He used to work offshore for PSC.
The men said they got the jobs at a federal disaster headquarters set up at an Algiers stadium.
“My job is under water,” said another man who identified himself as Big Dog, of his prior job as a cook at the Hyatt hotel on Canal Street.
But clearing tree limbs, trash, and debris from damaged homes was paying these days, they all acknowledged. It would do for now.
