A small story… here in Baton Rouge, we lost power around 9am on Monday, as Katrina moved through the area. Power, cable, telephone all went out. In the early afternoon, I picked up the phone and noticed we had a dial tone (still no power, though, thankfully I had thought ahead to get a cheap corded phone). I tried to dial out but got a circuits busy message. A bit later, the phone rang. It was my brother calling from Iraq, frantic to find my mother and check on all of us. He was certain that my mother had refused to evacuate as she had in all previous hurricanes. He spoke to me, then my mother, then my sister. About fifteen minutes after they ended the call, I picked up the phone to dial out, and it was dead. It’s still dead.
Depending on your point-of-view, either very vaguely creepy or very vaguely comforting.
The entire family from my dad’s first marriage lives in NO. We hadn’t heard word in a couple of days, but just learned today that everyone’s safe, though scattered all over (Houma, Baton Rouge, Georgia). My half-sister doesn’t know if she’ll even want to return, but for now, we know that they’re alive, healthy, and not facing the many difficulties that so many of their fellow citizens stranded in the city tragically are.
moveon.org has a service set up that helps locate free housing for those in need. If you are willing to offer free housing, there is a place for you to do that as well.
NC State University is allowing students at universities affected by Katrina transfer here, even though we’re already into the semester. They’re providing assistance with housing and financial aid, and I’m assuming that registration restrictions (like class size) have been lifted for them.
Tuesday morning, I was watching live coverage of people being evac’d from rooftops. You know, they lower the basket, and the people climb in and are lifted away. One guy, as soon as the basket started moving, you could tell by his expression that he was saying, “Whoo!” And he kept smiling and giving a thumbs-up to the people already in the helicopter. That made me smile…which is something I haven’t done much of since.
If you go to the Red Cross donation page for Hurricane Katrina relief, you’ll see the total collected so far. Right now, as I type this, the amount is $32,245,370. I have been checking it off and on this morning, and every time I refresh the page the amount has gone up – way up. In the midst of this terrible disaster, it is heartening to see this evidence of people’s concern and generosity.
OK, I just refreshed that page again, and the amount is already up to $32,301,000 – that’s over $50,000 in just a few minutes.
The Air force had flown in all the equipment needed (generators, lights etc.) to reopen the NO airport for 24x7 flights. They are now flying in a huge amount of supplies in a Berlin airlift type action.
They also had established a 100 bed hospital at the airport. Sounds like they may expand it.
The best news I got was a call at 3am that by Brother-In-Law & Sister-In-Law They and the rest of Charity Hospital were apparently air evac’d to a Lafayette Hospital. They said the staff was all okay but they lost 2 critical patients.
I heard a story on NPR this morning about a pediatric heart center at, IIRC, Tulane’s Hospital.
They said that they had an 8 year boy with heart failure and they had to move him. He was connected to this 300 pound machine that was pumping his heart for him. They had to move the machine to the roof (to a helicopter) and got like 8 doctors and nurses and pharmacists to do it.
It took about 25 minutes. The whole time they had to have someone pushing on the boy’s chest to pump his heart for him.
I just received an internal NASA e-mail from the Administrator, stating that the Stennis Space Center and Michoud Assembly Facility were both hit hard and will be closed for business indefinitely. Stennis also happens to be the FEMA staging facility for the western corner of Mississippi, so that probably has something to do with it.
Anyways, roughly half of the employees of both places are homeless. NASA intends to move offices to other facilities, including mine, and maintain payroll throughout, until the facilities are repaired and open for business.
Personally, as soon as details are available, I intend to take in a NASA refugee family, and share my place with them, since I can’t go down there to help.
Just talked to my Dad again this morning. He’s hunting for a place with generators that might let him charge his phone. He and his buddy are still all right, plenty of food and water, though they want to get out of town.
Rumor in the French Quarter according to Dad is that they will have electricity within 24-48 hours. I told him not likely. But such is the nature of rumors, I suppose.