THIS MODERN WORLD

From a reader:

i haven’t seen too much about this (atrios has a little thing about gas shortages in atlanta), but i thought that since i live in northern mississippi i might as well shoot you a line about what’s going on. basically, the gas stations here are running out and saying that they don’t know when more gas will come. most of them have already instituted some type of rationing. the station down the road from my house has a $25 limit, and my boss visited one last night with a 5 gallon limit per customer. there are long, long lines at the gas pumps, prices are soaring, fights are breaking out, and people are getting into wrecks trying to get in there. i’m told that there are cities around here that are already completely dry.

Because this catastrophe snuck up on us in slow motion, I think a lot of people haven’t really come to terms with the immensity of it. This is going to affect us all, for a long time, in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Gas lines and price gouging are only the beginning.

(What’s happening in your area as a result of Katrina? Send your stories.)

Thanks to the readers who took part in my little fundraiser yesterday. I’ll forward payment to the Red Cross, and send out the posters, as soon as all the payments clear.

Raising a thousand bucks in a few hours isn’t bad, but unfortunately it’s a drop in a bottomless well right now. I do urge you all to click the (donated) ad over to the right and give something, even if it’s just a couple of bucks. (If you can’t see the ad yet, click the link at the top of the page.)

Four years ago it was Condi telling us that no one could have possibly foreseen the use of a jetliner in a terrorist attack, even though many people had suggested exactly that possibility. Now we have George Bush telling us:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.”

Via Echidne, who provides various links which readily refute this idiocy. And here’s one more, from Scientific American in 2001:

THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta. which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh — an area the size of Manhattan — will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.

A direct hit is inevitable. Large hurricanes come close every year. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy put parts of the city under eight feet of water. In 1992 monstrous Hurricane Andrew missed the city by only 100 miles. In 1998 Hurricane Georges veered east at the last moment but still caused billions of dollars of damage. At fault are natural processes that have been artificially accelerated by human tinkering — levying rivers, draining wetlands, dredging channels and cutting canals through marshes [see map on pages 80 and 81]. Ironically, scientists and engineers say the only hope is more manipulation, although they don’t necessarily agree on which proposed projects to pursue. Without intervention, experts at L.S.U. warn, the protective delta will be gone by 2090. The sunken city would sit directly on the sea — at best a troubled Venice, at worst a modern-day Atlantis.

But no one could have foreseen this.

Look, I’ve seen the conservatives and the Sensible Liberals saying that this disaster shouldn’t be politicized. In other words, we shouldn’t talk about the decisions that were made beforehand regarding the levee system, and we shouldn’t discuss the ways in which the commitment of funds and manpower to Iraq will affect recovery efforts, and we shouldn’t discuss Bush’s bizarre decision to spend a day giving canned stump speeches before heading back to D.C., and we shouldn’t discuss the decisions that will be made in the days ahead — and I say, bullshit. Bush is clearly operating under no such constraint — he’s obviously anticipating the criticism and trying to deflect it.

And as Josh says:

I’m sorry. I know we’re supposed to be observing an accountability free moment for the president. But there are just too many examples out there of the ways in which his policies have contributed to and accentuated this crisis: systematic cuts in levee and pump construction around New Orleans, phasing out FEMA and the apparently the whole concept of national coordination of the response to natural disasters. That’s a great idea, isn’t it?

* * *

Yes, let’s save everyone and everything we can. People on the scene and in the surrounding region are pulling together in amazing ways. But no more letting this man’s failures become his own argument against accountability. It’s always been a live-for-today presidency.

NY Times lead editorial:

George W. Bush gave one of the worst speeches of his life yesterday, especially given the level of national distress and the need for words of consolation and wisdom. In what seems to be a ritual in this administration, the president appeared a day later than he was needed. He then read an address of a quality more appropriate for an Arbor Day celebration: a long laundry list of pounds of ice, generators and blankets delivered to the stricken Gulf Coast. He advised the public that anybody who wanted to help should send cash, grinned, and promised that everything would work out in the end.

We will, of course, endure, and the city of New Orleans must come back. But looking at the pictures on television yesterday of a place abandoned to the forces of flood, fire and looting, it was hard not to wonder exactly how that is going to come to pass. Right now, hundreds of thousands of American refugees need our national concern and care. Thousands of people still need to be rescued from imminent peril. Public health threats must be controlled in New Orleans and throughout southern Mississippi. Drivers must be given confidence that gasoline will be available, and profiteering must be brought under control at a moment when television has been showing long lines at some pumps and spot prices approaching $4 a gallon have been reported.

Sacrifices may be necessary to make sure that all these things happen in an orderly, efficient way. But this administration has never been one to counsel sacrifice. And nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.

While our attention must now be on the Gulf Coast’s most immediate needs, the nation will soon ask why New Orleans’s levees remained so inadequate. Publications from the local newspaper to National Geographic have fulminated about the bad state of flood protection in this beloved city, which is below sea level. Why were developers permitted to destroy wetlands and barrier islands that could have held back the hurricane’s surge? Why was Congress, before it wandered off to vacation, engaged in slashing the budget for correcting some of the gaping holes in the area’s flood protection?

Here.

This was a promotional piece for an alt-weekly convention held in New Orleans in 2001. There aren’t many left but I’ve had a few tucked away in the flatfiles for a rainy day — and I’d say this qualifies. So I’m putting five of them up for sale now: $200 apiece postpaid and signed, every penny goes to the Red Cross.

Update: looks like all posters are spoken for.