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People locked in; Red Cross locked out.

by Risa

Apparently last night (6 DAYS after the hurricane )there were still ~5000 people still stuck the Superdome, which is up to the hilt in filth, without food or water.
The National Guard is was preventing people (well, at least the poor black ones) from leaving the city, controlling access to the bridge that is the only way out. At the same time, the Red Cross not been allowed into New Orleans to help the people stuck there (!?!?!)

Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera went absolutely nuts on FOX last night, both of them almost in tears at the desperation of the situation. Crooks and Liars has the video. This is extremely powerful, watch it.

Update: Apparently they’ve finally got on the ball. Geraldo was on FOX recently reporting that the Navy is now evacuating about 100 people every 10 minutes in Chinook helicopters. Why oh why didn’t this happen 4 days ago?

President announced in his radio adress that he’s finally sending in the 82nd airborne. Again, why didn’t this happen 4 days ago?

Reports are coming in from all over about how help was offered from neighboring states and localities, but the approval from above didn’t get through –
Talking Points Memo reports that Lousiana Gov. Blanco accepted an offer of state National Guard troops from New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on Sunday, just before the storm hit. But the paperwork from Washington, allowing the troops to deploy, didn’t come until Thursday…

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September 3rd, 2005 12:23 PM
in Human Rights, News | 8 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

8 Responses to “People locked in; Red Cross locked out.”

  1. 1.   Arun Says:
    September 3rd, 2005 at 3:32 pm

    From the Chicago Tribute (sorry, no URL)

    Spreading the poison of bigotry

    By Howard Witt
    Tribune senior correspondent
    Published September 4, 2005

    BATON ROUGE, La. — They locked down the entrance doors Thursday at the Baton Rouge hotel where I’m staying alongside hundreds of New Orleans residents driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina.

    “Because of the riots,” the hotel managers explained. Armed Gunmen from New Orleans were headed this way, they had heard.

    “It’s the blacks,” whispered one white woman in the elevator. “We always worried this would happen.”

    Something else gave way last week besides the levees that had protected New Orleans from the waters surrounding it. The thin veneer of civility and practiced cordiality that in normal times masks the prejudices and bigotries held by many whites in this region of Deep South Louisiana was heavily battered as well.

    All it took to set the rumor mills in motion were the first TV pictures broadcast Tuesday showing some looters—many of them black—smashing store windows in downtown New Orleans. Reports later in the week of sporadic violence and shootings among the desperate throngs outside the Superdome clamoring to be rescued only added to the panic.

    By Thursday, local TV and radio stations in Baton Rouge—the only ones in the metro area still able to broadcast—were breezily passing along reports of cars being hijacked at gunpoint by New Orleans refugees, riots breaking out in the shelters set up in Baton Rouge to house the displaced, and guns and knives being seized.

    Scarcely any of it was true—the police, for example, confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter. There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes.

    But all of it played directly into the darkest prejudices long held against the hundreds of thousands of impoverished blacks who live “down there,” in New Orleans, that other world regarded by many white suburbanites—indeed, many people across the rest of the state—as a dangerous urban no-go area.

    Now the floods were pushing tens of thousands of those inner-city residents deep into Baton Rouge and beyond. The TV pictures showed vast throngs of black people who had been trapped in downtown New Orleans disgorging out of rescue trucks and helicopters to be ushered onto buses headed west on Interstate Highway 10. The nervousness among many of the white evacuees in my hotel was palpable.

    Few stopped to contemplate that the reason nearly all the people shown on TV were black was because that’s who was left behind when the better-off New Orleans residents with the money and means to escape evacuated the city in advance of the storm.

    Nor did they seem to notice that most of the refugees were bedraggled mothers and exhausted fathers and frightened children and ailing old people—ordinary, law-abiding citizens who had had little to begin with and escaped with absolutely nothing except the clothes on their backs and their lives.

    And it wasn’t just the uninformed, the idle and the bigoted spreading the poison with loaded language.

    Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden, himself an African-American, blamed the state for sending “New Orleans thugs” to be sheltered in Baton Rouge and promptly slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the main River Center shelter, which held 5,000 refugees from the storm.

    “We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans,” Holden was quoted as telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in Thursday’s edition. “We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people.”

    It was left to the Baton Rouge police chief to go on TV later in the day to try to cool the growing hysteria and point out that a single knife had been seized in the shelter. The mayor later said he had been misquoted by the newspaper.

    But the damage had been done. The doors to my hotel stayed locked.

  2. 2.   Hurricanes and politics | Cosmic Variance Says:
    September 3rd, 2005 at 7:18 pm

    [...] What a mistake that would have been. Sure, you can’t blame Bush for the hurricane, but the tragedy has been needlessly magnified by massive incompetence at all levels, foremost at the very top. The extent to which things have been screwed up is only gradually becoming clear, but we already know that the response strategy included funneling large numbers of poor people into the convention center and locking them in, while refusing help from other countries and cities, and keeping out the Red Cross on the theory that the refugees wouldn’t leave the city if there were food and water and medicine there. [...]

  3. 3.   Fyodor Uckoff Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 1:17 am

    “Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden, himself an African-American, blamed the state for sending “New Orleans thugs” to be sheltered in Baton Rouge and promptly slapped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on the main River Center shelter, which held 5,000 refugees from the storm.

    “We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans,” Holden was quoted as telling the Baton Rouge Advocate in Thursday’s edition. “We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people.”"

    Well, I must say that it was really, really *insensitive* of Holden, “himself an African-American”, to go telling the truth on this occasion. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of visiting NOLA, the fact is that it has long been an extremely dangerous place with a record of criminality almost unequalled even in the South. You are routinely advised not to go anywhere by yourself, even in daylight. Under the circumstances, the extreme reluctance of everyone to go there was not really very surprising. Hint: nobody there was surprised by the scenes of pillage. In fact, they wondered why it took so long. Another case of over-slow response I guess……even the criminals are slow off the mark down there!

  4. 4.   Greg Kuperberg Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 2:22 am

    It shows you the way that they run Louisiana. Instead of trying to reduce crime, each city instead tries to shut it out. One of the cities, likely enough the largest one, gets the shortest straw. It’s just one of several colossal public failures that was exposed by the hurricane.

  5. 5.   Kim Schnitzius Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 5:22 pm

    Can anyone answer a question for me- who is in charge of the Louisiana Homeland Security Department? Do they answer to the governor or Michael Chertoff? Who gave the order to keep the Red Cross out of New Orleans?

  6. 6.   Risa Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 8:42 pm

    Kim, I’m pretty sure that the National Guard gave this order. Since the National Guard operates under both state and federal capacities, I’m not sure who is the ultimate authority here, although I think that it’s the commander in chief. There’s no Louisiana Homeland Security Dept, though; this is a federal agency. But according the the Homeland Security’s own webpage,

    In the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will assume primary responsibility on March 1st for ensuring that emergency response professionals are prepared for any situation. This will entail providing a coordinated, comprehensive federal response to any large-scale crisis and mounting a swift and effective recovery effort.

  7. 7.   Kim Schnitzius Says:
    September 4th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
  8. 8.   Kim Schnitzius Says:
    September 5th, 2005 at 10:17 am

    I’ve sent the following letter to my congresswoman and both Florida senators:

    Dear Senator Nelson:
    According to the Red Cross web site, they were denied access to New Orleans during this crisis. It seems a decision, according to Shepard Smith on Fox News, was also made to prevent anyone from leaving New Orleans. People were denied food, water, and medical treatment for 6 days due to these decisions. These decisions caused countless deaths and unimaginable human suffering. I challenge you to call for an investigation into who made these decisions. These people, and I don’t care who they are, must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for murder. I don’t care if it leads to Governor Blanco, Michael Chertoff, Michael Brown, President Bush, or Mayor Nagin. I don’t care where this leads- those responsible for making these decisions and allowing these decisions to be implemented are guilty of murder, plain and simple. People were treated worse than cattle and the responsible parties MUST pay the penalty. Anyone who finds him/herself in a position of authority in times of crisis MUST know that they can not make decisions that will deny victims the right to obtain help when offered or to prevent victims from seeking help for themselves for any reason. This is an UGLY side of human nature that we have seen before- I am thinking specifically of the Titanic, when the horrific decision was made to lock the lower classes in the lower reaches of the ship preventing them from having any chance of getting off. This is ugly and a clear message must be sent to all leaders that it will not be tolerated in a civilized society.

    Please take action.