Katrina's aftermath

First footage of Slidell and Eden outside of New Orleans is coming in on WWL.

Eden by a miracle has been spared with only a rapidly receding 4 foot flood. Slidell... well, some of the footage looks Tsunami level. 20 foot surge from the lake quoted. The centre looks sort of intact if heavily flooded, but the lake fringe - about two blocks deep ... there doesn't seem to be anything left at all. Just debris. I pray enough evacuated.

"Been hit and been hit hard." - Slidell Police Chief. "Water lines torn loose... no communications, isolated from outside world... just local communications... concerned people with famalies may try to come back... can't supply basic needs of life. Many, many days until electricity restored... Need to get the message out that the emergency care workers have had no fatalities or injuries, to reassure the famalies." --- (Paraphrased) "As to city fatalities, we don't know. But seemingly no major fatalaties as of yet."

xpost right stence but you and jody don't jump up to blast anyone who suggests pat robertson and jerry falwell might be assholes.

http://us.news3.yimg.com/us.i2.yimg.com/p/ap/20050830/capt.capm10208301856.bush__capm102.jpg

I attribute this more to stupidity than apathy, for what it's worth.

i'll admit that i feel lucky to be in a city where "acts of god" like this are rare if not nonexistent, but we're still a big-league target for terrorism obv.

What part of the Southern Shoreboard is "rural"? This is a stupid fucking argument. You can't go across any section of shoreline in the US without bumping into a city or vacation destination.

anyway new york is just as susceptible to hurricanes (see: 1820s) so laugh away when it happens here, just don't expect me to not call you an asshole then, too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/05/americas_katrina_hits_us/img/8.jpg

look. just please stop it with your "northerners drive like this" shtick. your attitude is exactly as smug as the attitude you're criticizing.

we have red states, you have blue states, we have centers of conservatism and fundamentalist religion, you have "liberal" tourist meccas. we even have uneducated poor people and some of them aren't even white!!

This is pretty much exactly where I live (Mag and State, a block from Webster) and very close to where Kyle/Fetchboy indicated he would be staying. So that's a slight silver lining for the shit-covered stormcloud of today.

i am disgusted by both of those "commentators," and i am disgusted when people do it on the left to those in the south. WHERE DID I SAY FUCKING OTHERWISE YOU FUCKING MORON?

sorry if i don't find one of the best cities in america underwater, some of the poorer parts of america devestated, and god knows how many people dead 'hilarious' or 'justified' because some of their elected officials are republican. i'm an asshole that way.

HELLO YOU DUMBSHIT WHERE DO YOU THINK MY FAMILY'S FROM??!??!? WHERE DO YOU THINK MY GRANDFATHER'S BURIED??!?!?

No. New England (or really anyplace about Virginia) doesn't get many hurricanes compared with the south and Gulf Coast..

However, they do show up on occasion.

i'm getting really sick of these talking heads lambasting people who didn't evacuate.

The issue is the water, from what I understand. Hurricanes form in the South Atlantic, starting off the shores of Africa and moving west, until eventually forming and then generally gunning into the Carribbean. Cyclones almost never form in the North Atlantic, due to the cold temperature of the water, and those that do hit the northeast are storms that typically tiptoe up the coastline, pushed back by the prevailing winds and fronts (which also typically makes them fairly weak hurricanes, in comparison to the Category 4s and 5s that land in the Southeast and Gulf).

who else is watching this snake guy on cnn?

Andrew?

parts of the northeast are susceptible to big storms -- the eastern end of long island usually gets battered pretty hard, and so does the jersey shore. not as extreme as the southeast, but there is a lot of flood damage, felled trees, etc. many of those towns (esp. in jersey) are working-class beach communities with the same flimsy-houses-on-stilts that you see in the south.

i was worried about that. using sandbags to close a 200-foot hole in a flooding levee seems like a herculean job.

In 1955 Diane, even though it was down to a category 1, dumped so much rain that it caused extreme damage in Connecticut. Among other things, it washed away the new top soil in the yard in front of the house my parents had just had built. So forever after we had scrawny, scraggly grass compared to our neighbors. We'd lament this every now and then, but mainly didn't take the lawn all that seriously.

But yeah, the Caribbean and gulf get the brunt of the hurricanes. For some reason, Florida hadn't been hit for something like 30 years before Andrew. Now it seems to get hit once a month during the season.

We've all read how the water would naturally drain into the bayous if the levees weren't there, etc

To put it another way: if you're in a space ship, and there's a hole causing all the air to be sucked out, you don't try to make a bigger hole to make the vaccum stop from sucking out everything. Your only option is to try and plug the hole.

(BTW, its now being said that the flooding shouldn't be 12-15 ft, but more like 9. still pretty bad.)