Looters Will Be Shot

Non-Looters, too!

I'm sure there are assheads (to use J's favorite slur) who've taken advantage of the looting scene down there in Water World. Then again, stealing a vacuum cleaner or TV that's going to get soaked in Lake Pontchartrain runoff, well, it's an insurance claim for loss either way, so if they get the booty to higher ground I can't see the harm. And with no electricity, they're not really being criminals as much as being bad consumers. I mean, if I have to swim out of my house, I'm not stealing cleaning equipment. If the stores aren't open because the owners evacuated and there's no electricity anyway, I'm stealing food and booze. And maybe a boat if I find one.

As far as whether the deluge was preventable, I dunno. I think when you have people in the Quarter who ride out the hurricane in a bar boarded shut with the plywood sporting the slogan 'we will not die sober,' no one figured the levies and flood walls would break. Maybe it could have been prevented, but I don't know if anyone could have pinpointed where it was going to fail and gotten material in place fast enough or not. At this point, it's kind of like realizing that buildings like the Twin Towers ought to have automated anti-aircraft guns on them, just like an aircraft carrier, sufficient to elminate any airborn threat including cruise missles and errant airliners. Try selling that idea before 9/11, but in the post-9/11 world try flying a 747 at the Pentagon. My bet is you end up with a few hundred civilians made into confetti a mile before they would have it the wall.

When the '93 flood happened, I traveled to St. Louis, and at one point I-70 was only about six feet above the Missouri River at one of the mid-state crossing points. I clocked it on my odometer, and the Missouri (not Old Man River a tributary) was over two miles wide. At St. Charles, the confluence of the rivers, it was 26 miles from shore to shore. In the years after that, I saw flood walls go in where no one had ever thought you'd even want a sand bag. And that was a slow rising of water while it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. The Gulf Coast got that with some stank on it in a day. In a perfect world, everyone would have monolithic homes with self-sufficent power and 2-inch Lexan windows that withstand 300+mph winds. An as soon as you figure out how to build those kinds of multi-million dollar homes for people who are lucky to afford a fucking trailer, call me.

Obviously what they've done to address drainage in the City Below Sea Level, the opposite of Denver, wasn't good enough and will probably be beefed up big time. But those hundred year old pumps that aren't pumping because the electricity is off: those are new compared to the city itself. So while my own basement is enough to scare me off of living in a little house on Constantinople Street to do these scribblings on Big Chief tablets, there's got to be reasons New Orleans is there.

Something tells me the city will never be the same again, no matter how many billions Congress doesn't have gets spent. I wish I'd visited it before. Kind of like my pilgrimage to NYC, there's just some places you should see, experience, taste.

Oh, and good news on the Tabasco front: Avery Island appears to be far enough inland to only be devastated. Their zip code is not on the list the Post Office isn't accepting mail to. So hopefully the hot sauce will continue to flow. From what I can find online, it looks like if you compared Katrina to a ten-car pileup, they're about eight cars into it, fucked, but not a totaled car with a dead driver.