Centerfield

And it's getting worse and worse. WWLTV in New Orleans is reporting that efforts to block the breach in the 17th Street Levee have stopped, and several of the water pumps are failing. This means water will continue to pour into the city until it's the same height as the lake. The French Quarter and St. Charles Avenue (one of the ritziest and oldest streets in the country) could be up to 15 feet underwater soon.

Folks, it doesn't get any worse than this. The only small sliver of sort of good fortune is that the levee breach did not occur while the hurricane was raging. Had the flooding been more sudden, there would be even fewer people alive to rescue. Tonight on the news they showed rescue workers chopping holes in roofs to free people trapped in attics.

Forget about the death toll of 60 or so that you keep seeing. We haven't even begun to count the dead in Louisiana. From what I'm hearing, it'll be in the hundreds at least. My friends in state government tell me that the calls they are getting from the area are even more horrendous and terrifying than what we're seeing on the news.

In Jefferson Parish, just outside New Orleans proper, it will be a week before they allow residents with picture ID to return to pick up any clothing or other small things they can salvage. Once they make that trip, the resident will not be allowed to return for probably a month. One official said they may be able to get the schools back up and running by December 1.

Back in '91 (oh lord, I'm geezerin'...) I worked S&R on the Andover, KS tornado. It was an F5 that swept through central Kansas, killing 17. 11 of those died in the Andover trailer park, and that's where I did my time, arriving on site inside an hour after the hit. The max damage zone was well over a mile wide and ran over fifty miles long. This, minus the bulldozers which came a week later, is what we were searching.

That's actually already cleaned up a good bit--we removed most of the standing debris the first two days, and the 'dozer tells me that photo was taken at least a week after the twister. Had by some unlikely chance Katrina stayed a Cat 5, that's what an entire 200-mile-plus wide swath of the Gulf Coast maybe a hundred or more miles deep would look like right now. Farther east towards Gulfport/Biloxi, a lot of the terrain does look like that--Cat 4 isn't that much kinder. Plus the flooding. That it wasn't as bad as it could have been doesn't mean it isn't very bad. It is very bad, and will get worse anyplace the waters aren't reduced quickly.

At least it seems like the state and local governments acted responsibly (at least in New Orleans) to get people the hell out of harm's way. If the hurricane had somehow subsided or not been as bad, people would be ridiculing the authorities for overreacting. Kudos to them, I think, for at least keeping the situation from being even worse than it was. But there are some heart rending stories.

But I have to make one complaint about the media coverage. Some of this strikes me as voyeuristic. For example, I was listening to ESPN Radio this morning and they played a tape of Brett Favre's mother in Mississippi talking to Brett Favre to let him know she was ok. She had run into a reporter and he let her use his cell phone. I thought it was inappropriate to broadcast a personal moment like that and I think some of the coverage devolves into invading peoples' privacy at difficult moments.

Marc, I admit to finding such moments very invasive and perhaps uncalled for, and they are surely trucked in front of us for ratings purposes. But there's a silver lining if such gut-wrenching moments help us loosen our grip on our wallets. What a tragedy.

Here's another human moment.

What's up gentlemen -- I highly recommend www.americares.org. They enjoy the same high capacity as the Red Cross to handle large scale disaster relief efforts while using just 1% of donated money for fundraising and administration (vs. 9% for the ARC). Both orgs are doing vital and tremendous good, however.