I mean really psyched! As well he should be!
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
Daily Archives: September 2, 2005
Feeling guilty about that gas guzzling SUV?
Here’s an idea: go fill it up with supplies for Katrina victims and find a drop off center in your area that is arranging to bring stuff down. Check your local Red Cross chapter – they should know of any such efforts.
Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org
FEMA oblivion
Well, it was really FEMA’s boss, Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, who had the most astounding interview with Robert Seigel yesterday afternoon on All Things Considered. I listenened in the car on the way home. Seigel asked Chertoff why the thousands of people at the convention center with no food, water or officials in charge were being completely overlooked. Chertoff responded with disbelief – that the people were even there. Seigel said that NPR reporters were there and that is what they are reporting and it was a nightmare. Chertoff said well, you can’t believe all of the rumors. Oh my god. So Seigel replied that these are not rumors. These are experienced reporters that have covered wars and have been in refugee camps. Chertoff said, well, I’m not going to argue with you and the interview ended. It was astounding! Why couldn’t he just say “oh my god, nobody has come to me with this information. I will get on it immediately.” It was like he was a robot. The entire interview was incredible. Chertoff was on the defensive and kept saying “there’s food, there’s help…we have staging areas.” You can listen to it here. Siegel deserves a medal for keeping his cool. It’s a shame that it has to be this way. Our government could have been heroic.
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Evacuate with what?
According to this page of the US Census Bureau stats for New Orleans:
In 2003, New Orleans city had 181,000 occupied housing units – 92,000 (51 percent) owner occupied and 89,000 (49 percent) renter occupied. Seven percent of the households did not have telephone service and 21 percent of the households did not have access to a car, truck, or van for private use. Twenty-six percent had two vehicles and another 6 percent had three or more.
21% of 181,000 is about 38,000.
38,000 households represents a lot of people who have no access to a vehicle.
Think about that when reading this statement from the FEMA director in response to the predicted death toll.
“Unfortunately, that’s going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings,” Brown told CNN.
“I don’t make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans,” he said.
“And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.”
I wondered too, at first. Why did so many people stay? But then the more you saw on the news, the more you realized that many people just didn’t really have any way to leave. And nowhere to go. And nobody came to get them.
www.acehaid.org
3 Day Indigo class by Pluralsight
Costco in Colchester Helping me help Gulf Coast victims- you can help too
I don’t have a Costco membership, but I just called and got permission to come shopping there for the Vermont National Guard trucks going down to the Gulf Coast that are collecting today and today only. (More info on that here if you are from Vermont.) If you are someone that I know and you would like to make a contribution, email me and let me know how much you would like to contribute. I will purchase that much more when I go this afternoon.
www.acehaid.org
CNN Video Clips – lose the ads for Katrina news
The ads that play in front of the video clips on CNN.com are getting pretty offensive. The latest is an ad for DOW that talks about how clean they make the water, how great the crops are, how much wonderful medicine there is and how much wonderful food they can preserve. And then cut to the tragedy that is New Orleans. Disgusting. I know the ads are rotated randomly, but hello, is someone paying attention?
www.acehaid.org
Blog venting
One of the nice things about having a smart client blogging app that let’s me store posts is that I can write to my hearts content about how I feel about what is going on in the Gulf Coast and rant to my hearts content about the government’s slow and deadly response. I can get it out of my system and then save it and never even post it if I don’t want to.
www.acehaid.org