Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans

I sit here, 8 hours away from the Home I love so, and my heart is breaking. Like everyone else, I am grateful for the friends and family that made it out safely. Most of my family fared well, but a few lost everything.

I am so thankful for the streaming reports from WWL-TV and WDSU in the beginning. It helped me breathe easier as the storm hit. After covering storms during my tenure in New Orleans radio, I expected some of the flooding and the damage, but like everyone else, felt The Crescent City had been spared "the nightmare" meteroligist have predicted since I was a child.

Then the reports started coming in. First St. Bernard, then New Orleans East, then the coastal parishes. The reports sounded like a bad joke, 8 feet of water on Judge Perez, 12 feet of water in the east.

My heart sank as I saw the first pictures from the air. I would look at the area, find a landmark I knew, and then flash back to the hundreds of times I had passed that intersection. It really hit home when I saw the flooding in the 9th ward. I lived in Chalmette, so I drove through there everyday. Watching them dropping people 15 feet up the side of the Judge Sieber bridge was like watching a really freaky version of the twilight zone.

Such a big deal has been made out of the looting. That happens duing every castrophe. The one's looking for food and water I had no issue with. How can you fault the peole trying to get stuff to survive? I will only say that the one's taking valuables, and the "gangs" will have to face their maker one day.

The truth is, we were told this would happen for as long as I can remember. The federal goverment wouldn't spend the money needed to bolster the levees to the level the Corps of Engineers wanted. None of us thought of leaving. I would have been home in SE LA if I could find a place there that would pay as well as I get here. New Orleans is a great place to live. It's like no other city on earth. It will be back. You can destroy buildings, but nothing can destroy the spirit that make New Orleans home.

Yes, the response was slow. But, they are not getting to the MS, or AL coastline any quicker than they got to us. Jessie, Al, and all the rest of the "it's a racal thing" crowd needs to shut up for a second and realize that the feds have screwed up everywhere, not just New Orleans, and LA.

Here's the real question, why didn't we spend the 3 billion the Corps of Engineers asked for over 20 years ago to shure up the levee system? 3 billion then would have stopped 100 billion of damage now. This isn't about what Ray, Kathleen, David, Mary, or even W has done (or hasn't done). The levee breach should have been solved way before any of them had any responsibility.

Yes, the federal response should have happened faster, everywhere. That's a given, but the Mayor, the Governor, the heads of all the local goverments around the city all asked everyone to leave 2 days before the storm hit.

I've been in AR since Feb 2005. Before that, I was living in Houma, LA just south of New Orleans. I evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. Thousands didn't, even though that was asked then too. I left late and watched as every TV outlet in the area had a fit because it seemed that even though those leaving was only about 40 - 50% of the area, the traffic jams were long, and the issues were evident.

I only have one issue with what Mayor Nagin, and Gov. Blanco did to prepare for this. Why did the buses not get used? As a last ditch effort, every school bus, and every RTA bus should have been put on a grid, one las ditch effort to evacuate everyone that wanted to go. If it only got a few thousand extra people out, it would have been a few thousand that didn't end up in the hell of the Superdome or Convention Center, or worse, dead.

I continue to pray that we will be able to recover many of the trapped people alive and well. I continue to pray for the families of the vitims to have the strength to get through the dark days ahead.