KAT INFO:
hurricane katrina and the chaos of
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This is a longish article by Jose Torres Tama, of
For those who are annoyed even by this
email and the message above then please delete it and forgive me, I won’t
be sending more like this to the MAC big list.
Peace in the Midst of the Storm that
Still Rages –
E-K. Daufin
MAC Membership Chair
Professor of Communication
334.229.6885
By Jose Torres Tama, of
I escaped from
Please circulate this as much as possible as there is much misinformation about
a number of things and some of the decisions that were made locally, statewide
and nationally.
While we can urge the efforts for evacuation of the people still left behind,
we must also urge for them to let us back in so that we, the residents, can be
engaged as a community to re-build our city. I am waiting to return and rebuild
as soon as I am allowed to do so. The arrival of help obviously came much too
late for many. I was one of the lucky ones with my partner and two friends who
managed to find a wormhole in the chaos and get to the other side of the
atrocities.
Also, I did an interview with "El Diaro/La Prensa" in
Jimmy Nolan's account is on the "Washington Post" site under stories
of Hurricane Katrina. It was published in the Sunday edition. I will be doing a
piece on the radio Journal called "Latino
Everyday I give thanks that I am alive after the unnecessary madness that
ensued once Katrina passed. Once or twice a day, I do break down into
tears as I experience a deep deep sadness for the city I love and the people
who suffered unimaginable horrors in the social storm that was even worse.
Below is an account of how I escaped through a wormhole in the madness. ---Jose
Torres Tama (call me at 504-232-2968 and e-mail at [log in to unmask])
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Hurricane Katrina and the chaos of
Amigos, how do I begin to speak a picture of the aftermath that was an even
greater terror than the physical damage that Hurricane Katrina spawned as some
kind of water fury birthing an urban Kali-like chaos fueled further by the
incompetence of local and state officials? The continuous quantity of
misinformation that local and national media began spewing out was
irresponsible and more than incorrect at times as the resilient and mythic city
of New Orleans was already being pronounced dead and those of us who
voluntarily chose to stay behind in hopes of helping to repair whatever damage
Katrina might inflict were eventually sequestered by bad news, the ineptitude
of local governance and currently the national disaster relief creating an
apocalypse.
I chose to stay because I am devoted to a city I love and was willing to ride
out any natural storm in a metropolis that has survived yellow fever epidemics
and two early fires that cindered the old French Quarter to the ground so that
the Spanish could rebuild it when it was a capital of its
Providences—even before there was a United States.
So I ask you where is the compassionate conservative regime that seems
politically poised to punish this first multiracial port city in the hemispheric
I am offering such a historical time line and perspective on how the past
effects the present because we are generally uniformed about this city that is
more than Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and the party town of the Old South. I am
pleading for a collective scream from coast to coast to save this eclectic
relic of a city that has been a home for many--from one century to another.
I was able to get out on the Wednesday after Katrina hit when the city
officials ordered the water shut down. The water was cut and it was time to go.
And I had to flee this city that I have lived in for the past twenty years not
via the efforts of authorized personnel but via a pirate bus, a yellow vehicle
with the Jefferson Parish School Board brand on its side—a bus that
operated the kind of rescue mission only imagined in a Louisiana Hollywood
bayou version of “Hotel Rwanda.” I escaped with my partner Claudia
Copeland, my writer friend Jimmy Nolan, who is a fifth-generation native born
in the middle of an unnamed hurricane, and his neighbor who I only know as Kip.
Kip was on his third day of survival without access to a dialysis machine that
cleans his liver and allows him to live.
We, the ones who stubbornly stay from one hurricane to another that places us
in the “cone of uncertainty,” do so because we understand that our
human resilience after the natural storm will help rebuild and weather whatever
mother nature decides to throw at us. We know how to live with hurricanes and
their aftermath, but we were not prepared for the official sequestering that
unleashed an even more furious storm of urban desperation. Desperation that
festered like an untreated wound in an August summer.
Yes, Katrina was a force to be reckoned with and her damage was more
catastrophic than Hurricane Andrew which hit west of
We were recipients of all the prayers and rituals that keep
I live on
Can you imagine the terror that this bad information evoked in my mother who
lives in
But the misinformation and irresponsible reports began at 10pm that night when
the local CBS affiliate Channel 4, which had relocated a crew to
In fact, I was on a second floor balcony in the heart of the Vieux Carre at
Dumaine and
They digressed into a reality TV news show that was now using Katrina as a
measure for high ratings. Be aware that when a hurricane is in the Gulf the
reporters and weather men and women are the stars of the show. These were not
journalists bringing you information, for they resembled chattering egos
positioning themselves for “glorious coverage”- not unlike the city
council officials who were also gloating in the applause for themselves for
their “contra-flow” evacuation strategies that again turned the
interstate 10 east and west into a parking lot of more desperation. It
seemed that very little had improved from last year’s highway experiment
that clogged evacuees for ten hours to move thirty miles outside of the city in
either direction as Hurricane Ivan “the terrible” had us in its
“cone of uncertainty” then.
Come every June, we, as citizens of
By the afternoon of Wednesday, August 31, on other rumors that private hotels
like the Hotel Monteleone at the
By 9pm the buses had not arrived and the hotel management was as confused us
all of us waiting as to why we were still standing there at this time of night
with the city police escort they had also hired just in case their missing
buses were rushed by people without the proper tickets to board. When the
yellow pirate school bus cut the dark like some night creature on the street
pointing its blinding headlight eyes to the waiting hundreds some cheers broke
the whisperings, and we finally thought our hired fleet of heroic rescue
vehicles had arrived. The bus only arrived with the information that the
fleet had been commandeered—confiscated--stolen by local police officials
acting on martial law.
All along, I had placed myself in waiting close to the hotel management at the
corner of Royal and Iberville to be in proximity to hear any information on
what was unfolding. Only then did I speak to one of the yellow bus crew
of two that told me there were no buses coming and that they were there
relaying this difficult news while offering passage to Baton Rouge at fifty
dollars a head. Imagine how this conversation was taking place in the
flashlight lit dark of night on a French Quarter street corner where the sounds
of madness were audible a block away on the infamous Bourbon Street that
normally hosts an all-night party for Puritans and yahoos that come to unwind,
drink, and throw up from all parts of the country because they cannot have that
much fun in their own cities of social convention and Christian repression.
Certainly, we made an offer to the bus driver for the four of us that was quite
below their asking rate, and like any other transaction under the table in this
city, it was accepted. We got on the bus as the Monteleone
management was trying to figure out what to do and if to relay the bad news to
the five-hundred people that were losing hope as the night grew more ominous.
We handed over our collection of dollars to the bus driver and sat on the cold
steel floor, with Allen Toussaint already having been the first to mount this
pirate bus when it pulled up to the street. He sat among a small group of folks
that were already on board--occupying one of the coveted seats. I was ecstatic
to be on any vehicle ready to drive me out of town and would have sat on the
roof if I had to.
If the Monteleone could privately engineer a rescue effort to bring in ten
buses, then how is it possible that the city and state could not organize a
fleet of 100 buses to rescue all the people left behind? These officials
could have used the stealth training of the pirate bus crew that seemed to come
in and out of town through back roads that were quite dry as opposed to news
accounts that water compromised all land rescue efforts. We, the citizens
of
I ask you to mount a collective scream of outrage and wolf howls into the
airwaves, radio and TV stations, so that we can come in to do what we have
always done in times of disaster and that is to lend a genuine human effort
that is tribal community oriented and truly compassionate. We are being
played as a reality TV show for political sadists who have the audacity to
publicly say we are not worthy of governmental support because we are an old
city. Just yesterday, I heard that a Republican politician spewed some
vitriol to that effect. Yes, we are an old city in these young
Jose Torres Tama
Saturday, September 3, 2005