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Posts Tagged ‘Watching Katrina’

Four Years Ago: Day 4…

September 1st, 2009 Comments off

Morial Convention Center - 9.1.05

Spent most of last night trying to follow what was happening in New Orleans on the Internet. It was the same old news. It was almost like an information vacuum. Where were the rest of the people? I had finally gone to bed. It was now around 10:00 am PDT on Thursday, 9.1.05. Then it happened. In the rush to feed the appetites of a global audience, including myself, MSNBC turned its photo-journalist Tony Zumbado into a reporter and put him on the air live. He had just come from a tour of the Morial Convention Center, and began to describe to the world what he saw. As he gave a heart wrenching account of what he saw inside the convention center, the news producers were rolling tape of what he and his sound man shot and recorded earlier.

My heart just dropped. I could not believe what I was seeing. It was like I was witnessing a slow agonizing death, live and in living color. I immediately saw a relationship between the “looping looters” and the disaster victims whose ages appeared to range from newborn to centenarians.  The so-called looters were feeding the people, filling in the void left by the “normal” relief agencies. It was like I was looking at Mogadishu file footage. Refugees in America. “Please help us!” “We need food!” “Where’s the Mayor?”


M. Darryl Woods, Literally Responder
thecontraflow@yahoo.com





Four Years Ago: Day 1…

August 29th, 2009 Comments off

Warehouse District "Dodge a Bullet" - 8.29.05

Four years ago today I woke up to watch the Hurricane Katrina national news coverage. I was happy to hear that New Orleans “dodged the bullet”; that the bowl had not filled up; that the levees had held. The only damage I saw on TV was a truck crushed by bricks from a New Orleans CBD building wall. Then came the looping looting footage in heavy rotation. It was reminiscent of the 1977 NYC Blackout, the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, the 1999 Seattle WTO Riots. Nothing new here, just history repeating itself. It was time to get busy with my Southern Nevada business of life. The weather man was predicting 113 degrees today. One could say this was our daily natural disaster, the summer heatwave season.


M. Darryl Woods, Literary Responder
thecontraflow@yahoo.com