What Did YOU Learn From Hurricane Katrina?

patience · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 801

Ludi,
Yup. I put a big share of what goes on with our welfare class at the feet of LBJ and the "Great Society" programs that taught millions not to work, motivated mothers to have children for more ADC money without benefit of marraige, and the rest of those old debacles. We now have 3 or more generations of welfare people who have no other experience. I grew up poor, but escaped that mentality, at least. For 10 years, I lived in close proximity to large numbers of that group, and learned to understand how they think. That still doesn't make it much easier to accept what they do, and how they live.
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Local fix-it guy..

Roy

A whole bunch of things I really didn't want to know, not limited to but including:

1. I needed to GTFO of Louisiana for lots of reasons

2. The local gov would tell bold faced lies pertaining to the situation when evidence to the contrary was everywhere to be seen, like right in your face.

3. That you don't want to live too close to big cities during a crisis, unless you like thugs hanging around your neighborhood, local shopping center parking lots, asking you for stuff, all the while you're wondering if the guy's going to shoot you or hurt your wife/kids when they go to the store or you're not there. Loitering thugs are not a comforting sight no matter where you live.

4. Do NOT go to the refugee center unless you are prepared to be victimized by the biggest and the meanest people there.

5. Last but not least, the things I learned here at PO.com re: prep were true, and that my preps made the 'crisis' a whole lot easier to deal with.

Logically I knew these things prior to Katrina's arrival. However, seeing it all up close and personal really drove the point home.

Likewise, I can tell you that what made the national news was but a small portion of what actually was going on. Mrs. Roy volunteered to work in a shelter and met many folks just as they arrived from the Superdome and the convention center. The stories they told her concerning what was really going on in those places were, in a word, BAD. I also know some of the people directly involved in the military relief/police effort. Again, what they were telling me was a lot different than what the media, the governor, and the head of the Louisiana State Police were telling me.

FEMA's incompetence and Bush's cavalier attitude were no surprise. Nor was the political finger pointing in the aftermath.

It was a bad situation that affected many of my friends and family in varying degrees.

If there is a silver lining to the cloud that was Katrina, it was that we all got a brief peek at how the US responds to a real disaster within our own borders, how our fellow citizens might respond, and it made the preppers among us re-evaluate our preps and adjust accordingly.

Twilight · Expert Joined: Mar 02, 2007 Posts: 2253 Location: UK

I learned...

1. American civil defence is crap.

2. Not to assume ours is any better.

3. How not to walk into a pen.

4. If you can't walk for days carrying your own food, water and shelter in your local climate, you are fucked if there is no transport. Like all those obese people trapped by the wet heat - I bet most of them didn't walk because they couldn't.

But most importantly 5.

5. In a new type of crisis, the first battle is always lost.
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I don't know if I'd hang around the town square if I were you, the angry mob might be looking for someone to tar and feather. Of course, they could only glue and feather you because tar is a petroleum derivative.
- Tyler_JC

PrairieMule

Obtaing water is key in a emergency.

My stepfather and mother were living outside of NO in Metarie,La. I sent them home after the storm with a care package. It included a PUR explorer, a Mioxx Water purifier, and a propane camp stove to boil water again.

Mom was able to get water without the help of those nice young men in uniforms.
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Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.

BigTex

Check out this footage of the New Orleans police looting Walmart:

Post-Katrina Police Shopping Trip

The report ends with this quote from the reporter:

vision-master

Cell phone are worthless - can you hear me now!

green_achers

1. No matter how well prepared you think you might be, reality can still kick yer ass. I was two days out of kidney surgery, with a tube coming out of my back and a plastic bag of piss strapped to my leg. Not exactly my #1 survival fantasy.

2. If you have to camp for several days in the wreckage, go with the firearm you're familiar with, rather than picking up a new one.

3. Have spare magazines. I didn't need any, but had a friend who didn't have a single stripper clip for his SKS.

4. The Churches are the best agencies for delivering help. Their response was awesome. I don't care for their beliefs, and I personally believe the government should be responsible for emergency aid, but in our country and at this time, no one beats the churches. Well, Organic Valley and the Rainbow Family were right there with them, but their resources were much smaller.

patience: From what I read here, I don't think I would have gotten on that bus, either. Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they should abandon their life. You don't know anything about their circumstances. It's not the same as getting on a bus to take you to a temporary shelter, either.

Your idea seems to be that no one should be willing to accept assistance. Well, I saw thousands of people reduced to accepting all kinds of assistance, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. I gladly (even more gladly now) do what I can to help others when they need it, and will have no trouble accepting help if I ever need it.

(For the record, I got a small FEMA assistance check for evacuating, but applied for no further assistance. Several of my friends got sizable homeowner's grants, which I do not begrudge them a bit. I just felt that others needed the help more than I did.)
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OK, I give up. If they want to sell us real stuff for our Monopoly money, who am I to argue?

BigTex

patience · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jan 04, 2008 Posts: 801

I hope not to offend good people who suffered much from Katrina. This area has a number of people who fled New Orleans and have been welcomed here. Most have been assets to the community. We have become good friends with one couple. Another couple moved into the town nearby us and were extended credit for many things, then disappeared owing everyone. Personal experience there.

Based upon my relative's first hand experience dealing with the crowd in Houston, he had a low opinion of them as a whole from a police perspective. A significant number ended up in jail within weeks. The record speaks for itself for those who chose to first freeload, then turn to crime, rather than take a job when it was offered. Looks pretty clear cut to me. That does NOT mean, however, that all of those displaced people were not deserving of help.

My apologies to anyone I have offended.
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Local fix-it guy..

BigTex

Here's an important piece of information for those of you who are not that familiar with Louisiana or New Orleans.

Before Hurricance Katrina:

1. Louisiana state government and New Orleans city government were probably the most corrupt and inept in the country (maybe the hemisphere).

2. People in New Orleans and the surrounding areas are mostly insane. I think that being below sea level causes some strange brain chemical to seep out that makes you want to get drunk all the time and wander around until you pass out.

So the bottom line is this was a situation that was just barely functional BEFORE the hurricane. Once the hurricane came, it was a short step to complete chaos.

If you haven't watched the video above with the police in Walmart with shopping carts, just casually filling their basket with their looted selections as other looters worked around them, it's hilarious and chilling at the same time. There was no urgency. They were just taking their time, making sure they got the right size shoes, etc.

An incredibly high percentage of people I have known personally from Louisiana were either crazy or very mentally unstable. I had one pretty good buddy from Slidell who got freaked out one night and ran up a tree. I thought we were going to have to call the fire department to get him down. He was WAY up in the top of the tree just talking gibberish.

People are different down there.
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Smile

green_achers

Still responding here. I still haven't gotten around to writing much about Katrina.

We had a newspaper story about a young couple that were in Hancock County when things were very near unsurvivable. At one point it mentioned that the man had "salvaged" some badly needed items such as water and food out of a grocery store. Guess if you're white it's called something other than "looting."

In NO, as I recall, people were starving after being totally cut off from all aid in the city. The stores were abandoned and it must have looked pretty close to the end of the world to those people. Law enforcement in neighboring parishes was literally shooting at people who tried to walk out over the bridges. (The city is surrounded by water on three sides.) So I try not to be too judgmental about what people did during some of those times, unless they actually victimized people.

Maybe some didn't make a really great decision as the storm was approaching, but there is also the fact that a lot of us have evacuated a time or two, just to have the storm turn aside at the last minute. It's always a judgment call. I guess I'm lucky I wasn't healthy enough to take a chance. I found a urologist to remove the tube a couple hundred miles north, then had the stitches removed a couple of weeks later in a debris-strewn parking lot by a volunteer nurse. Blessed at every turn.
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OK, I give up. If they want to sell us real stuff for our Monopoly money, who am I to argue?

Legless_Marine · Coal Joined: Apr 30, 2008 Posts: 17

I learned from Hurricane Katrina that America's ability to self-repair has been seriously compromised.

Pops

http://www.greensburgks.org/
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...ladies and gentlemen, we're not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality.
--Gekko.

"I hope my own children never have to fight a war,"
--GHW Bush, Naval Aviator

IgnoranceIsBliss · Coal Joined: Apr 23, 2008 Posts: 2

Whoa, that site 'The Third World in our Midst" is terrifying. I think this quote from it sums up what I 'learned" (ok, I already knew - I attended a rough high school and left the Orlando, FL area 2 years ago to escape the insane crime and growing 3rd world conditions)

"One black man, observing the chaos from abroad, took a different view. Leighton Levy wrote in the Sept. 2 Jamaica Star: “I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.” He wanted to know why there was no footage of white looters: “Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks?”

The lesson for most of us from this disaster was that we have a huge underclass here in the US (of ALL races) that is nothing more than a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off. People are living on the edge even in the "best of times." Katrina was just a taste of what might happen in a full scale disaster - chemical attack, transportation strike, food shortage, etc. We can all prepare and get ready, but the real threat will be from the "hordes of zombies" that want our food and stuff.
Get ready people! It will be kill or be killed, and I plan on the former. (PS- I'm a 35 year old wife and mother with a graduate degree in Business who believes in shoot first and ask questions later. My family comes first.) I agree that living in a big city is not a good idea. Katrina showed us that people seem to be limited in how far they can travel from the metro areas, so maybe some of the mayhem will be confined to certain areas and not spread too far out. In more rural areas, people will hopefully have a different mentality and at least try to get along in the beginning.

It's funny that people in other countries look at us like we are crazy for wanting to own guns. I had a friend in Canada who had no idea why I would own a gun. Just last week, here in GA, there was a big bicycle race and some visitors from Scotland were robbed on the street. They said they didn't think about crime here because where they come from in Scotland, it is safe to walk the streets.