Here are a couple of places I found useful images:
Josh Marshall had me choking on my coffee this morning with this post:
House-Senate Katrina probe dies as Dems refuse to participate in GOP-controlled probe.
Mammalian biologists cite development as new evidence for late-stage testiculogenesis.
-- Josh Marshall
(I don't usually like political rhetoric involving balls, but I think this is one of the best versions I've seen.)
From the Washington Post:
The Department of Homeland Security recently announced that information provided by illegal immigrants seeking federal aid could be used against them later in deportation proceedings.
"The administration's priority is to provide needed assistance: water, food, medical care, shelter," said Joanna Gonzalez, a DHS spokeswoman. "However, as we move forward with the response, we can't turn a blind eye to the law."
I'm not sure if anyone else noticed this, but I thought the ad served up by Google AdSense that read,
Foreclosures for Sale
Find Louisiana Homes
50% Below Market Value!
Search Now for Free.
was in extremely poor taste, especially given the context of the subject matter on this blog, so I have blocked it. I've never tried blocking an ad before, so let me know if it shows up again.
(As of 4:19 PM it is not gone yet. I don't know how long the blocking takes to work.)
For those of you who read Chinese, here is an article on the Google Earth and the Katrina aftermath in Chinese from the Xinmin Weekly by Zhao Yanyan, and I'm in it. For those who don't read Chinese, here is a very strange translation created by Google's Language tools.
Gently clicks on the mouse, the luxuriant blue color Earth starts to revolve, ever such giant Earth, now actually is all controls in the palm.
Writes a draft / the Zhao colorful swallow king is attractive (reporter)
(Wouldn't it be nice if Google's Chinese translation tools worked as well as Google Earth?)
One of the effects of having spent weeks scrutinizing aerial and satellite photos for people wanting information about their homes, their families, their pets, is that I am now longer able to look at aerial photos of damage in the same way. It has become much more personalized. I experience it as a stripping away of a twentieth century attitude of abstract detachment, an attitude that the legacy of World War II and the Cold War encouraged.
A few days ago, Earthhopper (links: blog in Japanese; Flickr account) was testing out Google Earth's newly added images of Hiroshima and discovered an odd lack of clarity in the area of the Hiroshima memorial, the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome.
To correct this oversight, Earthhopper has used the same techniques that Shawn MacBride and the Google Earth Current Events community used to superimpose images of the New Orleans levee breaks upon satellite images, but this time on Hiroshima:
Hiroshima Atomic Bomb - Devastated Land - Google Earth Overlay
Image overlay of Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome, taken in 1945.
The atomic bomb hit the city on Aug 6, 1945 and killed more than 140,000 people on the day, 240,000+ listed as of now.
earthhopper.syuriken.jp/places/kmzkml/hiroshima.kmz
And the other one . . .
Image overlay of Hiroshima taken in 1947 by US military.
The atomic bomb hit the city on Aug 6, 1945 and killed more than 140,000 people on the day, 240,000+ listed as of now.
earthhopper.syuriken.jp/places/kmzkml/hiroshima.kmz
Each and every one of those several hundred thousand people had a name and a face and a life story. We have been encouraged to distance ourselves from this kind of information, encouraged to be overwhelmed by it. But is that just the way we are, or is it a political construct of the twentieth century? Can we get beyond it?
It seems to me that this technique has broad applications in historical photography and in helping us forge a new psychological relationship with history. Imagine these images covered with thousands of those little red Google pushpins with names, specific street addresses, with links to family photographs, personal correspondence:
And surely somewhere in the US archives are the "before" pictures taken for planning purposes.
We have the technology to remember all of those who can be documented and remember them as individuals, not just statistics. All through September, I have seen it. I have used it. Those who die in masses no longer need remain anonymous.
(See also a similar collaborative process using WW2 recognizance photos from bombing runs, also involving Google Earth and Flickr.
And futhur to the subject of the politics of war and memory, read Gavin Grant's brilliant story "Heads Down, Thumbs Up," in Sci Fiction.)
Lucy Kemnitzer writes in the comment section:
Our own experiences after the Loma Prieta quake is that outsiders are very much into destroying damaged buildings. FEMA had a program where they'd bulldoze your house for free for a limited time. Getting buildings properly assessed would take much longer, and a lot of buildings were bulldozed that shouldn't have been, including our beuatiful sandstone and brick nineteenth-century courthouse, which was supposed to be about to fall down of its own accord but resisted the wrecking ball for several tries. In this case, the feds are going to be even pushier about it, and it will take outright rebellion to keep serviceable old houses.
As for mold -- mold is killable and cleanable. It's a health hazard while it's growing and sporulating, but it's not a structural threat to the houses. The houses will need super cleaning anyway: that water that they've been under is dirty.
From CNN this evening:
There is no good solution. But the federal response has been such that people can't feel secure in leaving all their earthy possessions until such time as the feds say it is safe to return.
My son found this caterpillar in our yard Friday. I don't know what species it is. (Anyone know?) I took its picture because of the cellular automata-style patterns on its back. I sent it to the folks at Wolfram, who I'm sure could tell me what pattern that is.
(Regarding the ichor it's sitting in, we didn't know if it was injured or whether this was some other kind of secretion.)
From the front page of this morning's New York Times:
Give it a couple of years and we'll see this same headline with just the names changed: New Orleans instead of Iraq. Can't we do better this time? I would like to think so, but the early indications are not good at all.
From Nature (a magazine to which I just sold a piece, by the way): Enthusiast uses Google to reveal Roman ruins: Google Earth programme leads to remains of ancient villa.
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.
His eye was caught by unusual 'rectangular shadows' nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.
Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.
(Come on, guys. Where's the Mac version?)
I'm sure some of you out there have been wondering what you could do to help with disaster relief. Are you a good cook? Here's your chance!
The Fire Department in Abita Springs, Louisiana, on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, needs a volunteer cook to cook for the Firemen:
A cook that would be willing to volunteer services
to cook in the station, Abita Springs Fire Dept. They
would need to be able to prepare 30-80 meals 3 times a
day. The station kitchen will be used and housing can
be provided. It would great but not required if they
would be responsible for meal planning and stock
management.
To volunteer, respond by email to sardiver183@yahoo.com. They also need frozen and fresh food of all kinds. All email should contain "Katrina" within the subject line.
They have a number of other material needs, since the Emergency
management system has let the department down. Email for the current list.
For more in the current situation in Abita Springs, see this aritcle in The Slidell Sentry-News. See also The Pensacola News Journal.
UPDATE 9/18: Good news! They've gotten everything they need for now:
I just got off the phone with the fire chief of Abita,LA. He said all immediate needs have been met and further assistance will not be required.
One of the early media photos of a NOLA dead body was of a woman weeping over the body of her husband who had been suffering from lung cancer. When his prescription oxygen supply ran out, he suffocated and died.
Yesterday the Harvard School of Public Health released a survey of evacuees in shelters in the Houston area conducted in cooperation with The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The survey had the following health-related findings:
- 52% report having no health insurance coverage at the time of the hurricane. Of those with coverage, 34% say it is through Medicaid and 16% through Medicare. Before the hurricane 66% of people evacuated to Houston shelters used hospital or clinics as their main source of care and of those, a majority (54%) used Charity Hospital of New Orleans, substantially more than the second most common care site (University Hospital of New Orleans, at 8%).
- 33% report experiencing health problems or injuries as a result of the hurricane and 78% of them are currently receiving care for their ailments.
- 41% report chronic health conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes and asthma.
- 43% say they are supposed to be taking prescription medications, and of those, 29% percent report having problems getting the prescription drugs they need.
- Of the 61% who did not evacuate before the storm, 38% said they were either physically unable to leave or had to care for someone who was physically unable to leave.
- 39% report that they did not get help from any government agency or voluntary agency during the flood and evacuation.
Earlier this week, I had my adventure trying to solve a prescription problem for someone long distance, which I chronicled in my post, Walmart Wonderland: A Strange Tale. While the situation I was trying to help with was potentially life-threatening, I remember thinking how glad I was that it didn't involve either psychiatric meds or withdrawal. This morning, Navy Blue emailed me a link to the story of a discussion board's attempt to help someone out of a situation involving both.
About the post, she writes:
I am frustrated. AND I am concerned. This is an entry on the teeny little tale of me, a couple a people, and our friend Dan. He needed medication and had to have it sent from halfway across the country.
I still have the Red Cross link on my pages, and I still feel people should donate and that it is better to have the Red Cross trying to help than not, but as disturbing anecdotes involving Red Cross folk pile up in my inbox, it seems to me that for someone out there there is a book in this: a case study on how the Red Cross is just no substitute for competent government. (And neither is FEMA, for that matter.) Here are notable passages from Navy's account:
Now it was Saturday, the 9th. Two of his medications will run out tomorrow. One is a moodstabilizer and an anticonvulsant. When one quits an anticonvulsant 'cold turkey', you are at risk for seizures. The other one is a strong anti-depressant- known for heavy withdrawal symptoms. Combine this with such a traumatic experience and the physical and psychological stressors that come with it and Dan was in a very bad situation.
He emailed FEMA and The Red Cross, asking for information on what he can do.
A Red Cross truck came and delivered water and meals.The Walgreens, a couple towns over, opened. He drove through the dirty roads to the store, stopping to wait three hour for gas. Then he brought his medication bottles, which were current and clearly had refills on them, to the pharmacy. They wouldn't be refilled unless the pharmacist could get in touch with his pharmacy or doctor.
. . .
On the 15th, 6 days after he had contacted them, Dan finally heard from FEMA, by email and the Red Cross, via a representative.“Fema said that in a few days I will be assigned to a case handler who will check into the situation and drive out to interview me for an assessment of my needs. ”
“Red Cross said they only get involved in drugs when it is a matter of life or death. I tried explaining; the guy, who had a double digit IQ, stood there with a sort of glazed look in his eyes. Nothing I said penetrated the fog. ”He received the last package [FedExed by a member of the online discussion group] and has taken four doses, and the discontinuation symptoms are generally improving.
While in Walgreens, Dan ran into an acquaintance of his, who's psychiatrist is still in the area. He will tell the psychiatrist of Dan's situation and likely enable Dan to get new scripts for his medications. In the meantime, he will be ok with what he was able to receive.
By the time FEMA sends him a case worker for an interview, he will have probably already gotten his refills. If he hadn't had another resource, which happened, in this case, to be online friends, he could be severely ill. In a worst case- Dan could be dead: seizures; acute dehydration- he was getting weak and likely wouldn't have gotten food and water very easily in the next few days; physical illness [ he was extremely sick and lost 11 pounds in about three days, no doubt lowering his immune system when he is already weak and prey to several infections]...
(The other Red Cross anecdote I received was from someone whom I had tried to help assess possibilities of rescuing a trapped relative in the early days of the flooding crisis. After exhausting all governmental avenues to place a request to have some people in a specific spot in NOLA rescued, the family tried calling the Red Cross. The person they reached didn't want to help with the rescue but did want a donation. The desperate family tried to exchange a donation for the person taking the rescue request and passing it along to someone who might help. The representative eventually allowed as how no rescue request would be passed along even if a donation was made. At that moment, as nearly as my correspondent was able to assess, there was NO organization anywhere in the country willing to receive rescue requests. The request was ultimately conveyed via helpful journalists to the Coast Guard.)
People are suffering and dying because the emergency prescription infrastructure just doesn't work well enough. The Red Cross can help, but the nature of that help is far from ideal. We should not rest assured that all we have to do is donate money and that the hurricane survivors' needs will be taken care of, because it just ain't so.
MEANWHILE,
Scary stuff from a military briefing yesterday: Defense Department Briefing on Hurricane Katrina Repairs, Presenter: Commander, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Lt. Gen. Carl Strock. (A PDF of the slides from the briefing is available here)
One of the questions that we are dealing with now is the status of the levees. It's a very important question for two reasons. Number one, we want to make sure that if there are weakened portions of the levee or there are breaches that we haven't identified yet, we know about those. Because as the decisions are made to move back in to these parishes, we need to understand the level of vulnerability that our citizens have moving back in. So we've got a very intense effort going out to assess the condition of the levee systems and put in repairs where it makes sense.
The other thing, of course, is we're looking down range a little bit and we realized when we get through our response and the initial stages of recovery, we've really got to understand exactly what occurred here. So part of our project condition survey is to capture the conditions as the water recedes so we can do the analysis later on to ensure we have the right engineering and we're doing the right steps to protect the people in the future.
So that's it. It's a sort of a forensic aspect of the effort now, principally for operational and safety purposes, but also so we can go back and understand what happened. And that's an ongoing effort.
As we do that, we are identifying some breaches in levees we did not see initially. Our attention was really drawn to 17th Street and London Avenue canal in the inner harbor. But now we're finding some levee breaches in places like the National Wildlife Refuge up here. So there are other sections of the levee which breached. We also have levee breaches down in Plaquemines County. If I could go to that one real quick.
This is Plaquemines County, which is -- which is south and east of New Orleans. They have breaches down there which we're working as well. Plaquemines has been kind of out of the news, but clearly, it's an important area, it needs to be brought back up. One of the reasons for that is a lot of the support for the oil fields moves up and down this corridor here, so we need to bring -- bring that area back up as quickly as we can.
Physicist Ellery Schempp, a friend of sf writer Jim Morrow's and a fascinating character in his own right, sent in the following interesting analysis of the levee failures:
First of all, we recognize that the flooding in New Orleans was predicted in an article in Scientific American in October, 2001. There have been many disputes between environmental groups and the Army Corps of Engineers as to how to manage the lower Mississippi. It surely is not a black and white matter.
There is dispute as to when the first levee broke--some say it was ca. 10 AM on Monday on the 17th St canal. Others say it was later that evening. In either case, all the catastrophe and suffering occurred after the levees broke, which resulted in flooding the city. Before that moment, the remaining residents were not in severe danger. All the horrors occurred because of the flooding. All the future expenses are due to the flooding.
It is truly amazing that no one seems to know when the first levee wall broke. How could it be that people were not monitoring the walls? Relatively simple and inexpensive measures could have been implemented in the months before. The levees did not fail because the water was so high that it overran them; it wasn't the direct effects of a category 5 hurricane that destroyed New Orleans. In fact, 99% of the miles of levees held perfectly well--there were two breaches, one about 50 ft wide on the 17th Street Canal and the other about 200 ft long on the Lake Pontchartrain levee. Maybe there was a third one--no account seems to know. How could people not know?
I emphasize that this was not a case of an overflowing bathtub. Cement walls failed, not due to a category 5 hurricane, but because there was no system in place to monitor and support the levees.
This is well explained in the graphics of the recent History Channel description. No earthen levee or cement wall failed { via snap}; in every case the failure took place over hours.
What should have been done:
1. All the major levees should have been outfitted with electronic sensors to monitor them. There are a host of simple means from simple water sensors on the dry side (shielded from rain), to breakable wires to monitor continuity, to tiltmeters--dozens of technologies geologists use to monitor volcanoes and earthquake zones. These could all have been connected to redundant monitoring centers provided with multiple battery and diesel generator backup. In the event of an incipient failure, alarms would be sent pinpointing the area.2. The important levees could have been constantly patrolled on the parallel roads so any signs of trouble would be seen quickly. Trucks filled with sandbags and crews ready to work would be stationed at intervals. Mobile cranes, too.
3. How did the levees fail? The most probable scenario is this. Levees are at risk of water infiltrating under the barrier, percolating through and undermining the footing. This is well known, so engineers prevent this by carefully sealing the water side with mixtures of clay and grout to prevent any water infiltration. However, the dry side is usually not so protected.
Probably, water started to slosh over from waves. As it did, it ran down the dry-side walls and began to undermine the easily-penetrated dry-side foundations, possibly somewhat weakened by the heavy rains. Eventually, one section began to tilt slightly, allowing more water over, more erosion, and from then the result was foregone. The first breach probably was over only one or two 8-foot sections. But as everyone knows, as soon as water starts flowing fast through a breach, sections on either side go quickly. So a small breach became 200 feet wide.
4. Had the sensor monitoring system been in place and had the patrols been in place, this could have been prevented. Sensors and patrols would have noticed the water coming over and immediately two-feet of sandbags placed on top of the levee, preventing further undermining. The levees would have been saved, and there would have been no massive flooding.
5. Assume that even with monitoring for an incipient situation and timely response, a cement wall breaks {snap? there were no warning signs?}. How to stop the rush of water? Well, you have barges prepared for this--they move into place and block the flow enough. Takes some engineering to make it work, but certainly doable. Street-based crews provide back up.
6. In a worst case scenario, the levees would have failed despite these early warning and corrective activities. In that case, the monitoring and patrols would have been able to raise the alarm. In a well-organized emergency management system, immediately loudspeaker trucks and buses would fan out throughout the city. "The levees have broken, The levees have broken. You must leave now. A flood is coming. You must leave now."
At the time the levees broke, there was a 12-18 hour window to get into the city and evacuate people. In New Orleans, when the levees broke, everybody was clueless, there was no early warning, and there was no effort whatever to repair a small break before it became unstoppable. There was no effort to evacuate the residents with warnings of the NEW danger, after the hurricane had passed.
It is clear that a mere $50 million in monitoring technology and levee patrolling and response teams would have saved $400,000 million in future costs.
There is no excuse for the lack of a constant monitoring system; there is no excuse for not patrolling the levee walls; there is no excuse for not having a response plan to prevent a minor break from expanding to flood the entire city. Incompetence and stupidity are high on the list. I mean, why wasn't a simple monitoring system for failure in place?
(One minor point: The people swarming around this web site were able to verifiy three breaches in three different locations by matching media images to satellite images; and as far as I know we were the first "media" source to do so. Pretty sad, yes? I entirely agree with Schempp's general point about the shocking lack of information about the breaches.)
Schempp's CV concludes:
In a 1999 interview, Ellery said: “I have had the good fortune to have worked 400 miles from the North Pole and then 800 miles from the South Pole thanks to Prof. Robert Nichols at Tufts; I enjoyed these unique places immensely and they were transforming in my life; I had the good fortune to have the Supreme Court agree with my understanding of the First Amendment, with lots of help from the ACLU and my parents. I had the good fortune to do a PhD in physics at Brown, with support from Prof. Philip Bray and many professors. I am happy to be acknowledged, and I guess I made some contributions, but I think many others are to be recognized.”
He is also the author of the widely circulated satirical essay, Warning: Gravity is “Only a Theory.” Of his gravity essay, he remarks, " Amazingly, I found a lot of responses that took me seriously. I therefore had to write an annotated version that explains the science and jokes. "
I'm busy today. So this is an open thread. Tell me what I should have been blogging while I'm off cleaning house.
Mapwise, a lot seems to be happening.
First of all, the New Improved! Clickable Depth Map (aka the C&C Technologies New Orleans Flood Map) now has an address field! Hooray! (Now you don't have to go into Goggle Maps first in order to pin-point and address before using the depth map.)
Secondly Microsoft's VirtualEarth has joined the effort. Today I got t his message from a Program Manager:
After the Hurricane, a number of us began a project to show before and after imagery in an effort to help victims discover if their homes are under water. Instead of relying on low res satellite imagery, we worked with a company who specializes in low altitude oblique imagery which gives a MUCH more useful view of the area. Anyway, we just got the results of this effort online yesterday at msnbc. I hope you find it helpful.
I tried the site in both Safari and Firefox (G5 Mac; OSX Tiger). On neither broswer did their aerial photos display properly, although the bugs were different. But the project only launched yesterday, and I could see what they were trying to do, which looks very promising.It might work for you today. Or it might work for you next week when they get a few kinks out of it. Very promising.
UPDATE: My correspondent suggests the following to get around browser incompatibility issues:
Here is an idea since images aren’t displaying for you in the browser properly. At the end of the day, Eagle Eye images are standard JPG images. You can view them in any picture viewer, not just the online viewer we built at MSNBC. If you right click (or whatever the Mac equiv is) on an image that didn’t display, you can see the full URL for the image. You can just enter that URL in your browser to display it. Like this:
http://media.msnbc.msn.com/i/katrina/0914/after/LAORLE011003NeighObliq99N-000.jpg
The image he links to I find quite affecting. The boats look like toys forgotten by careless children, an odd collision in the semantics of scale.
FURTHER UPATE: The folks at Microsoft have volunteer to take care of my current address query load, so current inquries have been passed along to them. I've been working on a bit of a case of eye strain, so it comes at a good time.
My parents are just back from their vacation in Houston. My dad just sent me this marvelous jpeg along with the note below:
Dear Kathryn and Karen,
Attached is a .jpeg file made from a half-page advertisement in the 1877 Houston City Directory advertising the Solo Saloon, a drinking establishment owen by my great-grandfather (and your great-great-grandfather) Charles Kinzbach.
We found this last week in the archives of the Clayton Library in Houston.
Love,
Dad
I'm a bit unsure what I shold have said this morning when my son's new third grade teacher told me, in the context of a discussion of the math cirriculum, that in the third grade "we don't teach memorization; we teach concepts." Perhaps she was a little too candid.
Good thing that here in the Future we can all work out multiplication problems from first principles whenever we need to multiply, isn't it?
From Gizmodo: Joel Johnson writes about an improvised radio station set up by volunteers now on the air in New Orleans:
Some volunteers came down with a low-power FM station, a hundred feet of coax, and a makeshift antenna. What they didn’t have was a tower. I was going to strap a pole onto the chimney of the house we’re staying in, but another volunteer named Jackie said she was pretty handy with a Skill saw and would be happy to rig something together.
About 8 hours later, we lofted this home-built antenna tower onto the top of the roof and begin broadcasting 94.5 FM, a station the radio operators are calling ‘The Battle for Algiers’ (which has a political connotation that I have not had the time to grok).
After the sun set, I walked a little ways down the street (but not too far, because of the curfew), listening to scratchy, mono sounds of John Coltrane beaming our from an community radio tower built from the salvaged lumber of destroyed homes. With the helicopters overhead, it felt like a lull in an 1960’s American war in our own streets that never happened.
Picture by Bradley Stuart, Creative Commons, non-commerical.
(Thanks to Xeni, who told me it was coming, and to Matt Harris who told me it had happened!)
I've been debating for a day or so whether to post this, because I don't want to advertise myself as someone who can solve this kind of problem. But I think this tale needs to be told. So here is it, as I wrote it up in email yesterday:
In addition to queries from people wanting help with NOLA disaster maps, I get a few from people asking for help of other kinds. The missing persons queries I really can't do anything with. But I got one that, after a little bit of discussion to clarify the issues, had something I might be able to help with.
The woman I'm trying to help is displaced from Jefferson Parish. She has type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. She was given a one week supply of each of her three medications. It was paid for by the Red Cross, and filled at the Walmart in Baton Rouge. She was running out of medication. She said the diabetes medication was crucial to the maintenance of her blood sugar levels, and without it she was at risk for going into a diabetic coma. Also at the time of our first email exchange, the only aid she had received was the one week prescription.
She had applied unsuccessfully for food stamps (since resolved). She also said, "I went online and applied to FEMA and received an application for an SBA loan."
In the meantime, she had relocated to a rural community, Baywood, LA. The nearest Walmart is in Zachary, LA. She went there to refill her prescription, but was told that the Red Cross picking up the tab was a one-time thing.
So, I thought about this a bit, and called up Melanie Miller, the Assistant Minister at the First Congregational Church in Chappaqua, NY. We kicked around some ideas of how to help, and our first thought was for Melanie to get in contact with a Congregational Church in Louisiana. She tried calling the one closest to Baywood. But for understandable reasons, their phone line was perpetually busy.
So we had another thought. Why couldn't Melanie just call the pharmacy department of the Zachary Walmart and give them the church's credit card number and have the church pick up the tab? Sounds easy, right? An elegant solution.
So Melanie called. And she was told, not very nicely, that we didn't have enough information to get the prescriptions refilled and that their usual policy was that they didn't take credit cards over the phone. So we get more information, and Melanie calls again and is told that the only one who can authorize phone credit card charges is Pat, the Manager, and that he won't be in until after 11 AM. She Melanie calls and calls. Pat is 45 minutes late to work. When he finally arrives, Melanie gets him on the phone and he declines to allow the First Congregational Church of Chappaqua to buy this woman her medication because he won't take a credit card number over the phone.
It seems to me that anyone managing a pharmacy would be fully aware of the risks of taking someone of the medications the woman was prescribed without a doctor's supervision. So I don't really understand what Pat the Manager is thinking. Now, I don't want to rag on Walmart, because their distribution system may be the backbone of the recovery. And I don't even want particularly to rag on the Zachary, LA Walmart. But PLEASE, people, WAKE UP. This is a national emergency.
My next thought was to give a call to the Westchester office of one of our elected officials to see if she can help, which I did, leaving a request from a constituent for assistance. Hillary lives just around the corner from the First Congregational Church, at 15 Old House Lane.
When Melanie got upset with Pat the Walmart Manager, he told her that there was a possibility that our woman might be eligible for some form of free aid, but that she would need to call or come in to determine whether she was eligible. I suspect that if she contacts him to inquire, she will be told that the one week prescription from the Red Cross that she has already gone through is all that's available.
We're still working out it. Meanwhile, the woman is looking for a more cooperative pharmacy to which to transfer her prescriptions. I think she ran out of her diabetes medication a day or so ago.
UPDATE: Senator Clinton's office in on the case.
A FURTHER UPDATE AND EPILOGUE: First of all, our woman got her meds, so she isn't going to die. We had Senator Clinton's Westchester office all set to call Pat the Manager, but before the call took place, our woman transfered her prescriptions to a much-more-cooperative CVS, where she received her essential medication for free. Also, in the comments, Madeleine of the Red Cross explains that the Red Cross prescription help is not supposed to work the way the Zachary Walmart employees said. So if you have this kind of prescription problem, get in touch with the Red Cross for help solving it.
From NPR: A Doctor's Message from Katrina's Front Lines. Quoted is Hemant Vankawala, 34, is a doctor with one of the nine Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) medical groups set up at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport:
In hindsight, it seems silly that a bunch of civilian yahoos came in and took over the airport and had it up and running -- exceeding its normal operating load of passengers -- with an untrained skeleton crew and generator partial power. But we did what we had to do, and I think we did it well.
(A lot of the article, especially as concerns triage, is tough reading.)
CNN's front page this morning:
It seems to me that there should be a lot more people charged with negligent homicide, including government officials at all levels (up to and including that fellow who, after two weeks of dithering, has just publicly acknowledged that he's responsible.)
MEANWHILE, Josh Marshall writes about something I've been wondering. Just what was Dick Cheney doing while the rest of the administration waited for someone to tell them that the unfolding Katrina disaster wasn't all done with CGI? The answer is really interesting.
Did NASA ever locate the 1,000 people missing from the Michoud Assembly Facility east of New Orleans? Anyone know what the story is?
(Um. And why didn't they evacuate in the first place? Anyone know?) Karen explains in the comments that there were only 56 people actually at Michoud; that they missing employees are or were people not yet accounted for who may or may not have evacuated. That makes more sense.
I'm not usually a fan of leaving essential services to be provided by "faith-based" organizations, but with FEMA in disarray, a source of national shame, and with many of the obvious organizations overwhelmed with requests for help, churches may be a good place to try. Melanie Miller, Assistant Minister of the local Congregationalist Church here, has compiled links on where Hurricane Victims can seek aid from various denominations. Most of the actual information on these pages is on how you can donate money or goods. For those requiring aid, look for conact information on the sites and email them. Melanie writes:
To find out what relief efforts your denomination is offering click on
the appropriate link below:United Church of Christ
United Methodist Church
Evangelican Lutheran Church of America
The Episcopal Church
The American Baptist Church
Roman Catholic Church: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
To this list, Mark Bernstein adds the American Friends Service Commitee (i. e. the Quakers). I suppose I should say that what promted this post is that I was trying to solve a problem for someone, and it seemed like the church infrastructre was the best tool than came to hand.
