general Domes

Posted August 31, 2005 • Comments Off on Domes

For the last two days, I’ve been mulling a few words around in my mind, and some of them have been “thank god for the Superdome.” In every picture of New Orleans, it just looks like a big welcoming indestructibly huge thing, waiting patiently far above the water, with room for everyone and more.

That was before I realized it was dark in there.

Read this. http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina.refugees.ap/index.html

This idea is flabbergasting. Beyond the logistics of getting the people and their things onto buses when even Army trucks are just tall enough to drive to the Superdome, think about the sheer number of buses it will take to move 25,000 people 350 miles. At $2.60 a gallon for diesel, that’s probably a million dollars right there. Then they’ll have 25,000 people stranded 350 miles from home. How is that better?

I can’t get my mind around this whole thing. It’s bad enough that a storm probably took your house and everything you own away, but then to be taken away from your city? Your cell phone doesn’t work, you can’t tell your friends and relatives you’re alright unless you somehow make it onto TV, and now a government agency is going to plant you in another fucking stadium, in another state, after what must promise to be a horrific six-hour (probably much longer) bus ride? Your kids haven’t been to school yet this year, none of you have had a shower in days, even once you go back and try to rebuild, your employer is probably in dire straits too … and you have to live in the Astrodome. Until December.

Thank god for the Superdome, yes, but I feel waves of relief of behalf of those people from Louisiana and Mississippi who had the luck and presence of mind to leave earlier, the ones who are in, for example, motels in Pensacola right now, cool and safe and in touch.

Edited to add:

Now THIS is something else. http://www.tulane.edu