Quartz in North Carolina., Rare Earth Metals in Wyoming, the Prizes under 'Disasters' 2024 + "A National Disgrace in New Orleans 2005 " + The United Cajun Navy Rescues Thousands
New Orleans under water 2005 and North Carolina under water 2024 share the Cajun Navy as volunteer rescuers.
October 12, 2024
Today combines a piece that I wrote on September 2, 2005 for the San Francisco Bay View with an Appreciaiion of the Cajun Navy/United Cajun Navy for these Acadiana-born folks’ launching themselves into the rescue of many, many thousands of victims over 19 years. They’ve brought aid to New Orleans’ abandoned peoples in the ‘Federal Flood’ ensuing Hurricane Katrina in 2005—to Rivers Parish people after Hurricanes in the subsequent 15 years—and now to victims in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida. Third part of today’s Post touches on two the most crucial and lucrative caches of mineral wealth to Big Tech and Big Finance in the 21st century—Quartz under Spruce Pine, North Carolina and ‘Rare Earth’ under Wheatland, Wyoming—as both North Carolina and Wyoming suffer monstrous onslaughts from unprecedented water and fire…. Yes, devastations of the past few weeks are Biblical.
"A NATIONAL DISGRACE"
New Orleans, September 2, 2005
Why the Flooding, Immiseration, and Evacuation
of New Orleans (67% African-American) Was Made to Happen
"This doesn't feel like modern times"
We've seen the scenes.
Elderly hospital-patients quivering on cots in parking-lots. Younger survivors, unable to walk, towed in wagons and carried in baskets by others knee-deep to waist-deep in streams over balconied streets.
Helicopters flying past.
Gas-mains burning through Lake Pontchartrain's and the Mississippi River's water. Families clinging to rooftops and waving blankets for attention as other people's chairs float past. Shirtless children scrambling for food throughout an otherwise abandoned city.
National Guard trucks driving past.
And we've seen the crowds waiting. Crowds waiting inside and outside stadiums. Crowds waiting with plastic-bags full of clothes. Crowds waiting without food or water, crowds waiting for days and nights of hunger, dehydration, shock and desperation. Crowds waiting with disbelief that they're being treated so meanly in a land of plenty. Crowds waiting finally with cries and chants of "Help us! Help us!"
We've seen on TV and in newspapers the Black and Brown faces--Black and Brown faces an overwhelming majority--of poor people stranded in New Orleans over the five days since Hurricane Katrina howled toward them and swept into cutting and crushing landfall in the United States.
We've seen these would-be "refugees" left there over the four days since levees beside the city broke.
The poor people and their helpless, stranded misery look like ravaged populations of Darfur. They look like people abandoned and waiting after "natural disasters" in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. They look like poor, desperate people amid evacuations in Rwanda and famines in Ethiopia.
A woman is interviewed outside one flank of New Orleans' Superdome. Her dark hair is matted to her forehead. She stares hard into the TV camera. She seems to wish that someone or something will give her traumatized perplexity a good answer for what's going on.
"I don't know," she says. "This doesn't feel like modern times."
"It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle Homeland Security and the war in Iraq"
The levees that were breached by the 18-to-22-foot Storm-Surge into Lake Pontchartrain, following Hurricane Katrina's landfall, might have stood had improvements to them not been defunded by the U. S. Government over the past three years.
In 1995 flooding from a Sub-Hurricane level storm killed six in New Orleans, prompting the U. S. Government to begin the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA). Over the subsequent seven years, 1995 to 2002, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $300 million to shore up the levees whose humps snake round the below-sea level "bowl" of New Orleans and are meant to protect the City from flooding.
Spending on SELA after 2002, however, was sharply reduced, coincident with the U. S./British invasion of Iraq and expansion of the Department of Homeland Security.
In June of 2004 Walter Maestri, the emergency-management chief for Jefferson Parish told the Times-Picayune newspaper: "It appears that the money has been moved in the President's budget to handle Homeland Security and the war in Iraq, ... Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
Louisiana's season of Hurricanes in 2004 'was the worst in decades,' Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes. The Philadelphia journalist continues. 'In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.'
Among the most pressing projects was work on the Levee next to New Orleans' 17th Street Canal … site of the largest and most destructive breach by the Storm-Surge into Lake Pontchartrain on Monday, August 29. Work on this urgent project was abandoned in July 2005, one month before Hurricane Katrina struck, due to ostensible lack of funds .
Increasing and Insuring Destruction and Death
' "A hurricane is a classic act of nature, an act of God. You can't stop it. What we can do and what we have done is get ourselves to the utmost level of preparedness." '
Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security, in the
British/American Financial Times, 9/2/05
"They haven't done nuttin'!"
Malik Rahim, former Black Panther and current Green Party candidate for Mayor of
New Orleans, born and raised in that city, talking over the phone on 9/2/05.
What can explain the murderous neglect that remains obvious in New Orleans today, Friday, September 2, 2005, one week after the storm that would become known and feared as Hurricane Katrina began to swell and launch itself toward southeast Louisiana?
Why do National Guard trucks continue to cruise past the thousands stuck at the Superdome and Convention Center?
Why do patients literally rot inside 90+-degree heat of hospitals? Why are stacks of cases of drinking water in an Algiers firehouse kept from the parched throats of the thirsty as well as hungry at the nearby ferry across the Mississippi?
Why aren't homeless "refugees" not moved into the 18 Schools that are dry and on higher ground in Greater New Orleans? Why weren't scores of available schoolbuses not used to move poor people out of the city? Why weren't food and water from the plenty in supermarkets and warehouses in this MOST BUSY of southern U. S. Ports stockpiled before last Monday?
"They haven't done nuttin'!" Malik Rahim, my friend from work with Public Housing tenants in San Francisco and with Marie Harrison's campaign for Supervisor, declares today.
"They had three days to prepare for this. Food--water--transportation--they haven't done nuttin'! The only things that have been done to help people have been done by private volunteers. Black and White," Malik says.
The question remains. Why is this man-made disaster from neglect, following New Orleans' escape from the predicted height and brunt of a Grade-5 hurricane, happening?
Why does even New Orleans' head of Emergency Operations, Terry Ebbert, say about the U. S. Government's lack of preparations and responses: "This is a national disgrace."
The only rational explanation for such irrational neglect and lack of preparation and needlessly dispossession and suffering is that it's intentional, horrific as that explanation may be to compassionate beings.
Race and Money Again at the Core
"And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure."
Glen Ford on Black Commentator radio 9/2/05
Despite sitting almost below sea-level, New Orleans contains some of the most prized real-estate in the Western world. Before Katrina struck the U. S., however, said real-estate's potential or speculative value was many times greater than its currently assessed value. The median value of a house owned by its owner in New Orleans was among the lowest of such in Cities of the United States--$87,000. Over half of New Orleans’ residents were renters. 28% lived below the Federal poverty-level. 67.3% were African-American.
Now, only the well-off among New Orleans pre-Katrina residents will have the ready means and material incentive to return and rebuild in their still submerged city.
Also, the Wards hit hardest by flooding include Wards that contained the most Public Housing--those that contained "Projects". Wards, in short, that contained land that might have far more values in Dollars if their relatively poor residents were removed from it.
Now, too, the thought that machinations of further dispossession may result from the helpless suffering which we see every hour from New Orleans’ streets may give you pause. Your compassion may revolt at imagining such calculated cruelty.
Think, then, of 1870s' and 1880s' Reconstruction. Think of 1960s' and 1970s' Urban Renewal. Think of the same Armored Personnel Carriers that patrol Baghdad and Fallujah and Kabul now patrolling Poydras Avenue, St. Charles Avenue, and St. Claude Avenue, … while stranded peoples' bellies bloat, wounds grow more infected, and Dysentery—Dysentery in 2005, the urban United States—”This doesn’t feel like modern times”—spreads.
Think, and then be sure that overcoming such machinations will require all of us, who believe in the nobility of African-Americans, to FIGHT with the best of our abilities.
As Glen Ford concluded on Black Commentator radio today: "What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again?"
Don Paul, 9/2/05
The Cajun Navy/United Cajun Navy—from New Orleans 2005 into Appalachia 2024
We may appreciate citizens whose movement began in Lafayette, Louisiana, on August 31, 2005, in the Acadian Mall. Check these men and women out! Around 400 boats! Around 800 people! All moving to help the stranded, 120 miles or so away, in flood-wracked New Orleans.
The Cajun Navy expanded and worked hard in its practices. Witness 2018 and 'Games’ on the Bayou to train in rescues.
In 2024 the United Cajun Navy has answered distress in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and most recently Florida.
They overcame obstructions in Burnsville, nearby Black Mountain, North Carolina, reported by ‘medical teams’ 10 days ago.
Brian Trachsler, a Vice-President of the UCN. describes the devastation to Mountain towns by unprecedented onslaught from the 40 trillions TONS of water dropped by Hurrican Helene as “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Quartz (and Lithium) under Appalachian North Caroline; Rare Earth Minerals under Wheatland, Wyoming
Perhaps the mineral wealth underneath those towns may explain the unprecedented onslaughts. Spruce Pine, North Carolina, was spotlit as BONANZA due to Quartz in March 2024.
Maybe, too, the recently discovered billions and trillions of Dollars worth in ‘rare earth ‘ minerals lodged exactly beneath the unprecedented ‘Elk Fire’ in
Dr. Shari Tenpenning observed on October 7, 2024.
