Corneliu
12-09-2005, 15:01
Power is beginning to return to some New Orleans Neighborhoods.
This is most definitely good news for New Orleans. The Central Business District is has restored power and the French Quarter is Ready to open for business.
Jeruselem
12-09-2005, 15:04
Where does NO get it's power from? Does it have local power stations?
The return of power is the first sign of the return of state oppression.
Gulf Republics
12-09-2005, 15:10
where the hell are all these cars coming from?! i thought the poor didnt have cars to get out of the city!!
oh wait i forgot the other layer of excuse for them...they couldnt afford the gas.... :rolleyes:
Gulf Republics
12-09-2005, 15:11
Oh, that took some time.
Tends to happen when the city is under water...not a very good idea to turn on the juice in houses when the water is up to their roof... :rolleyes: (woohoo 2 in one thread)
Corneliu
12-09-2005, 15:17
The parts of the city that are no longer underwater are getting power restored.
As soon as the water levels drop more, I'm sure that more of the power grid will be restored. This is going to take awhile though as poles and lines have to be repaired or replaced first.
Tends to happen when the city is under water...not a very good idea to turn on the juice in houses when the water is up to their roof... :rolleyes: (woohoo 2 in one thread)
Well, duh. Thank you Captain Obvious! Where would we be without you?
Anarchic Christians
12-09-2005, 15:33
where the hell are all these cars coming from?! i thought the poor didnt have cars to get out of the city!!
oh wait i forgot the other layer of excuse for them...they couldnt afford the gas.... :rolleyes:
Where were cars mentioned? Actually, just what are you smoking?
La Habana Cuba
12-09-2005, 18:00
The Fact is some not all but some of the people who could have left on thier own before the storm hit, decided to stay on thier own, despite knowing it was going to be a bad one, they either did not believe it or didnt care.
La Habana Cuba
12-09-2005, 18:35
New Orleans Slowly Stirs Back to Life By BRETT MARTEL, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 33 minutes ago
NEW ORLEANS - Business owners in the central business district were issued passes into the city Monday to retrieve vital records or equipment needed to run their companies, as New Orleans slowly and painfully stirred back to life two weeks after being slammed by Katrina.
Traffic was heavy on the only major highway into the city that was still open, and vehicles were backed up for about two miles at a National Guard checkpoint in Westwego, a suburb across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
There were also signs of life at businesses elsewhere in the city, after a weekend in which trash collection began and the airport reopened to cargo flights.
In the French Quarter, Nick Ditta was at Mango Mango, the bar he manages on Bourbon Street, searching for time cards.
"It's a mess man. There is no doubt about it," Ditta said. "But our people are going to get paid. That's all I'm worried about."
President Bush got his first up-close look at the destruction in New Orleans on Monday, taking a tour that took him through several flooded neighborhoods. Occasionally, he had to duck to avoid low-hanging electrical wires and branches.
The president denied there was any racial component to the way the government responded to the disaster, disputing assertions that Washington was sluggish because so many of the victims were poor and black.
"The storm didn't discriminate and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. He also rejected suggestions that the nation's military was stretched too thinly with the war in Iraq to deal with the Gulf Coast devastation.
Military cargo airplanes were set to begin spraying the New Orleans area on Monday to kill flies and mosquitoes. The standing water from Katrina is expected to worsen Louisiana's already considerable mosquito problem. Before the storm hit, the state had logged 78 cases of mosquito-borne West Nile virus and four deaths from the disease this year.
Among the businessmen allowe back into the city was Terry Cockerham, owner of Service Glass, which installs windows at businesses downtown. He has been working out of his house because his business was destroyed by looters and flooding.
"This is about the most work I've ever had," he said. "We'll work seven days a week until we get this job finished. I don't want to get rich. I just want to get everything back right."
In the French Quarter, burnt-orange rubble from terra-cotta roof tiles sat in neat piles for collection along the curb. Bourbon Street was cleaner than it ever is during Mardi Gras. And Donald Jones, a 57-year-old lifelong resident, said he was no longer armed when walking his street.
"The first five days I never went out of my house without my gun. Now I don't carry it," Jones said over the weekend. "The only people I meet is military."
Though 50 percent of New Orleans remained flooded and teams continued to collect the corpses, there were signs that the hopelessness was beginning to lift.
"Each day there's a little bit of an improvement," Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad W. Allen, commander of the New Orleans relief efforts, told NBC on Sunday night. "And in the end run, maybe a week, two weeks from now, someone's going to wake in the morning and have something they didn't have the day before, and that's hope."
The waters in New Orleans, which once covered 80 percent of the city, have pulled back far enough to allow for a scenic drive down Esplanade Avenue, past the handsome, columned two-story home where the French artist Edgar Degas once lived to the New Orleans Museum of Art in City Park.
The same can be said for Saint Charles Avenue. While many homes are deserted and the old green street cars are gone, the beauty of the Greek Revival and Victorian homes, fronted by a canopy of live oaks, overwhelms the sight of debris piled along the road.
"I think it's livable," said John Lopez, who moved to New Orleans from the New York City area about a year ago. "If they got running water to all these buildings that are obviously inhabitable, they could get the city cleaned up a lot faster because people would be cleaning up their own blocks and their own neighborhoods."
Lopez and others are among those in the city who survived the hurricane at home, refused the subsequent order to leave and have started to clean up their neighborhoods. While they are worried about authorities forcing them to evacuate, there so far have been no reports that has happened in New Orleans.
Authorities raised Louisiana's death toll to 197 on Sunday. Teams pulled an unspecified number of bodies from Memorial Medical Center, a 317-bed hospital in uptown New Orleans that closed more than a week ago after being surrounded by floodwaters.
Elsewhere, there were nuggets of encouraging news:
• Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport reopened for cargo traffic Sunday and planned to open to limited passenger service starting Tuesday.
• The city's main wastewater treatment facility was expected to running by Monday, said Sgt. John Zeller, an engineer with the California National Guard.
• Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, commander of active-duty troops engaged in hurricane relief, reiterated Sunday the number of dead would be "a heck of a lot lower" than initial projections of perhaps 10,000.
And residents of New Orleans were trying to re-establish pieces of the city's inimitable character. Some even found things to laugh about.
Barbara Hoover, who lives in the Faubourg-Marigny neighborhood just downriver from the French Quarter, said the military's ready-to-eat meals are "just as good, if not better, than the South Beach Diet. They're amazing."
___
Associated Press writers Erin McClam, Mary Foster, Colleen Long, Warren Levinson and Howie Rumberg contributed to this report.