Guy Dinmore’s report from NOLA for the Financial Times is a vivid description of the current conditions there, but it is also notable for a couple of other reasons. It is the first mention I’ve seen of the conditions in the eastern burb of Chalmette (outside of media in BC, which is covering the urban search and rescue teams from BC working in St. Bernard parish).
In addition, Dinmore’s article is the first I’ve read that uses the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 as a backdrop of analysis of the current situation.
Geraldine Lavy said her son protected four Australian tourists from rapists in the convention centre. “Can you imagine? Four white women on their own?”
And then she cursed her government, asking how the Australian embassy had been able to evacuate its citizens and she was still caught in hell, now separated from her son after being bussed to the airport.
Ms Lavy echoed the thoughts and words of many black Americans we spoke to over the weekend who, while often heroic or stoic in the face of the death and depravity around them, were deeply bitter and angry at the rich white people who run their country.
“They opened the levees to save the whole neighbourhood to protect their investments,” declared Larry Crawford, 34, believing, as many sincerely do, that some districts were deliberately flooded to relieve the pressure on the dykes protecting others.
Inconceivable today, yet this is what happened in 1927 with the great Mississippi flood that made a million people homeless. Not only that, as John Barry documents in his social history Rising Tide, black work gangs were held as virtual prisoners in squalid “concentration camps” while shoring up the levees to protect plantations. Many black Americans living in the north are descended from those who abandoned the Delta that year, after the landowners escaped the floods on a steamer to the music of “Bye, Bye Blackbird”.
This week almost nothing has been said in the news or by officials about the poor eastern suburb of Chalmette. Many of the houses – said by officials to number 27,000 – are totally under water. Here the death toll is thought to be greatest, possibly running well into the thousands, said police. Several hundred corpses are reported to have been gathered by locals in one school alone.
Senior officials, who have no bodies to count because there are no orders to collect any, say they have no idea how many people have died. One told a press conference on Saturday it could be one or two thousand.
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