Please continue keep all of the folks in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and surrounding states in your prayers! Please donate generously to your local church relief agency or to the American Red Cross. Charity is our Christian duty!
You can use the current Hurricane Katrina situation to emphasize to your relatives, friends, neighbors and co-workers just how fragile our society is. Do your best to convince them that it is prudent to stock up. I’d appreciate it if you could also tell them about SurvivalBlog.
Hurricane Katrina Update (SAs: Disaster Preparedness, Disaster Relief, Lessons from Katrina)
Things have gone from bad to worse on the Gulf Coast. Here are some tidbits that were phoned to me on Wednesday by a regular SurvivalBlog reader who is currently in close proximity to New Orleans. (He cannot currently send e-mail.):
1.) In New Orleans, looters are shooting at police stations, in one instance with a semi-auto AK-47. The looting is completely out of hand, and spreading.
2.) Jefferson Parish Louisiana Sheriff Harry Lee has issued a “shoot to kill” order.
3.) At the Super Dome (cum Relocation Center) there have been countless armed robberies, suicides, rapes, and three murders in the past 72 hours. Conditions are intolerable there (with no running water and no sanitation, so it has been ordered evacuated. Several thousand Super Dome evacuees are being bussed/trucked to the Houston Astro Dome. At least the electricity is working there…
4.) The level of the 13th Street has now essentially equalized with Lake Ponchartrain. Huge 7,000 pound sand bags are being lowered from Chinook helicopters into the levee breaches, but no success yet.
5.) New Orleans residents are caravanning in large numbers to Baton Rogue, and are now putting a tremendous stress on that city.
6.) A local radio reporter that was airlifted to safety from a badly flooded region reported that he saw “hundreds of bodies” floating the water when his helicopter was en route.
7.) Locals in have cleared the roads of fallen trees in many areas around New Orleans (using chainsaws), but no normal commerce has resumed.
7.) All of the local television stations are off the air.