God I hope this story is overblown right now!!!

[jazzbo]

Do you REALLY want to know?

[Johnny E]

[catesta]

←

Is this a different contract than the competitive-bid contract we were discussing in another thread a few days ago?

Guy

←

I believe so. I was watching a congressional meeting on C-SPAN and some representatives were opposed to the "no-bid" contract that was awarded to Haliburton.

←

Edited September 8, 2005 by catesta

[minew]

Anyone catch Cheney's appearance today on the Gulf Coast? While he was blathering on about what a great job everybody was doing, a local passerby, off camera, shouted clearly and audibly, "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney. Go fuck yourself."

You reap what you sow.

[Big Wheel]

Anyone catch Cheney's appearance today on the Gulf Coast?  While he was blathering on about what a great job everybody was doing, a local passerby, off camera, shouted clearly and audibly, "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney.  Go fuck yourself."

You reap what you sow.

←

The video can currently be found at http://www.crooksandliars.com .

[ghost of miles]

Anyone catch Cheney's appearance today on the Gulf Coast?  While he was blathering on about what a great job everybody was doing, a local passerby, off camera, shouted clearly and audibly, "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney.  Go fuck yourself."

You reap what you sow.

←

He'll probably be tracked down and prosecuted under some obscure provision of the Patriot Act.

Hey, Cali, thanks for posting that list of FEMA atrocities. Some folks on Fresh Air today were talking about what Bush has done to the agency... not good.

[Ron S]

Hey, Cali, thanks for posting that list of FEMA atrocities.  Some folks on Fresh Air today were talking about what Bush has done to the agency... not good.

See the Newsweek article about this that I posted here.

[Cali]

I know Hurricane Katrina is old news by now to many of us, but I received this link from a friend and I would like to share it.

Tim Wise

Edited September 9, 2005 by Cali

[minew]

from the Times Picayune

Suffering and semantics

There may be no more ridiculous pairing of words than "voluntary evacuation." Letting people know they can leave if they want to leave does nothing more than remind them that they live in a free country. But looking back at the events leading up to Hurricane Katrina, it's clear that the phrase "mandatory evacuation" doesn't mean anything either. At least not in New Orleans.

The phrase is meaninglessness on two levels: According to a television interview Mayor Ray Nagin gave the Saturday night before the storm, he didn't think he had the legal authority to order a mandatory evacuation or the ability to enforce it. City attorneys were scrambling to find out whether he could order everybody out, he said, and if doing so would make him liable for the many thousands of people who had no means of escape. The next morning he issued New Orleans' first-ever order of evacuation. Next door, Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard maintained that despite his desire to do so, he didn't have the legal authority to require his residents to leave.

To Mayor Nagin's credit, he made it clear on that Saturday that everybody needed to get out and that citizens shouldn't wait around to hear the word "mandatory" before deciding to leave. They might never hear it. He urged those who could to check on their neighbors, especially the elderly and infirm, and to use every conveyance possible to escape the wrath of the approaching storm.

The mayor was a voice of calm when others around him were succumbing to hysteria. But when it came time to get pushy, he did that, too. Even so, Mayor Nagin should have had his legal questions answered long before a storm was in the Gulf of Mexico. A mandatory evacuation had never been ordered, but the question of its legality should have been asked and answered years ago. What a mayor can do as a hurricane approaches should have been institutional knowledge, passed like a baton from one administration to the next.

It ought to have been passed down from governor to governor, too. The mayor's powers may have been limited, but as the chief executive of the state, Gov. Kathleen Blanco had more muscle. State law allows her to not only "direct and compel the evacuation of all or part of the population from any stricken or threatened area within the state," but also to utilize "all available resources of the state government and of each political subdivision of the state as reasonably necessary to cope with the disaster or emergency."

The Friday before the storm Gov. Blanco declared a state of emergency, and that could have served as a prerequisite for more forceful action. Imagine every school bus in South Louisiana packed with evacuees and heading to higher ground. Imagine the vans, SUVs and cars owned by state and local agencies being devoted to the same purpose. In retrospect, the mayor should have used his bully pulpit to demand more action from the state. But he ultimately didn't have the authority to take control of all those vehicles. The governor did.

Elected officials assumed that when the big one hit New Orleans, it would catch thousands upon thousands of people still in the city. Some wouldn't be able to afford a way out. Others who could afford to do so wouldn't either. Not a whole lot could have been done for that second group. The fact that even now there are people vowing to stay in their flooded homes is proof that some deaths were inevitable.

Louisiana was never going to be able to handle a disaster of Katrina’s scale without substantial outside help. If the federal response had not been so woefully inadequate, the storm would not have exacted such a horrific toll on New Orleans.

But that doesn't absolve anyone at any level of government from neglecting the poor. The assumption that poor people would be trapped was met with inaction, when it should have been met with a determination to save as many as possible. The words "mandatory evacuation" mean nothing when state and local officials won’t or can’t deploy the resources necessary to make the mandate stick. Not only could the mayor not order an evacuation, and not only could he not enforce it, but there were those who couldn't or wouldn’t leave. The corpses floating in the water attest to that.

[catesta]

Good points made in that article.

Thanks for posting it.

[GA Russell]

This, from the Times-Picayune:

Friday, September 09, 2005

Jazz Fest will go on

8:12 p.m., Friday

The 2006 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival will go on.

“There will be a Jazzfest. We are committed to putting on the 2006 Jazz and Heritage Festival, whatever that may take,” said Quint Davis, producer/director of the springtime musical extravaganza and president of Festival Productions Inc.-New Orleans, which produces the festival with AEG Live, the nation’s second highest-grossing concert promoter.

Details are sketchy at this point.

“We don’t know when, we don’t know where, we don’t know what format,” Davis said. “There will be a Jazzfest in 2006. It will be in Louisiana. It will be as close to New Orleans as we can get it.”

The producers would like to hold the event at its customary site at the Fair Grounds Race Course, but if that’s not possible they are committed to holding it in Louisiana. “We’ll be starting from the Fair Grounds and working our way out” in determining a location, Davis said.

This commitment comes from all of the major stakeholders in the festival, Davis said.

[ghost of miles]

Some good bipartisan news there, GA.

[sheldonm]

I was doing a photo shoot with the APA (American Pianist Association) this past week and the president of the group said they are working to find temporary housing for many of the N.O. based musicians/families up here in Indianapolis and many locals have offered assistance. Hopefully this will work out!

m~

[GA Russell]

This is from the Times-Picayune's website at www.nola.com

Highlights of government assistance

The following statistics highlight some of the activities of government agencies as of 1 p.m. Sunday:

Households receiving FEMA funding --364,000

Type of Payment:

Direct Deposit -- $382 million

Check -- $356 million

Debit Card -- $20 million

Total Assistance Provided -- $758 million

Lives Saved (rescues performed) -- 49,700

People housed in shelters -- 141,000

FEMA responders -- 9,800

U.S. Coast Guard personnel -- 4,000

National Guard personnel -- 50,000

Active Duty Military -- 20,000

MREs provided (meals) -- 22.5 million

Water provided (liters) -- 53.3 million

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will deliver more than 100,000 pieces of seized clothes for Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Jackson, Miss., on Monday at 1 p.m. The clothes were seized for violations of U.S. trademark laws. Monday’s delivery follows similar donations in Houston and San Antonio. After tomorrow’s delivery, more than $4 million worth of clothes will have been donated by the federal agencies.

[GA Russell]

Here's another Times-Picayune story. Harry Lee is very popular in suburban Jefferson Parish, and is considered a no nonsense guy.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee commandeers Sam's Wal-Mart stores

Sunday, 10:30 a.m.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said he has "commandered" the Sam's and Wal-Mart stores in the parish and ordered them to open as soon as possible.

Lee said he took the action after he learned that a Wal-Mart store wanted to open recently but was told by FEMA officials that it could not.

"I am upset with FEMA and some of their regulations," Lee said.

After talking about the situation concerning the Wal-Mart on Thursday, Lee said he briefly talked to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans on Friday. He asked her to check on the situation and find out if there was a legitimate reason to keep the store closed.

But because of communication difficulties, he did not hear back and took the situation in his own hands.

Lee said he gave handwritten notes to Wal-Mart stores in Harvey and Kenner saying they were ordered to open as soon as possible. Lee said Parish President Aaron Broussard agreed with the decision.

Lee said anyone from FEMA who tries to close either store will be arrested by deputies.

"We're encouraging the businesses to get up and going."

On other topics, Lee said he had 40 deputies who didn't report for duty for the storm. One who tried to return was told not to waste his time.

"As far as I am concerned (he) will never get a job in law enforcement again," Lee said.

[BERIGAN]

Lack of plan hurt Katrina-hit states' response

By Dara Kam, Alan Gomez

Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Saturday, September 10, 2005

UPDATED: 3:50 p.m. September 10, 2005

TALLAHASSEE — One thing Florida knows is hurricanes.

Florida emergency planners criticized and even rebuked their counterparts -- or what passes for emergency planners -- in those states for their handling of Hurricane Katrina. Gov. Jeb Bush, the head of Florida AHCA and the head of Florida wildlife (which is responsible for all search and rescue) all said they made offers of aid to Mississippi and Louisiana the day before Katrina hit but were rebuffed. After the storm, they said they've had to not only help provide people to those states but also have had to develop search and rescue plans for them. "They were completely unprepared -- as bad off as we were before Andrew," one Florida official said.

And how Louisiana and Mississippi officials have handled Hurricane Katrina is a far cry from what emergency managers here would have done. Mississippi was in the middle of rewriting its disaster plan when Katrina struck. Officials there were still analyzing what went wrong during Hurricane Dennis earlier this year when Katrina overtook them. Search teams from Florida were rescuing Mississippi victims before law enforcement officers there were even aware of the magnitude of the disaster.

Louisiana also lacked an adequate plan to evacuate New Orleans, despite years of research that predicted a disaster equal to or worse than Katrina. Even after a disaster test run last year exposed weaknesses in evacuation and recovery, officials failed to come up with solutions.

"They're where we were in 1992, exactly," said Col. Julie Jones, director of law enforcement for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, in a reference to Florida's state of emergency preparedness before Hurricane Andrew devastated southern Miami-Dade County. Since then, Florida has created what many consider a model emergency management system, initially developed by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles in response to Andrew and beefed up considerably by Gov. Jeb Bush in response to more than a dozen storms that have hit the state since he took office in 1998, including a record four hurricanes last year.

The state, under Bush, has learned even from storms that did not hit here. Bush was mortified by the long, stalled lines of cars fleeing from Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and ordered a study of evacuation alternatives that led to the state's current plan to convert certain highways to northern-only routes.

Meanwhile, Florida's western neighbors haven't faced as many storms, and their emergency preparedness apparently has not evolved as Florida's has.

Local and state officials in Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as federal officials, simply weren't prepared to deal with a disaster of Katrina's magnitude, according to observers, citizens and national experts on the scene after Hurricane Katrina wreaked catastrophic damage on the Gulf Coast.

One of the biggest differences between how Florida and other states handle natural disasters lies in the degree of cooperation between cities, counties and the state. In Florida, they are in constant communication with one another as storms advance and during the recovery phase. Not so elsewhere, as first responders from Florida discovered at dawn the day after Katrina made landfall. Search and rescue crews from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission were poised in Pensacola on Sunday night in anticipation of Katrina's landfall Monday.

After scouting the Panhandle and determining it was OK Monday morning, Jones said she called Mississippi officials to see if they needed help.

"They said, 'We don't know,' " she said. "Monday night, Mississippi said 'We still have not been able to evaluate the damage, so please go.' So Monday night, we were at the border ready to go, and we were in Mississippi by 6 a.m. Tuesday. So before Mississippi could wake up and say, 'OK, we have to start doing assessments,' Florida was in those two counties, in Jackson and Harrison."

Jones' crews made the first rescue in Mississippi at dawn the day after Katrina made landfall, and they spent a week in the area, ferrying Mississippi Marine Patrol officers whose vessels were destroyed by Katrina.

Florida law enforcement officials in each county hold monthly conference calls to discuss disaster coordination, but it wasn't until after the storm hit that these Mississippi officials were making a plan of what to do.

"The biggest frustration for us was sitting down and trying to get all the emergency managers in a county to sit down in their emergency operations centers and talk about a plan," Jones said.

Part of the problem was that Mississippi officials were in the process of rewriting their state emergency plan when Katrina hit, Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Lea Stokes said. They hadn't yet evaluated post-Dennis hurricane response surveys when the Category 4 storm and its 20- to 30-foot surge wiped out 75 miles of coastline.

Stokes and other Mississippi officials also blame problems responding to Katrina on its size and impact on telephone services. Land lines, cellphones and even satellite phones were useless, Stokes said.

"It was not so much a communications breakdown as it was a communication device breakdown," said Biloxi spokesman Vincent Creel. "So if we'd have had carrier pigeons, we'd have been using them. We'd have used smoke signals, but we didn't have water." Florida's emergency management chief, Craig Fugate, said just having any old plan isn't enough. It has to be adequate and a state needs an experienced organization well-versed in putting it into effect.

"I've heard comments made in other disasters that the first thing they did was throw the plan away because the plan was worthless," Fugate said. "A plan should not be some requirement. It should truly reflect what your real needs are, and what your real resources are." Louisiana's plan doesn't do either.

A November article published by the Natural Hazards Center, a University of Colorado research institute, analyzed what would have happened if Hurricane Ivan had hit New Orleans last summer instead of Pensacola.

"Hurricane Ivan would have pushed a 17-foot storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain; caused the levees between the lake and the city to overtop and fill the city 'bowl' with water from lake levee to river levee, in some places as deep as 20 feet; flooded the north shore suburbs of Lake Pontchartrain with waters pushing as much as seven miles inland; and inundated inhabited areas south of the Mississippi River," wrote Shirley Laska, a University of New Orleans disaster expert.

But the most recent Louisiana emergency operations plan doesn't address how to evacuate in the case of flooding from storm surge, saying simply that "The Greater New Orleans Metropolitan Area represents a difficult evacuation problem due to the large population and its unique layout."

It continues, "The primary means of hurricane evacuation will be personal vehicles. School and municipal buses, government-owned vehicles and vehicles provided by volunteer agencies may be used to provide transportation for individuals who lack transportation and require assistance in evacuating."

Buses were unable to transport New Orleans citizens for days following Katrina's landfall. The plan acknowledges that, in the event of a catastrophic hurricane, "the evacuation of over a million people from the Southeast Region could overwhelm normally available shelter resources." But it doesn't include a solution to the shelter issue.

Louisiana officials could not be reached for comment this week. Mississippi and Louisiana officials, however, have increasingly decried what they called a slow federal response to the disaster, blaming the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Gov. Bush defended FEMA.

"If we weren't prepared, and we didn't do our part, no amount of work by FEMA could overcome the lack of preparation," he said. Natural Hazards Center director Kathleen Tierney agreed, saying emergency planners in the Gulf states should have taken a tip from the jazz legends that made New Orleans famous.

"Organizational improvisation" is essential to cope with unpredictable events such as Katrina, Tierney said. "Research on jazz musicians shows that people don't just pull stuff out of the air when they're improvising. These are people with an extremely wide knowledge of musical genres. They have always practiced and practiced and practiced. Similarly, improvising involves a deep understanding of the resources you have at hand in your community."

Local officials, she said, "could have listened to researchers. They could take seriously Congressman Patrick Kennedy's bill called the Ready, Willing and Able Act that calls for more interaction with the community. They could have approached this improvisational task with imagination." And they might yet, Biloxi spokesman Creel said.

"Believe me, we're going to be doing a lot of what you call critiquing of this, but we haven't reached that point yet. We're still at the midst of it."

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/storm/content...onse_0910.html#

Edited September 11, 2005 by BERIGAN

[GA Russell]

Check out this frightening post on AAJ.

http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=11060

[Christiern]

Not a valid/working link.

[GA Russell]

It looks like it's not there anymore.

It had links to five or six articles from Britain and I think Australia, describing the terror that tourists felt while in the Super Dome.

Eyewitness accounts of stabbing, reports of rape, etc.

[Soulstation1]

those two fools that left 34 people to die at st. rita's should be shot

end of story

f'n idiots

ss1

[Johnny E]

those two fools that left 34 people to die at st. rita's should be shot

end of story

f'n idiots

ss1

←

Or better yet, straped to a bed in a room slowly filling with water. Fucking pigs!

[Johnny E]

A Fatal Incuriosity

By MAUREEN DOWD

NY Times - September 14, 2005

I hate spending time in hospitals and nursing homes. I find them to be some of the most depressing places on earth.

Maybe that's why the stories of the sick and elderly who died, 45 in a New Orleans hospital and 34 in St. Rita's nursing home in the devastated St. Bernard Parish outside New Orleans, haunt me so.

You're already vulnerable and alone when suddenly you're beset by nature and betrayed by your government.

At St. Rita's, 34 seniors fought to live with what little strength they had as the lights went out and the water rose over their legs, over their shoulders, over their mouths. As Gardiner Harris wrote in The Times, the failed defenses included a table nailed against a window and a couch pushed against a door.

Several electric wheelchairs were gathered near the front entrance, maybe by patients who dreamed of evacuating. Their drowned bodies were found swollen and unrecognizable a week later, as Mr. Harris reported, "draped over a wheelchair, wrapped in a shower curtain, lying on a floor in several inches of muck."

At Memorial Medical Center, victims also suffered in 100-degree heat and died, some while waiting to be rescued in the four days after Katrina hit.

As Louisiana's death toll spiked to 423 yesterday, the state charged St. Rita's owners with multiple counts of negligent homicide, accusing them of not responding to warnings about the hurricane. "In effect," State Attorney General Charles Foti Jr. said, "I think that their inactions resulted in the death of these people."

President Bush continued to try to spin his own inaction yesterday, but he may finally have reached a patch of reality beyond spin. Now he's the one drowning, unable to rescue himself by patting small black children on the head during photo-ops and making scripted attempts to appear engaged. He can keep going back down there, as he will again on Thursday when he gives a televised speech to the nation, but he can never compensate for his tragic inattention during days when so many lives could have been saved.

He made the ultimate sacrifice and admitted his administration had messed up, something he'd refused to do through all of the other screw-ups, from phantom W.M.D. and the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo to the miscalculations on the Iraq occupation and the insurgency, which will soon claim 2,000 young Americans.

How many places will be in shambles by the time the Bush crew leaves office?

Given that the Bush team has dealt with both gulf crises, Iraq and Katrina, with the same deadly mixture of arrogance and incompetence, and a refusal to face reality, it's frightening to think how it will handle the most demanding act of government domestic investment since the New Deal.

Even though we know W. likes to be in his bubble with his feather pillow, the stories this week are breathtaking about the lengths the White House staff had to go to in order to capture Incurious George's attention.

Newsweek reported that the reality of Katrina did not sink in for the president until days after the levees broke, turning New Orleans into a watery grave. It took a virtual intervention of his top aides to make W. watch the news about the worst natural disaster in a century. Dan Bartlett made a DVD of newscasts on the hurricane to show the president on Friday morning as he flew down to the Gulf Coast.

The aides were scared to tell the isolated president that he should cut short his vacation by a couple of days, Newsweek said, because he can be "cold and snappish in private." Mike Allen wrote in Time about one "youngish aide" who was so terrified about telling Mr. Bush he was wrong about something during the first term, he "had dry heaves" afterward.

The president had to be truly zoned out not to jump at the word "hurricane," given that he has always used his father's term as a reverse playbook and his father almost lost Florida in 1992 because of his slow-footed response to Hurricane Andrew. And W.'s chief of staff, Andy Card, was the White House transportation secretary the senior President Bush sent to the rescue after FEMA bungled that one.

W. has said he prefers to get his information straight up from aides, rather than filtered through newspapers or newscasts. But he surrounds himself with weak sisters who don't have the nerve to break bad news to him, or ideologues with agendas that require warping reality or chuckleheaded cronies like Brownie.

The president should stop haunting New Orleans, looking for that bullhorn moment. It's too late.

[ghost of miles]

It's great to see the media FINALLY waking up to what an AWOL airhead our "commander-in-chief" really is. Too bad it took 'em one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history to get a clue. And no, I'm not referring to Dowd's column--I'm referring to the generally much sharper and more objective coverage that CNN and others have offered, instead of routinely buying the puff & spin of the White House image-makers.

[Soulstation1]

damn

water is flowing back into new orleans

[Ron S]

MSNBC.com

Rita causes more flooding in New Orleans

‘Our worst fears came true,’ official says as water pours into Ninth Ward

The Associated Press

Updated: 11:44 a.m. ET Sept. 23, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - Hurricane Rita’s steady rains sent water pouring over a patched levee Friday, cascading into one of the city’s lowest-lying neighborhoods in a devastating repeat of New Orleans’ flooding nightmare.

“Our worst fears came true,” said Maj. Barry Guidry of the Georgia National Guard.

“We have three significant breaches in the levee and the water is rising rapidly,” he said. “At daybreak I found substantial breaks and they’ve grown larger.”

Dozens of blocks in the Ninth Ward were under water as a waterfall at least 30 feet wide poured over and through a dike that had been used to patch breaks in the Industrial Canal levee. On the street that runs parallel to the canal, the water ran waist-deep and was rising fast. Guidry said water was rising about three inches a minute.

The impoverished neighborhood was one of the areas of the city hit hardest by Katrina’s floodwaters and finally had been pumped dry before Hurricane Rita struck.

Ninth Ward believed cleared of residents

Sally Forman, an aide to Mayor Ray Nagin, said officials knew the levees were compromised, but they believe that the Ninth Ward is cleared of residents.

“I wouldn’t imagine there’s one person down there,” Forman said.

Mitch Frazier, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said contractors were being brought in Friday morning in an effort to repair the new damage. The corps had earlier installed 60-foot sections of metal across some of the city’s canals to protect against flooding and storm surges.

Forecasters have called for between 3 and 5 inches of rain in New Orleans as Rita passes Friday and Saturday, dangerously close to the 6 inches of rain that Corps officials say the patched levees can withstand.

Another concern is the storm surge accompanying Rita, which could send water rising as much as 4 feet above high tide.

Already Friday morning, a steady 20 mph wind, with gusts to 35 mph, was blowing, along with steady rains.

Because of uncertain weather conditions from Hurricane Rita, the recovery of bodies was suspended but previous discoveries pushed the death toll from Hurricane Katrina to 841 in Louisiana, and at least 1,078 across the Gulf Coast.

Grim advice from the governor

As many as 500,000 people in southwestern Louisiana, many of them already displaced by Hurricane Katrina, were told to evacuate and many jammed roads north to escape.

Glynn Stevenson, who swam out of his New Orleans house with belongings taped to his body, had just gotten settled into a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency when the call came for him to uproot again.

“It’s nothing to get mad about,” he said. “Just keep a cool attitude and help your brothers.”

As for those who refuse to leave, Gov. Kathleen Blanco advised: “Perhaps they should write their Social Security numbers on their arms with indelible ink.”

Landfall expected early Saturday

Rita was headed for a Texas landfall but the massive storm threatened southwestern Louisiana as well, with tropical storm-force winds expected by noon and hurricane-force winds of 74 mph or higher by early Saturday. Flash floods were possible as 10 to 15 inches of rain was forecast.

Workers were out overnight monitoring the enormous sandbags and rocks that were dropped into the broken levee and canal walls after Hurricane Katrina.

“Up until Rita, everyone was pretty upbeat,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said during a blustery outdoor news conference amid intermittent rain. “Now that Rita has come into the picture, it’s been difficult.”

National Guard and medical units were put on standby in the city. Helicopters were being positioned, and search-and-rescue boats from the state wildlife department were staged on high ground on the edge of Rita’s projected path. Blanco said she also asked for 15,000 more federal troops.

“We’ve got buses running continuously to get residents out. We’re trying to learn from other areas, not to repeat their mistake,” said Cindy Murphy, a manager at the police bureau in Lake Charles.

Supplies on hand in Louisiana

Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen said three days worth of supplies, including food and water, for 500,000 people are ready and waiting around Louisiana, if needed after Rita.

Hospitals around the state were shutting down, too. Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana’s state health officer, said patients from hospitals in Lake Charles and Cameron were being evacuated, some north to Alexandria, La., and others to hospitals as far away as Oklahoma.

A mandatory evacuation order was in effect for homes on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, and police said people in the city’s Algiers section on the other side of the river would be wise to get out, too. But thousands stayed put.

“I’m sticking it out,” said Florida Richardson, who sat on her front porch in Algiers, holding her grandson on her lap. “This house is 85 years old. It’s seen a lot of tornadoes and a lot of hurricanes. You can’t run from the power of God.”

Traffic jams, gas shortages

A traffic jam of evacuees extended from Houston and other Texas cities well into Louisiana, with Interstate 10 congested across southern Louisiana.

Janell LeDoux and her husband spent six hours on the freeway and covered just 80 miles from their home near Lake Charles east to Lafayette. And they were only halfway to her sister’s house in eastern Louisiana.

“I just hope we have something left to go home to. Not like in New Orleans,” she said. Four gas stations in Lafayette had run dry. A fifth station had only premium.

Billy Landry, a marina manager in Cypremort Point, wasn’t going to stay for Rita. He planned to haul himself and thousands of soft-shell crabs to safety.

“Since Katrina, everybody seems a little nervous. They don’t want to get pulled from rooftops,” he said.

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

© 2005 MSNBC.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9438536/