Now...
Trapped in an Arena of Suffering
'We are like animals,' a mother says inside the Louisiana Superdome, where hope and supplies are sparse.
By Scott Gold, Times Staff Writer
NEW ORLEANS — A 2-year-old girl slept in a pool of urine. Crack vials littered a restroom. Blood stained the walls next to vending machines smashed by teenagers.
The Louisiana Superdome, once a mighty testament to architecture and ingenuity, became the biggest storm shelter in New Orleans the day before Katrina's arrival Monday. About 16,000 people eventually settled in.
By Wednesday, it had degenerated into horror. A few hundred people were evacuated from the arena Wednesday, and buses will take away the vast majority of refugees today.
"We pee on the floor. We are like animals," said Taffany Smith, 25, as she cradled her 3-week-old son, Terry. In her right hand she carried a half-full bottle of formula provided by rescuers. Baby supplies are running low; one mother said she was given two diapers and told to scrape them off when they got dirty and use them again.
At least two people, including a child, have been raped. At least three people have died, including one man who jumped 50 feet to his death, saying he had nothing left to live for.
The hurricane left most of southern Louisiana without power, and the arena, which is in the central business district of New Orleans, was not spared. The air conditioning failed immediately and a swampy heat filled the dome.
An emergency generator kept some lights on, but quickly failed. Engineers have worked feverishly to keep a backup generator running, at one point swimming under the floodwater to knock a hole in the wall to install a new diesel fuel line. But the backup generator is now faltering and almost entirely submerged.
There is no sanitation. The stench is overwhelming. The city's water supply, which had held up since Sunday, gave out early Wednesday, and toilets in the Superdome became inoperable and began to overflow.
"There is feces on the walls," said Bryan Hebert, 43, who arrived at the Superdome on Monday. "There is feces all over the place."
The Superdome is patrolled by more than 500 Louisiana National Guard troops, many of whom carry machine guns as sweaty, smelly people press against metal barricades that keep them from leaving, shouting as the soldiers pass by: "Hey! We need more water! We need help!"
[...]
latimes.com
...and then:
psicorp.com
Excerpt:
In mid-afternoon on a sunny July day in 1816 the French frigate Medusa ran aground on the treacherous Arguin Bank, off the west coast of Africa. The events that followed earned the ship a permanent and prominent place in the annals of infamous sea disasters. 150 men and women were abandoned on a makeshift raft. When the raft was found by chance two weeks later only 15 remained alive, the rest having fallen victim to the sea, to mutiny, to starvation, and to cannibalism. The shipwreck and all that followed were the result of incompetent leadership, and when the tale reached France it caused a major political scandal, nearly toppling the government.
The story captured the imagination of the young artist Théodore Géricault, inspiring him to use it as the subject of a grand painting for the Paris Salon of 1819. Géricault's Scene of a Shipwreck (now known as Raft of the Medusa) was a sensation and proved to be a pivotal work in art history. It survives today as one of the treasures of the Louvre, and yet many people are unaware that it was based on a historical event.
[...]
collegeem.qc.ca |
