I've been watching the reports on CNN this morning and feeling great worry for all of you in the Gulf Coast area and for everyone in southern Lousiana and Mississippi. It looks like New Orleans has been spared the very worst, though hearing that the Superdome is coming apart was shocking,
but places like Biloxi and Gulfport are in a very bad way.
I think what astonishes and appals me almost as much as the terrible destruction is what the news organisations expect of their reporters and crews. These people are among the only human beings outside, exposed to the elements. There's one reporter and his crew in a car in Gulfport, a place described as a ghost town - everyone's evacuated. Everyone but the reporting team! And every time they go to Gulfport this reporter gets
out of the protection of his armoured car and into 100+mph winds and torrential rain.
In Biloxi, with gusts of 90+mph, a reporter and crew are standing outside a hotel which is falling apart! Bits of roof tiles, vinyl siding, window-frames and glass and even bits of trees are blowing everywhere, and these people are stnding out in it. In New Orleans CNN has a reporter standing outside the Superdome, a building which was supposed to withstand anything but whose roof is peeling off due to the weather. They've got another guy on a pier in Baton Rouge, where the Mississippi has risen about 10 feet and where an enormous barge is floating loose and banging against the same pier, and the winds are so strong he can barely stand upright.
Are we
that hungry for news that we want people's lives to be put at risk just to bring us a story?
In Baton Rouge a student being interviewed said, almost gleefully, that this was a "fun place" to watch the storm from. Anyone who could describe this sort of weather, a hurricane which has already destroyed lives, property, natural resources and so on to such an extent, and which will cause destruction running into perhaps billions of dollars, not to mention hardship and anguish for so many people who may return to their homes in a few days' time to find that they've lost most of what they owned, and maybe their jobs too if the businesses where they worked are destroyed too, needs to re-evaluate his priorities.
/rantStay safe, everyone in Katrina's path! And, whenever you can, let us know that you're okay. Jen, Shelley, anyone else in that part of the US, we're keeping you in our thoughts.
Wendy
