http://www.sierratimes.com/05/09/06/216_190_204_11_15710.htm

Unlike divorce, though, a flood tends to be a group activity. Rarely is one home destroyed. Fortunately, it is rare for a whole city to be devastated by a disaster. New Orleans is gone. It doesn't exist anymore.

It was not destroyed by a hurricane -- the hurricane missed. The city was inundated a day later, following the breakdown of long-deteriorating levees which had kept the sea out. But it wasn't even the flood which has destroyed New Orleans. Parts of town were hardly touched . . .at least by the flooding.

The real disaster was the PEOPLE of New Orleans.

When a hurricane approaches, say, Florida, there are a lot of people who evacuate the coastline and go inland or even go to other states, out of the projected path. There are also a lot of people who stay in place -- but few few of them are right along the coastline. Even fewer stay in areas below sea level.

Louis Armstrong International Airport -- built on "high ground" -- has an elevation on the runways (which are build higher still) of FOUR FEET ABOVE MEAN SEA LEVEL. The nearby Navy field is a foot lower, and, ironically, the one other runway in the area is Lakefront Airport, the highest at eight feet MSL, projection north into Lake Ponchartrain. If you take this information to mean that New Orleans was built on low, flat ground, then you see my point here. This is the Mississippi Delta, and the river flows right through the middle of the penninsula upon which New Orleans was built. The Gulf of Mexico is four miles away, with wetlands, streams and canals coming right into town, and it is higher than most of the land there.

This is not the smart place to build a city.

New Orleans started as a small town, where trade from the Gulf and from up the Mississippi met. It grew over the years, then became a point of strategic importance during the War of 1812, when a backwoods Tennessee militia leader kept the British Army from taking the city, which would have given the Brits access to the Great American River northward. It was this victory which turned the war in our favor, putting that militia leader, "Old Hickory," on the path to becoming President Andrew Jackson.

The problem is that, following the War of 1812, New Orleans became a major city. The Bourbon Street jazz scene was nothing more than whistling in a graveyard. There have been years of warnings from experts and even in the media about the precarious position held by the people there. US News and World Report quoted the director of the LSU Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes as saying "If a hurricane comes next month, New Orleans could no longer exist." That prediction was made in July. The flood came in August. (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050718/18neworleans.htm). Some readers have suggested that there is something eerie about the National Geographic Magazine article from last year, which reads just like the news reports of this past week, but there is nothing supernatural about it -- New Orleans was a disaster on the way. It had been bought and paid for by decades of building, of population growth, and of the Welfare State.

Huh? "The Welfare State"?!

Absolutely! The real disaster wasn't caused by water, it was caused by people who were raised to believe that the bureaucracy will take care of them. This mindset is attractive to many: don't bother thinking for yourself, don't do anything for your self, just go get "your" money. If you can reach it, it's yours. If it's too much trouble, forget it and go to something easy. You may notice that this is closely related to the mindset of a criminal, which is why it has been so easy for many of these people to become looters and rapists, and to shoot at those who would try to rescue them. Rescuers are a reminder that this new situation is not normal, and that eventually they may have to answer for their crimes.

The breakdown extended to the police department. Not only did something like 15% of the police officers stop responding to calls for help, but many of them calmly watched looting and a few even became looters themselves!

Let me make this clear: It is one thing to break into a store during a disaster for food or for the insulin that someone needs to live. This is more like commandeering vital supplies, and in fact many retailers have given "unwritten permission" for emergency responders to take needed supplies as needed, then catch up with accounting and reimbursement later. In fact, Wal-Mart has written off counhtless thousands of dollars' worth of such supplies over the years, as immediate needs have overwhelmed responders' budgets . . .

. . .However, a police officer rolling a 37" plasma screen HDTV away . . .well, that's just plain stealing. That's what the cop was given the badge and the gun to prevent!

Several gun stores were also looted, as owners had trusted their iron bars to keep thieves out long enough for the police to arrive . . .but the police never arrived. I can hardly wait for the first big lawsuit against a Federal Firearms Licensee over the murder weapon which he "negiligently failed to protect from being stolen."

Let's not forget that New Orleans was the first major city to sue gunmakers! That's right, the city whose cops became looters, which couldn't be bothered to guard gun shops, was the one which demanded that 16 gunmakers "reimburse the city for millions of dollars spent on police and medical services connected to gun violence." To be fair, I should also point out that it was a local legislator who wrote the state law which spiked the anti-gun lawsuit. Care to bet how long it takes the anti-gunners to point to that law as the reason that so many guns were stolen?

With those guns, the thugs have been taking bigger steps, shooting at National Guard helicopters and fire trucks. Some hospitals report that moved patients upward, floor by floor, trying to protect them (and vital equipment) as looters took over lower floors seeking drugs, supplies, and things to steal or just destroy.

The worst example of the breakdown, however, was at the Superdome, called into use as a refugee center. There were enough police and National Guard troops to make sure that everyone going in was disarmed, but not enough to protect them once they were inside. Proving once again that Heinlein was right -- "An armed society is a polite society" -- by going to the opposite extreme, the Superdome became the hunting ground for rapists and other thugs, who had nothing to fear from their victims, nor from the police who stayed outside where it was safer.

So here we have the whole combination plate. A culture where people are turned into herd animals, forced into a pen, themselves defenseless and trusting their herders for protection, when the herders themselves are afraid of the wolves -- or have become wolves themselves!

THIS is why New Orleans doesn't exist anymore. Building can be rebuilt, but "The Big Easy" has died and cannot be resuscitated. People will remember the Superdome as a concentration camp, a huge "rape room." They will forever wonder if the cop they see stayed on duty or became a predator, or whether he did anything but watch. Many will feel some small sense of shame each time they turn on that TV they stole (or bought from a thief). The rest of the country and the rest of the world now has put their whole city and anyone admitting to have lived there into the same category as British soccer fans, politicians and people who cheat on their marriages -- okay most of the time, but never quite trustworthy. It is already happening. Cities where the refugess are being taken are putting extra police on duty around them to guard against a spread of the problems which have been so widely reported. And this is the tragedy following the tragedy, because the vast majority of these folks are good people, who only need a safe place to stay while they come to terms with the world as it really is. The looters generally won't leave their loot, for fear that someone will do to them what they did to someone else.

I predict that, as a direct result of the mess in Louisiana, there will be a resurgence in militia and local posse membership. Now that we have seen Americans turning into animals, a lot of Joe Sixpacks are going to look around and realize that the only way to protect their families and their homes will be by turning into Joe SixGUN. Expect a lot of the towns near New Orleans to openly support these groups as they form or come back to life.

The first thing that needs to be done is to arrange citizen protection for hospitals! There are a lot more hospital doors than there are cops to protect them, and our medical personnel and facilities are the top priority. One nurse may save hundreds of lives over the course of a disaster, but she can't do it without equipment and supplies, and she can't do it if she's been beaten, raped and left to die. It only takes two or three guys with shotguns (take #6 shot) to effectively guard an entrance and protect dozens of nurses, doctors, and medics. Weld steel doors shut, if they can't be barred, and that will cut the number of entrances to worry about. Don't trust locks and latches, which can be defeated by a hammer, but a couple of inches of bead on each side near the top, center and bottom will solve the problem.

After 9/11, I told my readers to get CCW permits, largely as a sign to the terrorists and their supporters in Congress, education and the media that the People of the United States of America were not going to sit and politely offer themselves as targets. Many readers responded that they had done so.

Today, I am calling on my readers -- including YOU -- to get or renew their CCW permits as a sign that they are ready to defend their families, their homes and their hometowns. The looters gave a wide berth to anyone who showed a willingness to protect themselves and their property. Shouldn't that be you?

And don't forget radio communications. Those nifty FRS and CB radios could be worthless, so get ham licenses (it's easy!) and join the local emergency communications ham groups. Many ham operators are kids, so you can pick one of the thousands of ham frequencies as a family channel, keep in touch and know that your family is safe even if they are evacuated.

I have already heard from one group of nurses asking if I would come teach them gun safety and get them familiar with firearms, even though in their state it is pretty much impossible to get concealed-carry permits. They are going to buy pistols and store them at the various hospitals and clinics where they work. One doctor that I know in California has already gone to her hospital board demanding a change in the no-guns policy, pointing to New Orleans as an example of what happens in a major disaster, and pointing out that her hospital serves an area expected to be among the hardest hit when the Big Shake comes. When she asked how many of the doctors on the board had a gun "here," she saw the "telltale signs of shame" which indicated that at least half of them were already violating the policy, including one who was known to be a supporter of California's victim disarmament laws.

The lessons are there. They could apply to where you live. And, as we have seen, sometimes government isn't the answer to the problem, sometimes government IS the problem, so it's up to YOU.

As author AE Van Vogt and songstress Leslie Fish noted:

"Take it or leave it, you still must live with it The right to buy weapons is the right to be FREE!"

===== Keith R. Wood lives most of the time in Salt Lake City and some of the time in an island paradise, but knows that disaster strikes everywhere.