Benjamin Jarrell has more on the “law school refugees” front. He says many schools are willing to accommodate displaced students, but “what I hear through the grapevine is that Loyola hasn’t and probably won’t authorize 1L’s or 2L’s to take classes elsewhere.”

I e-mailed Peter Horvath at ND, and he wrote, thanking me for bringing it to his attention and saying he’ll bring it up with Dean Peshel, but adding, “I’m skeptical because (1) of spatial limitations in our building and (2) we’re already two weeks into the school year. I wonder if Tulane and Loyola students might be better served looking to enroll in schools that have not begun classes yet.”

It’s chaos when dark falls: “Women getting raped in the bathroom… three murders…”

Police officers were ambushed earlier, under a freeway.

“Because so many absolutely unthinkable things have happened — unthinkable until now — even the most outlandish rumors are scaring people.”

“Homes and business all over the city of New Orleans have been looted.”

And now it’s raining, which may cool people off, but “the few supplies they have are already wet.”

Shepard Smith, reporting from I-10, near the body of someone who died on the trek from the 9th Ward to the Superdome: “Whether New Orleans can rebuild is a matter for future reports, but New Orleans today is dead.”

Bill Crews sends along another report from the St. Amant/Gonzales area, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It might be his last:

I can’t do this much more. It seems as though things are starting to collapse (economically) here in Gonzales. Our fuel supply is beginning to run out. About 50% of the stations have no gas left. I know NOLA & SOMS are ruined but the ripple effect is worsening here… I won’t be doing this for a while after today. I cannot watch TV are listen to the news anymore…
So here’s the latest:
My neighbor works at one of our local refineries which went off-line yesterday as they have no crude coming in. He said that makes 8 or 9 oil refineries between Baton Rouge and the Miss. Gulf Coast that are now not producing gasoline/diesel…
870 AM: Officials now report that survivors of Jefferson & Orleans Parish are now walking out of devestated areas, back into “civilization”. In some cases that is a 25 to 30 mile hike through contaminated waters and over the levee systems that are still dry.

His friend Dale Shearer responded: “I think the big picture overwhelmed me this morning too. Brother shooting sister in head over bag of ice in Hattiesburg, looters shooting at helicopters trying to deliver supplies to hospital in New Orleans, idiotic morning tv personality asking Pres. Bush isn’t now the time to raise taxes. It’s all too much.”

CNN Breaking News: “New Orleans hospital halts patient evacuations after coming under sniper fire, a doctor who witnessed the incident says. More soon.”

People are “being forced to live like animals,” says CNN’s Chris Lawrence.

“People are asking, ‘Where are the buses? Where is the plan? Where is the help?’” he said.

“Are they going to leave us here to die?” others asked.

And now another CNN Breaking News alert: “New Orleans mayor issues ‘desparate SOS’ for aid, saying city lacks enough buses to evacuate hurricane refugees. Details soon.”

Now I know this is an unprecedented event. ;)

Apologies for the lack of updates. Sleep caught up with me again (and I missed a couple of classes as a result — sorry, profs! I’ll be back to a normal schedule next week, I swear!). Thanks to guestblogger Brian for his posts.

Yet Another Map of New Orleans

CNN now has a zoomable satellite image of a flooded New Orleans taken August 31. You can sort of tell by the color between the buildings what’s under water and what’s not. I’d guess this is about 1m resolution (or worse) but maybe that’s just my monitor.

Brian (Briandot) (yet again?)

I’m sure this is merely one of many towns that completely vanished the day that Katrina hit, but this is shocking nonetheless. Waveland, Mississippi, a town of 7,000 people about 35 miles east of New Orleans, was obliterated by the storm. Reports say that about 50 of the residents are dead, although it would be easy to speculate as to how many more will be found later.

The CNN article refers to it as “the former town of Waveland”. I wonder how many other former towns will be discovered in the relief effort.

Update: There is a very disturbing video of FEMA personnel recovering corpses in Waveland, MS. I can’t immediately figure out how to directly link to it, but it is accessible from the aforementioned CNN article.

Brian (Briandot)

For those of you who read CNN’s website (which with the current situation I suspect is everybody), you may know of their “QuickVote” feature. The U.S. site and the International Version are not the same. Currently up on the International Version (but not the U.S. version) is:

What has surprised you most about Hurricane Katrina?

• Nature’s power to destroy 14%
• Degree of looting and lawlessness 27%
• Failure of people to evacuate 26%
• Inability to cope with aftermath 33%

It’s interesting to see the international view on this. I don’t know if there was a similar such vote after the Indonesian tsunami. (Oh, and before someone gets upset at the international opinion regarding our lawlessness and inability to cope, note that such criticisms have been pretty common in the comment threads here already.)

Brian (Briandot)

The New York Times has a whole bunch of helpful maps of Katrina’s impact on New Orleans.

Walking home from the bus stop yesterday, I noticed the lovely pairing of Venus and Jupiter close together in the evening sky, and I was almost immediately reminded of my favorite Lord of the Rings quote, which struck me as quite relevant and applicable to the situation on the Gulf coast right now. The premise is this: Frodo and Sam are trudging through the benighted land of Mordor, surrounded by nothing but misery and despair. All seems hopeless, even moreso than it does in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast right now; the hobbits have every reason to believe that not only their little corner of the world, but the entire world as a whole, is about to come to an utterly evil end. And then…

The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Duath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

In the end, the Shadow is only a small and passing thing: there is a light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Words to live by, when all else seems lost.

I’m supposedly going to be on the Hugh Hewitt radio show (again) around 6:30 PM EST/CDT today (that’s 7:30 on the East Coast, 4:30 on the West Coast). You can listen online, or on one of these radio stations, including 1270 AM in South Bend.

“Brendansphere” blogger Charles Chambers, an Atlanta resident and New Orleans native, has been on the front lines of the relief efforts in recent days, making two round-trip drives of over 1,000 miles to bring supplies to the stricken city. He writes by e-mail:

I went to New Orleans [Tuesday] night and dropped off 160 gallons of water and 50 gallons of gasoline. I made it down to Metairie and it looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off.

The people were glad to get the water and had no idea how bad the situation was because of the news blackout around there.

I say two drives because he was planning to make a second trip last night (i.e., Wednesday night), delivering a truckload of bagged ice to Hammond (where I infer there is a staging area of some sort). I’ll let y’all know if I hear how that went.

When I asked how the heck he got into New Orleans the first time, he explained, “Several cops stopped me but let me keep going when they knew what I was doing.”

Keep up the great work, Charles. I’m getting all sorts of praise for sitting on my ass, blogging about the storm, but guys like you are the real heroes.

After watching Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds earlier this summer, I posted a review in which I criticized, among other things, his portrayal of an overwhelming tendency toward mob savagery in the wake of the invasion (e.g., the carjacking scene). Excerpt:

Speaking of people in desperate situations becoming savages and doing what is necessary to survive, I don’t think this movie adequately portrays the flip side of that equation: people coming together to help each other in a crisis, something that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly by recent events (9/11, the blackout, the hurricanes, the tsunami, etc.), really does happen. Yeah, there’s a bit of this in the movie, like the son heroically rescuing people hanging off the boat ramp or the strangers trying to save the daughter when they think she is all alone. But overall, Spielberg definitely gives us the sense that he believes the overwhelming response to a mega-crisis such as an alien invasion would be “every man for himself.” Perhaps I’m naive, but I just don’t think that’s true. There’d be some of that, sure. But I think the real world is a more nuanced — and better — place than Spielberg’s world.

Alas, what’s happening in New Orleans is beginning to make me think that perhaps Spielberg was closer to the correct balance of the equation than I thought — or at least, that he understood something which I may have failed to fully recognize: that, when society’s usual safeguards and structures break down, it takes only a relatively small group of people acting like savages to make life totally untenable for the majority whose inclination is to remain non-savage, forcing them to either become savage themselves or else be utterly at the savages’ mercy.