The Boston Globe reports this morning that the subset of NO evacuees at Otis who are foolish enough to want to stay in Massachusetts are compiling a list of grievances, including a claim that there aren’t enough black organizations or volunteers “being allowed” on Edwards – as if black citizens were being forcibly excluded from the Base, a claim which no doubt comes as a big surprise to the black clergyman who is acting “Mayor” of “Edwards Village”.
According to the story, the evacuees have been told that their “visit” to Edwards is temporary, and they have to move on some time this month, the prospect of which is sending some into a panic, and rightly so.
Complicating the ideal scenario, placement by October 21, the evacuees have figured out that cost of housing is a big problem in Mass, even with offers of FEMA assistance.
Out of 104 people who want to stay in Mass. either temporarily or permanently, only 8 have found housing so far.
This is so typical: government officials impulsively decide to bring over 200 people some 1,300 miles away from home to the highest cost of living region in the US with one of the lowest rates of job creation. They did this, obviously, with no planning or forethought, leaving others to hold the bag, i.e., the community and the evacuees themselves.
I was supposed to work at the Base on October 15 and, earlier this week, thought better of it, figuring they really didn’t need someone like me to hang around at a desk like excess baggage. How right I was.
I’m irritated with the evacuees for griping about trivia, like not having refrigerators in their rooms.
On the other hand, I’m very sympathetic to them as a subset of people who lost their homes, were shuttled onto planes to who-knows-where, and have been living in a semi prison/halfway house with no mobility and little privacy.
Some of the evacuees also had to cope with at least one nutcase who was finally booted out, along with his “threatening” dog. That alone would have sent me into a padded cell.
I’m sorry that the evacuees played the race card, but suspect this is an easily-articulated substitute for some understandable gripes.
Look at the facts: 3,000 NO city workers are being laid off for lack of funds. Minimum wage laws and environmental regulations have been suspended in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Alphonso Jackson, the Secretary for Housing and Urban Development, told the Houston Chronicle that “New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again”, a (deliberate?) consequence of relocating NO residents to over 40 states, with no plan to return them home.
Rather than providing employment to local people thrown out of work, multi-million dollar contracts are instead being given out to out-of-state Bush cronies with no written agreements or auditable paper trails.
Meanwhile, there’s a disaster for the Cape waiting to happen on La Palma, which is part of the Canary Islands off the West coast of Africa. There, an eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano could cause a tsunami of 10-25 meters, or roughly 30-80 feet, that would hit the East Coast of the US in about 9 hours.
Last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami traveled almost 2 miles inland in Thailand, where the waves were up to 11 feet high, and about 3 1/2 miles inland in Banda Aceh, where the waves were up to 40 feet high.
Thus, a tsunami spawned by an eruption of Cumbre Vieja would be more than enough to swamp the entire Outer and Lower Cape and most of Mid Cape; the “skinniest” part of the Cape, roughly from Hyannis Park to Yarmouth Station is about 4 miles.
If all 230,000 of us (make that half a million during tourist season) were told to evacuate, we’d be at the mercy of the Sagamore and Bourne bridges, both of which were shut down for 1-2 1/2 hours, respectively, one day last month due to a few inches of rain.
This long exercise is meant to prove that a scenario similar to what happened in New Orleans could be repeated for at least some of us here.
If nothing else comes out of the ever-growing mismanagement in NO, the following is a lesson learned:
The all-too-predictable destruction of New Orleans by natural causes, and the federal government’s response thereafter, is proof that we really are on our own.