Charity's Story

What happened at Charity Hospital during and after Katrina?



Go here.

Sept 30 Elections

We will be asked to vote on thirteen (13) constitutional amendments in two weeks on September 30th. And additional eight amendments will be on the November 7th election.

You can read these amendments at this website.

WWL had political pollster Bernie Pinsonat on to discuss three of the 13:

Here are Mr. Pinsonet's opinions:

Amendment Four
Limits the amount that juries can award to a property owner should private property be siezed by the government for damage mitigation. This amendment is considered pro government.


Amendment Five
Property cannot be taken by the state except for public purposes (a general public right to definite use of the property). It also provides provide exceptions use of the property and that just compensation to be paid to the owner of the expropriated property.(pro landowner)


Amendment Six
Prohibits the transfer of property expropriated by the state to any person without first offering the property to the original owner; to provide that unused expropriated property be declared surplus property to be first offered to the original owner prior to sale to the general public by competitive bid.


the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR) details all amendments in great detail.
Go to PAR website to review and make your intelligent decision at this website.



VOTE, DAMMIT!!!

Scuzzbucket of the week

Actually, this guy is sadder than a scuzzbucket. Maybe he was just hungry.
I needed the laugh.



A one-legged shoplifter was arrested days after allegedly taking a rack of beef ribs, police said Wednesday.




story here WWL.com


According to Lt. Todd Duplantis, a Houma Police spokesman, officers were called to the Rouses Grocery Store on St. Charles Street in reference to a shoplifter on Saturday, September 9. The store manager told them a one-legged man on a scooter picked up a 14-pound pack of ribs and left the store without paying for them.

The manager said he chased the man down and got the ribs back outside the store, Duplantis said. Police patrolled the area but could not find the suspect.

On Wednesday, police, acting on several tips, apprehended 48-year-old Darryl Chauvin and charged him with theft of goods, Duplantis said. Investigators also discovered that Chauvin had seven outstanding warrants against him for writing bad checks. He was also charged for those warrants.

PTSD and it's children

Suicide rate higher, but nowhere near double than pre-Katrina,

story here

Whew! that's a relief

The Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans' suicide rate appears to have gone up in the first six months after Hurricane Katrina evacuees were allowed back home, but the increase could be due to chance instead of post-storm depression, a new study by Louisiana's state epidemiologist found.

So what does THAT mean? chance?

Dr. Raoult Ratard took a unique approach to studying the death and suicide rate because there have been no firm estimates of how many people have returned after the storm. Various sources have put the number at anywhere from less than 200,000 to around 250,000 out of the pre-Katrina Census figure of just under 455,000.

So, Ratard compared the number of deaths from October 2005 (when the city was re-opened after the storm) through March 2006 to the number of deaths for the same period the year before. The pre-storm death total was 2,507; post storm, 1,024. The ratio was 0.41.

The number of pre-storm suicides was 16; post storm, 11. The ratio was 0.69.

So, the suicide ratio was higher than the death ratio. But the totals are too small to conclude that Katrina caused the increase. "They are not big enough so that you can say with certainty that it would not be due to chance," he said.



some people will do ANYTHING for study money.


...a recent study which found that seriously depressed survivors of the storm thought about suicide far less often than people in that shape before Katrina.

But, since the number of seriously depressed people is much higher, the total percentage of people considering suicide could still be higher or about the same....


STOP!!! stop the number manipulation! my head hurts!


It's hard to say whether figures will show that suicides increased after March or around the recent Aug. 29 anniversary, Kessler said. Anniversaries of traumatic events such as divorce or a child's death do increase the chance of suicide, but concern by public figures and a feeling of pulling together may counterbalance that.

"It's hard to know. It could go either way," he said. "I'm much more concerned about the long-term grinding effect on people ...


The mayor just gave another speech saying people have got to realize it's going to be a while, and people say, `A while! It's been a while. How long is a while?'"

No, they're not quite saying THAT. Here's what they're saying...


Ratard's study also found a significant drop in the rate of homicides. However the study period ended just as the city's homicide lull did.

There had been 19 homicides in the October through March after the storm, compared to 129 in the same period a year earlier. But there were 13 in June, followed by 21 — just under the monthly average before Katrina — in July, and 98 so far this year.



Welcome to Hard Times...

Alligator Bend

A $19.6 million proposal may be the first among four projects recommended for approval by the Breaux Act Task Force at its Oct. 18 meeting.

If the task force agrees, as expected, the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service and the state Department of Natural Resources would choose a contractor and oversee the work
to rebuild a land bridge, sandwiched between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne in an area known as Alligator Bend, (shown below, with the red star) the contractor would mine about 3 million cubic yards of sediment from Lake Borgne to fill in 410 acres of open water, in part created by Hurricane Katrina.

The project also includes planting vegetation along 7 1/4 miles of the Lake Borgne shoreline, which retreated 5 feet during the storm.

For more info, go here.

Just what everyone needs....

from Cajun Creations dot com:

Da Mayor in Your Pocket
Price: $10.00

Things got bad, and then he got mad. New Orleanians' have an interesting sense of humor, and Da Mayor in Your Pocket is a must have all New Orleanians.We suggest you buy two, because someone you know is going to fall in love with it and you'll have to buy another one anyway. Batteries included. Good clean fun.

Includes six of our Mayor's famous sayings (you know the ones he made on national radio or TV)...

You gotta be kidding me
This is a national disaster
Get their asses movin' to New Orleans
And let's fix the biggest Goddamn crisis in the history of this country
Excuse my French everybody in America
But, I am pissed.

So are we, Ray, Ray

We will never forget

September 11, 2001.
We will never forget

What's happening

just another crazy week in New Orleans

Thanks to Ernie.

Mississippi Gulf Coast

The damage done to the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Katrina was devastating.

Here is a video showing
before and after shots in the Gulfport-Biloxi area.

Thanks to Seawitch for this video.

Mr. Responsibility

Seems like the scuzzbucket of the week last week has redeemed himself....a
little bit.

From the Times Picayune:
John Lyons Jr. has decided not to pursue his lawsuit against a Broadmoor man who said he rescued more than 200 residents from post-Katrina floodwaters after commandeering Lyons' boat.

Looks like Mr Lyons finally came to his senses and thought over how ridiculous and
self-serving his suit was. But he couldn't stop at that. He just had to say
"The big issue here is not the monetary damages that I incurred from the loss of the boat," he wrote. "It is about holding people responsible for their actions.

"Does a natural disaster give an individual the right to break into private property, take possessions of others, not return them and then have no responsibility to the rightful owner? If this becomes a precedent, then we, the citizens, will ultimately pay the price."

Lyons said he too was a victim of Hurricane Katrina and that he evacuated 10 people from a flooded home, including several elderly women and a young child.

"To complete this evacuation, I borrowed a pirogue and personally paddled these people eight blocks through fallen trees to dry ground. After numerous trips back and forth, when everyone was out and safe, I waded back through chest-deep floodwater to return the pirogue to the owner's home."

Isn't he special.

Weather

We've been blessed this week with a taste of low humidity (60% is low). It's been awesome. I even worked in my yard this morning before the sun got high in the sky. Cooler weather wakes us up. Makes us feel alive again. We didn't have much of this cooler weather last year, post Katrina. Here's a post that says it so much better than I can