I’m not sure how long this will last but it might be good for a laugh until Gustav hits. Unfortunately for these guys, however, riding out Gustav in Houma probably won’t be good for any laughs. You might be able to find additional video here if this feed stops.
The compassionate one shows his true colors:
Sometime you really have wonder at what cost some are willing to see their political ideology advanced.
To liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, the bounds are seemingly endless. Moore has made a recent career out of attacking President George W. Bush, bashing conservatives and criticizing business. His latest outrage occurred on MSNBC’s August 29 “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and when he commented about the coincidental timing of an unfortunate disaster – the potential for Hurricane Gustav to make landfall at the beginning of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
“I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven,” Moore said, laughing. “To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities – at the top of the Mississippi River.”
Thankfully, it looks like Cuba’s evacuation prevented the kind of massive casualties one would usually expect in a storm of this magnitude:
Strong gusts of wind over 340-km/hour were felt in the Paso Real de San Diego zone after the hurricane hard hit the Los Palacios municipality; although there is also considerable damage in other areas like Candelaria, San Cristobal and Bahia Honda. The hurricane’s strong winds are also being felt in the province capital city and other localities.
The Provincial Defense Council insists on the protection of the population in order to avoid human losses. More than 147,900 people were evacuated in Pinar del Rio, most of them went to the homes of neighbours and relatives as is usual among Cubans who always show their solidarity in the face of hurricanes.
And Gustav could strengthen before hitting the Gulf Coast…
Go play the loop. The scale and power of this growing hurricane is amazing, and if you live on the Gulf Coast, quite terrifying.
New Orleans will be virtually empty before Gustav strikes:
“I am announcing today mandatory evacuation of New Orleans starting 8am Sunday on the West bank,” Nagin said at a press conference.
“We want everybody… we want 100 per cent evacuation. If you decide to stay, you are on your own.”
“This is the mother of all storms,” Nagin said. “This storm is so powerful and growing more powerful every day that I’m not sure we’ve seen anything like it.”
Nagin estimated that less than half of the city’s population has left despite days of dire warnings.
“This is the real deal,” Nagin said. “Riding this storm out would be one of the biggest mistakes you could make in your life.”
Nagin said police, fire and other emergency personnel are being pulled from the city to safer areas. A “skeleton crew” of fewer than 50 city workers will be left behind, according to officials.
New Orleans is still dangerously vulnerable:
Though the city is more aware of the hurricane danger now than it was then, unfortunately – even scandalously – New Orleans is not as prepared as it ought to be.
A recent yearlong Associated Press investigation found that many New Orleanians have a false sense of how secure their city really is behind rebuilt levees.
Though there have been some improvements, an enormous amount of the necessary levee work remains undone and seriously behind schedule. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose faulty levee-building helped cause the Katrina disaster, has over the past three years put in drainage pumps that wouldn’t work and failed reviews by the National Research Council, among other shortcomings. The Corps has high hopes for its efforts, but hope won’t stop a rising storm tide.
It is hard to believe New Orleans remains so vulnerable after Katrina revealed how city, state and federal officials, as well as the people who kept electing them, wasted decades to build defenses against the killer hurricane everyone knew was bound to come.
But here we are, three years after Katrina, with the city still undefended beyond rudimentary repair work. The AP investigation made clear that the city’s crisis today is also the fault of business people, activists and others who don’t seem to grasp the urgency of their situation.
I was in New Orleans in March of this year and couldn’t believe what an absolute mess the city was outside of the French Quarter. If it takes the dirty side of a cat 5 hurricane the damage will be incomprehensible.
Texas is not alone. There are 65,000 troops on standby along the Gulf Coast:
Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said there are 65,000 guardsmen on standby across the region.
“Any response required will be rapid and effective,” Gen. Blum said during a press conference at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters in Washington.
Other resources are pouring into staging areas from around the country:
Ambulance staff and equipment from North Dakota and Minnesota are on their way to the Gulf Coast to provide emergency response capacity to the areas likely to be impacted by Hurricane Gustav.
“Five ambulances and 22 people left late Thursday evening,” said Randy Fischer, operations director for Ringdahl EMS. “We took one ambulance and three people from our Jamestown operation, one ambulance and three people from Lisbon and the rest from our operations in Minnesota.”
Fischer said Ringdahl EMS is under contract to American Medical Response and was notified Thursday morning of a potential deployment of what is referred to as a strike team. The team is traveling to a staging area at San Antonio, Texas.
Remember that all of these resources will likely be useless to you during the storm itself if you decided to stay and are caught in it’s path. These folks will be picking up the pieces after the storm has moved on.
-
Recent Interviews
Michael Ross
A look at current intelligence
issues with a former Mossad
combatant
Dr. Steven Metz
An Army War College
professor looks at our response
to insurgency
Joshua Foust
Perspectives on COIN from a
fellow at the American Security
Project-
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
A CT expert's take on
radicalization and terrorist
strategy
-