America's Ordeal-excellent heartbreaking sum up &?s of last week- Observer

[uppityperson]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1562298,00.html

It was difficult to decide which looked more incongruous, the shark on the highway or the column of Humvee military vehicles patrolling a US city. Above the Veterans Memorial Highway, a drag of low-slung malls and takeaway joints, stretching almost the length of Metairie, a northern district of Jefferson Parish to the east of New Orleans, the sky was alive with Black Hawk military helicopters.

To the west, smoke from a burning store in the downtown area of the city spiralled upwards. A few hundred yards across the highway, US coastguards from three states patrolled Lake Pontchartrain. Three hundred square miles in size, it was this lake which on Monday night poured through a 300ft gap in the levee protecting New Orleans' 17th Street, causing a mini tsunami to engulf much of the city.
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They are scenes of surreal and violent abnormality that, in barely five days, the United States has been forced to become familiar with as it has confronted its worst natural disaster in the shape of Hurricane Katrina. Scenes that have forced America into its deepest moment of national introspection since 9/11 as it has been forced to ask: how could this have happened to a US city, and why did the relief efforts go so badly wrong?
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The smell in parts of the city is overpowering. Mosquitoes buzz across the fetid water touched with the purple tinge of oil slicks. One woman told The Observer how she saw an alligator emerge from the water and drag a disabled man underneath. Scores of bodies have been seen floating in the Ninth Ward in the north of the city, where the most serious flooding has occurred. Lucrece Phillips can't get the images of dead babies, women and men, floating along the streets out of her head.

Much more at link.

[uppityperson]

1. one kick for a good article.

[DELUSIONAL]

2. kick

[ailsagirl]

3. Excellent article-- I'm just reading it now. Recommended!!

The horror that has become one of America's most internationally famous cities is a vision that has come to grip an entire nation in shared anger, impotence and shame - a vision that now carries serious implications for the President and his administration as each day of delay and incompetence has seen the crisis worsen, and the city increasingly resemble Mogadishu.

[ailsagirl]

4. kick

[Skittles]

5. I read every word - an excellent read

thanks uppity