The good news is that I did in fact do a fly-over of New Orleans, St. Bernard Parish, and Slidell today with the Louisiana Air National Guard. The bad news is that it caused me to miss my flight to Baltimore and I’ll be sleeping over in Dallas tonight. But the somewhat comforting news is that the flight I was scheduled to be on this afternoon was delayed enough so that even if I had made that flight I’d be staying in Dallas tonight anyway.
As for the Blackhawk flyover. In some areas, particularly on the east side of New Orleans, it looked like as if you built a small Lego city, put it down on the ground, and stomped the crap out of it. Buildings that were just piles of sticks, cars overturned in the canals, boats standing up on end. Homes ripped off of their foundations and butted up against other houses. Tree after tree just snapped like matchsticks.
Before we took off from Baton Rouge, our National Guardsman pilot said to keep an eye out for holes in the roofs of the houses, where people cut their way out of their way out as the flood waters rose. But it didn’t really hit me until I saw it myself -- holes maybe six feet or so across in the roofs of large family houses, house after house. Some looked as if they had somehow been burnt out. Others looked as if they had cut with an axe. House after house, people clawing their way out to survival. And then there was the stuff that people had written on the roofs of their houses, things like “Need water,” or a list of the names of the families still inside. The handwriting on a few I saw was almost perfect block letters. It made me wonder how someone in a situation like that could manage to spray paint those words - cries for help - so neatly.
I’d post some pictures but I wisely separated all my electronics -- in my carry-on bag --from all of my plugs and cables -- in my checked pack. So I have a camera and I have a laptop, but, alas, nothing to connect the two.
(Just posted this now but wrote it up yesterday. One of the plugs I packed was the one for my laptop and it died after I wrote it but before I posted it. I'm back in DC now, after a lovely night in Grapevine, Texas.)
