Should've suspected the former NYT editor could write.
....so can our SF Chron letter-writers.
BTW, about the knock-on effects of the hurricane:
On Monday I was looking for a new shirt in the Marshall's discount store in San Francisco and heard a conversation between two women near the fitting rooms. I think both were mothers of daughters. They were disgusted with the choice of clothes remaining, saying everything had already been picked over by earlier back-to-school shoppers. One of the women said she hadn't been able to come earlier -- I gathered with her daughter -- because they had been waiting for some money from New Orleans and the check had been delayed by the flood evacuation.
So, I thought, ish, here we go, how many more families are there like this one?
I'm guessing the check might have been something like alimony or child support, and probably whoever was earning that money is now displaced and not earning, and next month a check doesn't come to a family in San Francisco, or maybe instead what arrives is refugee relatives to a household that can already barely send a daughter to school with new discount blue jeans.
There is a steady flow back and forth of poor people between California and the South. We will have refugees here very soon even though San Francisco is an expensive place to live. There is going to be a little less to go around everywhere, not just on the Gulf Coast.
Posted by Martha Bridegam at September 1, 2005 09:02 AMEffects of the hurricane I see:
A cousin in Virginia who is sent on two days' notice to Mississippi to work on restoring electricity.
My local home-repair megastore has no generators for sale. A sign apologizes, explaining that they've all been sent to New Orleans.
The San Antonio AM news station is appealing for people to bring clean underwear to the in-town shelters that have started receiving refugees.
My coworkers look exhausted from maintaining servers which are suddenly processing hundreds dollars worth of donations per second.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 2, 2005 08:25 PMCongrats on the donation processing.
While so many people are dropping the ball, it seems like Texans at the state and local level are about as well organized as anyone. The Harris County Housing Authority in Houston, for example.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 2, 2005 09:13 PMNo congrats to us -- we're just doing our jobs. Congrats to the donors. Thanks anyhow, though. At least one of the round-the-clock IT guys has a premature one-week-old in NICU right now, and has to divide his time between work and hospital in a way none of us like.
I'm sure it's nothing unique to Texas. It's just that we're the only population center near New Orleans that hasn't also been clobbered. I don't think a Louisianan could even get to Atlanta. A college friend's parents (from Slidell) are currently in Memphis, I understand. No idea what they'll come back to.
My own family has evacuated from southeast Texas twice in the last dozen years. Fall 1992 was a complete debacle, but planning authorities were able (and willing) to learn from it well enough that they didn't have the same problems in Fall 2002. There are all sorts of things you never expect when you're planning an evacuation, even without a large urban population that lacks transportation. Hospitals, prisons, and nursing homes came as a surprise in 1992, but so did the issue of east-west traffic, as well as the notion of bottlenecks. Huge numbers of people were stuck along the coast because of unsynchronized lights or stop signs in tiny towns 200 miles inland: traffic simply backed up that far. Hotels were full well into Oklahoma and Arkansas.
The rules laid down after the false alarm of 1992 were rigid and unpopular, but they worked in 2002. If you live in city X, your evacuation route us US 69 north, and you're not allowed to turn off it until you're several hundred miles inland. City Y -- the next town west -- takes a different route, and the east-west roads between those towns are blocked. Every small-town cop is required to prioritize northbound traffic, whether they like it or not, and no nonsense with speed traps.
It's just tragic that it seems to take a full dress rehearsal to adequately prepare for the real thing.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 2, 2005 10:51 PMAdequately? Woss adequate? Or do you mean *this* is the dress rehearsal now?
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at September 3, 2005 12:27 PMMy point was that New Orleans hadn't had the kind of false alarm evacuation to learn from that southeast Texas had. Talking with my mother today, however, she pointed out that in fact they'd had precisely that chance a year ago when they evacuated for Hugo.
So much for that theory.
Posted by: Ben Brumfield at September 3, 2005 01:55 PM