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New Orleans after Katrina: Back to Stone Age
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-07 08:59
They learn what darkness means when there are no lights. Suddenly, candles are a lot more than romantic. They learn what hunger means when there's no refrigerator, no microwave, no stove. They learn what thirst means when water is tainted from refuse, sewage and worse.
A dead fish lies on a street outside a restaurant in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, September 5, 2005. On Monday, residents were allowed back to their homes for the first time since Hurricane Katrina struck.[Reuters] |
One woman, 76-year-old Carolyn Knack, cleaned her dentures in dishwashing liquid. An elderly man went to the banks of the Mississippi to scrub his clothes.
Looting takes on many different names: borrowing, requisitioning, commandeering. Maybe an older, anthropological term works best -- hunting and gathering.
"A looter is not someone who takes food or water and what people need," said a New Orleans police officer whose unit set up in an abandoned downtown hotel and rode out the post-Katrina chaos.
He and his crew took what they needed to keep doing their jobs. "We requisitioned a lot of items. Basically we find a store that had been looted and we go and salvage what we could" -- water, candy bars, gasoline.
He wouldn't give his name because he'd be fired, he said.
Television images of looters raiding Wal-Mart for guns -- or neighbors' tales of people pillaging houses -- drew disgust and condemnation from virtually everyone. But it wasn't quite as simple as the pictures seemed. Some stole; some helped.
Stolen boats were used to rescue people from their homes. Stolen cars moved them across the city to dry land. Stolen food, water and clothes supplied the basic essentials.
"They was just stealing stuff to get by," said Ebony Morgan, 23, a single mom catching a bus of evacuees out with her twin two-year-olds, Kristin and Eitan. "They was just giving it all away."
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