Tragedy

While at press time the full scope of the disaster along the Gulf Coast was not yet clear, it appeared that New Orleans had, in essence, been destroyed.

The main highways in and out of the city, including the 23-mile Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, the longest overwater bridge in the nation, simply didn't exist anymore. Thousands were trapped in the city with no food, water, electricity or communications networks. Floodwater was spilling in over the broken levees, drowning entire parishes and filling the city up as if it were a giant bowl. It seemed likely that gas leaks and corpses would turn the stagnant water toxic and pestilential, infinitely increasing the already nightmarish difficulty of pumping the city dry.

The best possible case involved evacuating thousands of people, many of them old and sick, in helicopters. It looked as if it would take weeks, maybe longer, for engineers to drain the water enough for the hundreds of thousands of refugees to even survey the damage done to their homes and businesses. It is apocalyptic, and made worse by the fact that before Monday night it appeared as if the city had averted the worst of the catastrophe.

For those of us who know and love New Orleans, it is an unfathomable tragedy, made more appalling in some ways by the fact that the French Quarter, the Garden District and the business district appear to have been spared the worst of it, leaving the poorest and most defenseless residents of some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country, places where you can go half a mile in some places without seeing a building of concrete or brick, to bear the brunt.

The fools and vultures who always emerge in such circumstances have hardly helped matters, as with Jefferson parish president Aaron Broussard declaration that "I'm expecting that some people who are die-hards will die hard." Which is not to say we have sympathy for those who stay in the city through every hurricane season, robbing and looting from those who leave.

All sorts of people have shamed themselves so far, and more no doubt will. The national press has covered the story in a callous and morally imbecilic fashion. Having more or less openly rooted for the worst to happen-watching CNN Sunday night, you could hear the disappointment in the voices of the anchors as the Category 5 hurricane was downgraded to a Category 4-they are now confronted with what is among the worst disasters in American history, and seem to have no real idea how to respond to it.

At least they had the decency to try and appear as if they weren't cheering on Katrina, unlike the enviros, extreme weather fetishists and religious zealots who openly yearned for despoiled oil platforms, global warming-scorched atmosphere and God, respectively, to take their revenge on sinful man

If the zealots see whatever they want in the carnage, though, so do average New Yorkers. It was impossible to look at the devastation and think of much other than the nuclear bomb we're all more or less certain will one day go off in our city. We can pray, make our impotent donations to the Red Cross or simply brood, as our fancy takes us, but it's impossible to forget that not all disasters are natural, and that in looking at what's left of New Orleans we may simply be looking at our own future.