Pumping Begins in New Orleans–UPDATE

UPDATE: The Shelbyville Times-Gazette has reported that 40,000 dead bodies may be found when New Orleans is drained and other hurricane areas, such as Biloxi, Mississippi, are cleaned up. This estimate was based on an interview by reporter Clint Confehr with mortuary owner Dan Buckner, who says the government has ordered 25,000 body bags for the cleanup. For more information, click here.

Engineers have begun pumping out the flooded streets of New Orleans. They expect to find as many as ten thousand dead bodies and Mayor Ray Nagin says, “It’s going to be awful and it’s going to wake the nation up again.” It will take about three weeks to fully remove all the water from the streets. This timetable will radically change if another hurricane, which may be on the way, hits the area.

Be prepared for gruesome images on your TV newscasts. It remains to be seen whether our media will show the grisly images of dead bodies, chewed by alligators, that will be revealed when the water is finally gone. In Europe, the media showed video of people jumping to their deaths out of the windows of the World Trade Center on 911, rather than being burned up in the flames, but these images were not shown to us here in the US.

The Katrina disaster is leading to a major gas shortage, with inevitable higher prices. New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin says, “We are pumping about a million dollars’ worth of gas a day [into] the air.” Gas prices could rise to $5 or $6 a gallon. In the UK, prices have risen to the equivalent of $7 a gallon, causing major protests.

A Canadian task force of firefighters and police arrived four days after the storm, according to Fire Chief Thomas Stone, who says, “If you can get a Canadian team here in four days, US teams should be here faster than that.”

Art credit: http://www.freeimages.co.uk

Tune into this weekend’s Dreamland, available on our website on September 9, to hear James Howard Kunstler talk about how we may be out of gas for a very long time. Anne interviews him just for subscribers.To find out how best to donate money to the survivors of Katrina, click here.

NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.