the latest

FEMA reports the water has stopped rising in New Orleans. in other news, the situation in the city has become so dangerous that even the news organizations are pulling their people out. the latest video does show the French Quarter mostly dry, and one reporter said the areas right along the river are fairly dry, but pretty much everything else is underwater.

looting is rampant and the police aren't even trying to stop it for the most part -- they say they think it would only make things more dangerous to try to interfere, and they're concentrating their efforts more on trying to save lives. the producer CNN still has in the city reports that people are pretty much looting clothing and shoe stores, not food and emergency needs.

FEMA is now working out how to make the Superdome into a more functional shelter -- apparently they've decided not to evacuate people from there, or they feel that it will take so long that they need to provide services until they can get everyone out. the military is setting up a field hospital just outside of New Orleans.

i still can't believe this is actually happening.

and if you were wondering

why did so many people stay? read this. thanks to wicked_wish for summing up many of my thoughts, and several i hadn't yet had.

i have to stop reading other people's thoughts on the disaster, because of the occasional comment that makes me feel like i'm about to throw an aneurysm.

wow.

OK, they gave up on the Superdome. they're in the process of transporting 24,000 people from it to the Houston Astrodome. the mayor of New Orleans says that hundreds and possibly thousands of people are dead. they're dropping giant sandbags into the breaches in the levees, but since all of the pumps are now underwater, stopping the flooding is only the beginning. they're talking three to six months to get the city dry.

there's entirely too much blather about looting. who gives a crap? it's not like those stores are uninsured, and they'll be written off as a total loss anyway, most likely. let the damn people have the stuff.

in asia, typhoon Talim is approaching Taiwan, with typhoon Nabi close behind. neither is as powerful as Katrina, but they could still do some pretty severe damage; we'll see what happens with them.

i'll note that it's surprisingly difficult to find info on typhoons as opposed to hurricanes, at least in English. most US sites have only very sketchy info on these typhoons, even though they're fairly impressive ones.

it just gets worse

there's been another levee breach. also, the anchors are running out of new info so they're pushing the sensationalism a bit now.

i'm starting to run out of juice. watching this is getting to be more than i can take.