For those of you celebrating Christmas wherever you are, happy holidays. This picture is of a beach community South and West of New Orleans that I believe was primarily blown away by a direct hit from Rita. Hard to tell at this scale but the broken teeth of those pylons marches off to the horizon where houses and businesses once stood. This picture was taken last Thursday, almost 4 months after this hurricane hit. There are few Happy holidays in Louisiana this year, with official stats saying 200,000 homes destroyed by these two storms. The Southern half of Louisiana largly looks like this.

Everyone here has Terabytes of photos such as these. They decorate the halls of the JFO and are on the desktops of virtually everyone that touches this disaster.









They announced the locations where the city of New Orleans will put 8,000 trailers in the city limits this week. City parks, neighborhoods, any flat and otherwise unoccupied places. They are earmarked for workers, university, city officials and are grouped so they can be together. As you might imagine, the city is fighting with itself as to who has the authority to place these trailers .. the city council says one thing, the mayor (that insipid dumbass) says another. The governor (clearly the product of cousins marrying) is still harping on FEMA as being the bad guy for the state not getting everyone in a home yet.... and this is just barely day 120. The mayor of St Gabriel where the old morgue was is trying to hold up FEMA for 1.2 million a month in rent he charged us taxpayers for use of the abandoned school and is complaining that he put a new roof on it and wants us to pay for it.. any of you guys that ever rented a place ever paid for having the roof replaced>? He may get an extra month out of this ploy.. at this scale, it is hard to imagine the total value of the entire community exceeting 1.2 million very much.. I have posted pics of this community earlier in this blog. I would liike to see where the money goes though. If the mayor starts driving a new Cadillac, I would not be real surprised... :-)

I will have new news of my involvement in seperating FEMA and the state at the morgue. This has turned into a very interesting proposition. I am learning so much about who is supposed to do what here and.. how things end up going badly and sometimes very well. Happy Holidays to you all. Thinking about Colorado quite a bit during this season.