Saturday::: Again

I wanted to post more pictures from the strike teams. These are pretty deep into the disaster area and are often very rural in the Western Parishes more affected by RITA. The focus of DMORT of course is human remains, but they come across lots of other items. Here is some of the damage they saw up close and personal and the trials they went through to both recover people and cemetary escapees (this IS the land of Cool Hand Luke...... what we got here.. is a failure to communicate).

Today is the day lots of the staff rotate out. There will be a group go out at Christmas and another one come in on the 28th for a shot at the new year. DMORT is not that big an organization and it is possible that I will be able to meet nearly everyone in the cadre before I leave the disaster. There are some interesting characters here carrying names like "mudflap" and "Bigun".

I am going to see Narnia tomorrow before I go to work in the evening.. we are switching in some new network equipment in advance of taking the populace here inside the web of the FEMA networking gnomes. I will write my short review of the movie and hope for the best.

The cafeteria lady here is under fire for the "down home" cooking that is done. We have lots of people from places like New York and California and other uptown places like Nebraska that do not favor this style of cooking. We have chicken with almost every meal (very much like central america) baked, fried, wings, buffaloed, BBQ'd, fried, stewed and gumboed....Beef tends to be ground and served as meat loaf, hamburgers or meat balls. There is rice for almost every dish, the red beans and, the chicen and, the etoufe' (sp??) all have rice. This cook also has a fondness of putting shrimp in the most unlikely things like the spagetti sauce and then not warning folk that may have allergies..... let the eater beware. I helped her with her descriptions of food and it sounds better to eat than it did before. I kind of like it all, the greens are fresh at the DMORT facility, and hwile I wish there was more fresh fruit, I would eat like a pig here if I ate my meals here.

So DMORT will put these remains in caskets for people, even the bodies that have been disinterred. Just to prove that no good deed goes unpunished, people are complaining that they are not going back into the original coffin that the dear departed were once planted in. My son Jake will remember the movie The Mummy where they were talking about the state of the mummy they had found and decided it was a bit "gooey" to be so old. Well, the entire caskets coming out of these cemetaries are like that.. goo... so the government is offering these not quite top of the line metal caskets, with nice fittings to rebury folk and.... are getting grief about it.