Mardi Gras Season:::::::::::::::

Mardi Gras Season:::::::::::::::

“Carnival” , Mari Gras, Fat Tuesday….. all synonyms for a season down here I have not seen anything like before. It starts like Halloween in Colorado, suddenly there is an empty isle in the grocery store, then just as suddenly it is full of Purple/Gold/Green flashy things like tinsel wigs and bundles of beads for $6.00…. The Parade schedules are announced and people that I work with start planning which days they are going to be off, which they are going to be late and which they are going to be hung over.

There are funny names for parades… by the way, Mardi Gras is a day.. Feb 28th (this year) but actually represents a season and the “parties” are just parades with floats that throw beads. The Parades have themes…. Some of the funnier names I have heard this year include one in Baton Rouge that I cannot confirm “FEMA-ture Jackulation” at least they have a sense of humor. I have been horrified to learn that women do NOT have to show their breasts to get beads… turns out if you are not careful people will hit you right in the face with them… beads.. not breasts..

There is also Mardi Gras food. One traditional thing is something called a King Cake. They are rings, often they are filled with strawberry or lemon or cream cheese or come combination.. sometimes they are praline. The way they are used, someone buys a King Cake (by the way they are spray colored GOLD/GREEN/PURPLE with granular sugar and white sugar icing on top like a cinnamon roll you buy at the grocery store).. the person that buys the cake takes it somewhere like the office and it is cut and eaten. Inside there is a plastic baby… about an inch long… the person that gets the baby has to buy the NEXT King Cake…. Leave it to this state to put a choking hazard in a snack food and turn it into gambling.

More as this season progresses.

Saturday!!::::::::::::::::::

Saturday!!::::::::::::::::::

Sorry for the distance between postings lately. It has been very similar to the movie “Groundhog Day” the last almost three weeks with little to capture the attention or imagination of anyone. I quit eating breakfast………… I know you were all dying to hear that. Something happened yesterday though that got my mind going again. I got contacted by someone from my days at IBM, someone I had not spoken to in a couple years, tracked me down among other ways, through my blog.

I am not a fan of IBM, I did make a lot of money out of them and learned a lot and made at least a couple of very long term friends out of it. They are not a good stock company and I would not own it, and they spit out people all chewed up, even when it is not necessary. I was reflecting with my friend from IBM that it was very odd that the attributes that limited my career with IBM were assets to me at FEMA.; hmmmmm..

Spring flowers are up here. Rhododendron are a red riot, lots of bushes with fragrant white flowers and trees with yellow and white flowers plus the spring bulbs you would all recognize from all over the place are up and flowering like mad. There are roadside flowers in the ditches, seems to be just the one species that is so yellow and showy so far but I expect more as the season progresses.

The state and parish of NO are being all wishy washy about the DMORT people doing searches in the 9th ward. Everyone agrees there are bodies there, maybe hundreds, but somehow the politics have brewed up so that actually going to get them has turned into a scene. There are still houses sitting in the middle of streets there now 152 days after Katrina hit. In the mean time DMORT and the VIC are filling time, trying to organize things and shipping bodies. Yep, one convoy the other day left here with 173 casketed remains for two of the southern parishes.

Louisiana is complaining that Mississippi got more money than they did in block grants … turns out the Mississippi plan was well developed, clear and efficient…… There seems to be plenty to do everywhere you turn down here, Everyone is busy but it is making little impact that is visible. I think that everyone is coming to grips with New Orleans present and future being about a maximum of 1/3 the size it was before the storm for years and years. School started again this spring and even now, there are only about 9,000 students in class in all of New Orleans (I am sure Arvada has way more than that). Politicians have lost their entire voting base in some cases, it affects seats in congress, in the state, number of police and fire fighters, teachers, infrastructure workers, state and local hires.. all permanently downsized. Ultimate recovery here does not mean returning everyone to their homes, as far as I can tell they are permanently gone. I think of a term Diaspora….

Otherwise life is good. I am heading home in mid to late april depending on the work here. Lets plan a big dinner!!!

Friday Thoughts::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

The cafeteria at the VIC is a trip. The “old” morgue over at St Gabriel was fed by a displaced Caterer from New Orleans featuring three stunning meals a day, vegetarian entrees etc. The New facility hired local cooks and no matter what changes they make it comes out very down home in composition. Rice is with virtually every meal, lots of red beans and starches, sausage, chicken leg quarters (I have seen one chicken breast in two months here). The salads have been nice and fresh and recently they started making the salad dressings which I have enjoyed at lunch sometimes. I always liked institutional food, and this is not bad, but the people here that have to live on the facility and eat three meals a day here are just up in arms. Last night was steak night and apparently the rib-eyes were severely over cooked and not edible so there was considerable angst this morning. The food does tend to be overly salty, too fatty and oddly scheduled, so macaroni and cheese and shrimp etufe (however you spell that) over rice in the same meal. I presume the alternative of heading to Yousefs for pig lips and pork rinds is not an option either.

The coke machine has been resupplied and the person that loaded it AGAIN alternated red fanta with diet coke so it is a pot luck thing which you get. My office mate Charlie and I flip a coin to see who goes first. One of us always gets diet coke, the other a fanta..or.. if the coke comes first, then the other gets a diet dr pepper….we cannot discover who the jokester is that does that to diet coke.

Today is a big day, New Orleans posted the first of the demolition orders for condemned property. The first 127 properties to be razed were posted today, 199,873 to go.

Thank you all for your comments about my short story. The long toothed skull was real, part of a family apparently, or group of people with these long teeth from New Orleans. Hard not to have the volume of deceased people going through this place and not find something creepy to talk about. There are 125+/- still unidentified bodies here, with 70 of them not even tentatively identified. There remain something over 3,000 missing from the storm (the state touts 11,000 plus but that number is just crazy where it came from). The state wants FEMA/DMORT/whoever to go examine in detail the 400+ addresses where the public has reported last seeing individuals. These flooded places are such a mess, furniture floats everywhere and stacks to the ceiling, it is all covered by inches of goo and covered several inches thick with fungus and mold. The dead are all degraded and frankly are hard to distinguish from the other muck covered debris. The only way to search the places is to literally remove every thing stick by stick. Job for huge crews of people working very long days for a very long time. Many of the houses are unstable, and already condemned and dangerous to go into, you hate to kill someone else looking for someone dead. If your son or mom were in one of those places, would you leave that job to someone else or would you go and drag all that crap out into the yard and look for yourself? I wonder….

The VIC IV

The building was essentially a taught strung tent hung from aluminum and stainless frames that were cabled together for structural support. The world above the office roof was a cavernous dark space interlaced along the wall with wire rope cables that connected to the structural supports. We were only 15 or 20 feet from the Warehouse overhead and cautiously made our way that direction down the support beams that held the wiring and cabling for communications and power. There was a wall that bluntly ended our travel at the entry to the warehouse.

I used my folding belt knife to slit the fabric for four feet or so and then had to reach through and slit the other wall for the same distance to let the bright lights of the warehouse shine through. Sliding through this slit into the open of the warehouse felt liberating. There were two offices that were on this South wall of the warehouse that we stored empty boxes on for use when we had to pack up FEMA stuff for later deployment. The boxes had been stacked along the front edges of the offices and provided a very nice screen to the current denizens of the warehouse. The door into the warehouse from the offices had a simple push bar to open going that direction and a mass of the dead was milling about on the floor and banging on walls.

We were stuck up here it seemed. On the other hand whatever was driving these things did not seem to have any interest in having them look up. I felt momentarily safe enough to try to sit down and collect my thoughts. I pulled up one of the larger boxes from one of the Dell servers and sat. Julia did not seem so relaxed.

“Ok…. Where from here then?” she whispered. I responded with a shoulder shrug and whispered back “I have no idea but this seems safe for the moment anyway, we need to buy some time is what I am thinking right now”.

I realized that some of the booming in my ears was from my racing heart. So much for blood pressure medicine, stuff like this was going to run your vitals pretty hard. The incessant booming on the drumhead of the building though was like a giant rhythmic heartbeat, slow but loud, BOOM BOOM BOOM.

One of the dead must have hit the electric button for the extra large garage type door in the middle of this bay and the door opened up tall and wide enough for a semi trailer to be backed in. Standing in the center of this door was the dark man in black, tall, and while he was still over 100 feet away, I could see he was pale but seemed substantial and not skelotonized as he had been the last time I saw him. “Lestat” I whispered…..

Moments later a commotion outside and three of the blackwater personnel were drug into the light of the warehouse. They had tattered clothing and were bleeding from various wounds, I could not see how bad any of them were. I did not have to wait long. Lestat began a hissing sibilant speech waving his arms and gesturing with his fingers using nothing that I recognized as words in the echoey warehouse. The men were pinned to the storage racks of that West wall and spread eagled upright, held by a dozen or more dead or fragments of dead. What happened next I really cannot describe, there are blank places in my memory. I heard the first scream, saw Lestat bob his head at the first mans chest and leave with a blood covered face and the rest of the victims shirt in his hands….. I looked away as the choir of screaming began. It took these men over two hours to die. The cramp in my forearm was Julia gripping my arm with such force it cut off the blood. We cowered in our aerie wishing there were things we could do to help. The continuing BOOM BOOM BOOM on the walls was unrelenting punctuated by flashes of lightning and thunder from the still monstrous rain deluge outside.

When I looked again, there were only fragmentary remains of one of the Blackwater guys, even the clothing was gone. The man in black was nowhere to be seen and what remained of the dead in the warehouse were a swarming pile over the few remains left. Literally they had consumed these men such that nothing was left. But more than that, the booming of the building was fading. Julia was still sitting on the end of my box with her hands on her ears and elbows on her knees facing the roof below us with her eyes screwed shut. I touched her forearm…her startled jump reminded me how afraid both of us were. “Have you got any ideas at all?” I asked her

“We just have to get out of here is all I know Steve…… I cannot let one of those things touch me” she said low and intent to me. “Then lets plan something eh?” I suggested.

Together we discussed our options we could see. Stay put, get to the outside and make a run for it, try to move to a safer location and did not believe in any of them as being safe enough to just settle for. Julia then had the real inspiration “Gators….. how about the Gators?”. Gators are made by John Deere and are at home in the swamps. Open cab, multiwheel drive, big balloon tires and reliable as hell. There were half a dozen of them on site, even around the building and, sitting parked at the far end of the row of shelving, one fresh green one was waiting. “Great, so how the hell are we gonna get that?” I asked ….

Julia turned and looked at me intently and said “If you suggest we split up I am going to kill you myself”….which actually put a smile on my face.

“This is no horror movie, kiddo” I said…”but I am not too interested in being anywhere alone at this time anyway”

I did not feel TOO bad about getting off the roof of the office build we were sitting on. There was a Laundry cart below us and toward the Gator that I could jump and land in. Should be quiet although I had no idea if the dead could hear anything or not. I felt like I could be brave enough to try to get out if the man in Black was not present. Julia agreed with a nod. “No time like the present, lets go before I lose my nerve” I suggested and again, got the affirmative nod.

I went first, landing softly in the laundry cart, stepping down and moving to my left around the cart. Movement to the periphery of my vision from the direction I had come did not sufficiently warn me and as I turned the body was already upon me, bony fingers clutching my shoulders, open susurrus mouth painting my face with malodorous gasses. I had time to get my hands out, sinking through the chest cavity to the bony spine and holding the dead at arms length through the missing ribs of its chest. The pressure on my shoulders increased exponentially, the bony fingers spikes into the meaty part of the back of my shoulders, inexorably pulling me into the creature. As my arms began to tremble I was staring into the eye sockets, noting that there were rudimentary eyes there, glistening and alive. This silent drama went on for perhaps another 30 seconds when the head of the dead did not so much be removed as it exploded. The POP of its disintegration was partially masked by the loud “NO NO NO” that Julia was focusing on the corpse. I saw her just as she reswung the baseball bat she had found in the warehouse and hit the body again just below the shoulder joints of the beast, disarticulating the upper torso and causing the collapse of the rest of the body.

“GO!” She said

Without further interruption I skulked crabwise down a row of shelving in the warehouse towards the Gator with Julia directly behind me. I was watching the last of the dead through the boxes continue to finish remains of the Blacwater guy as I approached the Gator. “You drive” she ordered and I was not in the mood to debate at this time.

The Gator has a little diesel engine in it, and requires no keys, you simply turn a starter and it runs, lever up for reverse and down for forward, the belt drive does not let it go very fast but it is faster than I can run for very long for sure. I had the Gator started and moving backwards just as Julia hit the seat next to me, I was backing out the door. One of the dead stood in my path and I hit him at perhaps ten or 15 miles an hour. The effect was impressive as the body went down and I could feel it grinding away under the vehicle as I exited the warehouse in full speed reverse into the rain.

Fifteen or twenty yards into the parking lot I smashed the brakes on… let the Gator slide to a full stop and began looking for forward. Julia was swinging from a seated position at two bodies that had arisen from nowhere and scored a direct hit on the first, hindering the second sufficiently that I found forward and floored the little ATV feeling the exhilaration of it leaping forward, its six wheel drive throwing mud in all directions.

We were a couple hundred yards from the front gate at that point, needing to round the front portion of the building in order to clear the gate at the front. The guard shack was a welded steel trailer that masked off the gate access from the buildings it protected. I rounded the guard shack at perhaps 20 mph and saw the man in black standing astride the centerline of the gate. He was flanked left and right by a phalanx of the dead. I so clearly remember his smile, and the extended canines glistening in my headlights.

“HOLD ON” I bellowed and whipped the Gator over to the left side of the gate causing Lestat to mirror my movement as I reached the gate he was still on the right half of the centerline on Julia’s side of the vehicle and I slewed the Gator back toward the centerline, within a couple feet of my collision with him, Julia launched the baseball bat with a two handed overhead fling that spun the bat directly at the head of the Vampire. His move to deflect the bat partially distracted him at our moment of impact and the gator rolled over this creature like a log in the forest and sped up the road trailing pieces of the dead phalanx of bodies at his side. I hit the centerline of the mud lane that was our only exit from this place and looked over my shoulder as the creature in black stood, turned to face my tail lights and strode purposefully down the muddy lane after us. Julia had turned as well and was watching backwards at him as I focused on finding the right slushy spots to hit and miss for the gator to go forward. Half a mile to the paved road was such a long trip. I hit the pavement at an angle and turned toward St Gabriel, pushing the Gator flat out. It did decent speed on the pavement, perhaps 25 miles an hour and as we let the miles slide behind us looking for lights and people I began to really have hope of surviving this night.

We hit the Mobile gas station 20 min later at the intersection of 30 and 75 and pulled into the lighted pump area of the gas station and drove to the parking. Julia asked the cashier to call 911 and we waited inside till the highway patrol arrived. She spoke to the patrolmen as well, since my attempts at telling any part of the story rapidly got incoherent , literally a string of nouns without verbs, “bodies, Lestat, the dead, man in black, blood, oh blood”. Half an hour after that a group of cars and a swat team headed back to the VIC. Gratefully I did not go.

Dawn lit the VIC with Julia and I sitting in the command van for the State Highway patrol. Federal Police cars surrounded us and perhaps 50 vehicles and a hundred armed personnel were up and down the access to the VIC. I could see the smoldering remains of half of the barracks in the rear of the VIC, apparently they were on fire when the SWAT team arrived. I had to tell this story 50 times in ten hours it seemed like, had to pee in a cup, and take a breathalyzer test as well. Julia’s story apparently matched mine for 50 times because right at dawn they put us back in the same van and drove us to the location.

A man in the black uniform of the Federal Protective Services opened the sliding door and sat with us for a second looking at his notes. He looked us directly in the eyes then and alternating his gaze between us explained what he knew.

“We have no indication that anyone was killed inside the facility. While there is extensive damage to the facility there is no sign in the places you indicated deaths occurred that any such deaths in fact happened there. There are thousands of body parts of the dead lying everywhere, almost completely in parts as if they exploded, and there is no sign of a man in black, toothy or otherwise inside. Do you wish to amend any part of your statements to us?”

“No” we chorused

“This event has been classified by the Federal government. You may not speak of this event to anyone. Do you Understand?”

I nodded, Julia was quiet, then “But what happened here then” she asked

“I have no true idea, but I cannot believe what you say is true. Our investigation will continue and you will make yourselves available to additional questions as they occur. Do not leave the vicinity” he said

With that he left the van, and motioned for a driver to take us. I was delivered to my apartment and have not seen Julia since.

I keep watching for news of unexplained deaths south of Baton Rouge, but then, did I ever hear of them before? I have no idea what this was, who that person was, where he came from or even how I lived when those others died so frequently. Lestat abandoned his cohort so easily that I presume they were tools for him to return to some state of being that allowed him to leave…… but what do I know of his motivations……There are no neat strings to tie up this story, simply, it happened and then he disappeared. I wonder if his work will show up again in the devastated South of the state. Going North seems a good idea now, winter or no, surely nothing like this could ever happen in Colorado. I can sleep now some, if the lights are on and nothing goes bump in the night, perhaps one day that will fade and I will feel normal again.

The VIC III

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
I decided to wait a while before leaving for the day, hoping this downpour would slacken up and it would not be so dangerous going home. I did not count on the parking lot being paved with gravel and dirt, being very new and covering only Louisiana gumbo for substrate. An hour later my car was nearly up to the hubs in water where it was parked and there were precious few islands where one might see the mud that the parking lot was now become. Two hours later and it was clear I was not leaving soon. By early afternoon the parking lot and entry road were a sea of grey gumbo mud and standing water. The trip to the paved road never looked so long. I went back to the double doors overlooking the morgue to watch the rain.

Don, our remaining trailer management fellow, ambled down to the guard shack on the inside gate. He had noticed the booming in the Trailer area. Apparently he enlisted the help of the Federal Police Sergeant, and the Blackwater gate guard to come with him to investigate. In the intensifying rain squall, the sergeant, a blackwater security man and Don climbed into the white and blue police car and drove across the compound to the gate to the trailer parking area. The sergeant stayed in the car as blackwater and Don got out in the deluge to investigate the noises. I can so clearly remember thinking “Boy those guys are going to get SO wet” and watched them go into the trailer area through the internal gate flashlights ticking left-right, left-right.

Gunshots are not as loud outdoors as you might imagine from movies you have seen. They are muffled even more by the rain, thunder and that continuing booming from the trailer area. The first one was so faint I could have missed it but heard something odd and opened the door to listen further and heard the next six in rapid succession. My next impression is of Don running full out coming out of the gate with an oddly lumpy appearance, his flashlight jumping crazily up and down.. even in circles. As he approached the police car something slid down his back and around his legs and down he went.. face first into the goop and directly in front of the Police car. The sergeant to his credit did not hesitate, he was out of the car before Dons’ body hit the mud, weapon at the ready as the last set of gunshots came from the trailer area, two quick ones.. then a final shot. I could hear the sergeant bellowing something but it was faded by the rain. He holstered his weapon and with his bare hands tried to remove the largish lumps from the back of the fallen Don, only to have the first one he touched reverse itself and attach itself to his chest, levitating the two and a half feet from Don’s back to the sergeants chest as if spring-loaded. I could see now the lump had arms of some kind and as the sergeant whirled and fought, I could make out that it appeared to be a torso, a badly decomposed torso in a tux top, the head buried to the eyesockets in the sergeants chest.

This was enough for me. I turned on my heel and sprinted back into the main bullpen in the office area and called loudly if anyone was there. Julia popped her head out of IR and said “Hey Steve!! Whats up?” Again at a run I got to her and took hold of her arm saying “We have to leave now… now…. It is something terrible”…. And tugged with increasing vigor at her arm. People like Julia have been looking at dead bodies for months now, identifying lost folk, sorting the trivia of hundreds of dead people so she is not so easily panicked.

“What? What on earth are you talking about?” She asked.

What came out was simply jibberish I am sure..”Trailers, dead bodies, Don is dead, police are down.. come NOW” and continued to tug away at her arm. Some hero I am, no glib answers only thinly disguised panic.

Julia reversed my course and headed back to the double doors I had been observing from. By the time she got there, with me on her arm blabbering the whole way that it was time to go she peered into the gloom through the torrential rain to the police car and the activities going on there. I noticed immediately one change…. In the gap of the gate stood a solitary figure in black he looked familiar and appeared to be giving silent directions as I could not hear a thing.

“What… IS that?” she asked

“They are all dead” is the answer I supplied…. “and now it is time for us to go NOW.”

Julia still was not moving. “What is on the ground?” “Who is that guy at the gate?” and then slowly the mass on the ground moved. Pieces came off the mound and resolved themselves into body fragments, crawling along in the mud with our building as a destination. At that moment a shambling avalanche of the dead flowed out the gate in the wake of the man in black, pacing towards our building as steady as a metronome.

We Ran.

I locked doors behind us. There were solid core doors in steel frames on the inside of the building, I always noticed how strong they were. I hoped that they would forever hold out the swarm that I had seen last. When we got to the IT office I stopped. The intervening 150 feet or so caused me to realize I did not feel good about where I might go to or how I might get there. Julia being part of the DMORT team had not been issued a car and while mine was just outside the back door to my office I was not at all sure it would drive across that open morass to the highway and I for sure did not want to get caught out there with these things. Hindsight being 20/20 I should have run like a scalded dog but instead paused long enough to have my options severely limited. When you are in that spot, stupid shit runs through your head…… “I am responsible for these servers and the data on them” “ Where is my rain jacket?”

That useless reverie ended less than ten minutes later when simultaneously the entire building began to reverberate with the steady pounding of BOOM BOOM BOOM on the taught fabric material of the building itself. This drumhead booming came from everywhere. It was then that the thought struck me that they escaped from locked steel and aluminum trailers and this building was only covered in fabric, tough space age fabric but still.. taught fabric. I heard the glass of the back door shatter and in one movement pushed Julia inside the IT office and slammed shut the door auto locking it.

Once inside the office Julia noted sarcastically “So… can you find a smaller hole for us to hide in?” to which I had no answer at all and have never felt so claustrophobic. I reacted.. I pushed the steel sever box up against the door and stuck pieces of cat 5 wire under the casters, essentially welding that heavy thing in place. At that moment the walls began to thump and boom as the walls on the outside of the building had boomed, seems our visitors did not care much about doors, the walls were just drywall and not particularly sturdy. I caught Julia looking overhead.

“Up there!” she whispered and was in motion at the same time. Up on the server and through the acoustic ceiling to the roof supports above she went. I paused long enough to dump the server over on its side, and then using the bundled server interface lines climbed through the ceiling to the supports above spitting out insulation as I went. Once on the support, I cut the cat 5 letting it fall and replaced the ceiling tile. We moved quietly in the gloom toward the warehouse towards the largest open area in the building and away from the claustrophobic office area.

The VIC II

Highway 30 going South on Dec 31..a-headin for the VIC…… Most mornings it is easier to let your brain get slowly in gear so you notice the imagery of the countryside again as I headed in for a half day…YAY.. so a half a day off and some time relaxing. The day looked ominous from the very beginning, not raining yet, but the air so thick with grey water you could almost reach out and wring a glass full out of a passing fog bank. Awesome smells in this world, and driving a late December morning with the windows down always is an odorous way to get to work. I mostly remember being happy, reflecting on one of the best years of my life and letting the miles roll by and sipping some of CCs’ finest black coffee.

Blackwater security stopped me at the first of the security gates and examined my badge. The exchange was always the same: “Morning!! “

“Good Morning Sir” says the guard, reading my badge for an expiration date. It is not fair, they carefully read my badge and know my name “Have a good Day Mr Morse” but I have no clue who they are. Should I have asked?

“Gonna rain a gusher boys…. Better get those ponchos on for later!!” I threw out the window and head for the second checkpoint. I wonder how much inane banter like this these guys had to put up with every day of the world. The inner guard positions had a single man standing in the middle of the road.

“When will you be leaving the facility today Mr Morse?” asked the guard

“As Early as I possibly can “ I threw back “Maybe as early as ten o’clock!!”

“Good Luck then, we are going on skeleton staff after the morgue shuts down at noon today.” He said as I drifted forward towards my parking spot.

Holidays on these disasters are pretty bleak. Those that can head home early or cycle out are gone already. We are officially open but everyone is just trying to finish what is on their plate, there are serious plans for large groups to head for New Orleans as early as possible to bring in the new year in style in the crippled city. I knew I had to stay till the last one quit and then start the data backup on my server which had been being balky lately (stupid Microsoft backup software anyway).

I refreshed my coffee and made the rounds, trying to see who was going to be the dweeb that kept us all late today. The groups in IR and Dental were truly working as usual, the state people were nowhere to be seen and it appeared I was the lone representative of FEMA in the front office.

The building was built very oddly, covered in the same roofing material that the roof of DIA in Denver was made from, the whole thing looked like a blimp hanger, a 400 foot white blimp hanger. 250 yards to the North, a similar but shorter version of the same building housed the actual morgue. There were hundreds of trailers standing silent sentry inside a second fence around the back and sides of the morgue extending along the northern fence, neatly arranged and parked with military precision. The office building had the FEMA portion so completely separated from the rest of the facility that you have to leave the building to get to other parts. The DMORT/State section was next followed by warehouse, then overflow sleeping then the entertainment section with couches and tvs and washers and dryers and gym equipment and then the kitchen/dining area. Beyond the end of the building and on the west side of the compound were the dorms, co-ed with everyone having a room but with bathroom facilities for each gender and a kind of break room with a fridge and a microwave.

I stopped at trailer management and spoke to Don there, he looked hung over and not too cheerful. “What are you looking so pissed about?” I asked him.

“Oh No one can find Mudflap this morning and he was supposed to update the trailer rosters last night and now we have to go re-count a half a dozen units before we can get out of here” Don grumbled. I smiled on the inside, what the heck, you pop open a door, walk down an isle, read metal tags and write down half a dozen numbers, you are done, how bad can that be.

“Happy New Year Don!!” I said over my shoulder, determined not to let this guy get into my good mood. I heard the outer door slam behind me and went on back to my little hole of a place in IT.

ÛÛÛ¿ÛÛÛÞJ

By 10:30 the last of the partiers had departed for New Orleans, the last three of the working groups were shutting down and the VIC was reduced to 22 living humans. I was standing at the double glass door that overlooks the morgue as Julia came in from the morgue. “Just Blackwater left over there Steve” she said brightly. “Time to wrap it up” and brushed past me toward the IR offices she normally worked in. Julia was always bright and cheerful, with short brown hair, younger than me (who wasn’t these days) and from the Desert Southwest. I always noticed a big bright smile under a set of small wire rim glasses to start the day.

I continued to look toward the Morgue, as the rain began. The rain in the Gulf Coast South is a fearsome sight. When the fronts roll across it falls in sheets that make it hard to breathe on occasion if you are caught out in it. When those fronts stall, it can pour and blow for hours and when it does.. water backs up everywhere. I saw the Auxiliary generators shut down and the perimeter light trailers kick on throwing a blue cast through the cascading rain. The Booming thunder just KEPT rolling around in the sky and as it passed.. and the quiet returned….. something caught my ear. I stepped out on the sidewalk through the double doors and heard a background rumble that could not be a continuation of the thunder. Between bright flashes and booming thunder blasts, it remained constant, a resonant boom, what I now know to be the pounding in the trailers that attracted the attention of the Blackwater and trailer-management boys. The booming drumming that began the bloodbath at the VIC.

The VIC

When you drive the back roads of Louisiana, you rarely think to look to the side and wonder what might be behind that tree-line, or what drama might be unfolding a few hundred yards to your left or right. When you are driving you have a goal, a destination, a reason for the direction you are going. I am here to document one of those times when something did happen along one of those Louisiana back roads. Here to speak that which the State and Federal Governments have decided to suppress. I have a story to tell about an Early January weekend and the heroic survivors of one of the most gruesome stories ever told in a land with a multitude of such tales.

Highway 30 runs South and East out of Baton Rouge, broadly paralleling the Mississippi river on its way to New Orleans. Along the way it passes the sleepy little community of St Gabriel, named ironically enough for the patron saint of communication. The sugar cane fields are bordered with moss hung trees, most without leaves this time of year. Driving down this highway in that time before dawn you see the patchy ground fog reaching tendrils upwards from unseen breezes, the entire scene barely visible in the morning light.

This is the land of giant oil and petrochemical refineries. The lights of the vessels and piping stand out even against the lightening morning sky. Steam from the cooling towers drifts over the road often obscuring oncoming traffic and adding to the morning fog. The food of the insatiable American industrial machine is manufactured here for use over the rest of the country. As you turn off Highway 30 and make for the Mississippi levee, the countryside becomes even more rural, isolated and strange.

This story begins really months before with the devastating hurricane one-two punch of Katrina and Rita, killing hundreds and washing away the interred remains of hundreds more. By design and accident these remains made their way to a temporary morgue facility in St Gabriel and then to a new morgue built well off the River Road, back in the trees along the Mississippi. The VIC as it became known stood for “Victims Identification Center” but in the parlance of those that worked here simply… The VIC.

These victims and disinterred remains found their way to frozen food trailers in the massive parking area of the VIC where they were processed by professionals in the fields of forensics, anthropology, dentistry, mortuary science, pathology and law enforcement. For those lucky ones that were identified, release was only delayed by political, legal and financial issues that were resolved often enough to keep a trickle of bodies leaving the facility against the tide of incoming dead.

December 28, 2005 a body was found in the remains of a washed away cemetery in Plaquemines parish. This casket was odd from the first, as it was bound in chains made of iron and padlocked. Most of these caskets had to be opened with power tools but this example required larger tools and drew quite a crowd of morgue workers when it was finally opened. This crew of hardened veterans had been processing bodies for four months by this time, little could happen that could phase them. Inside this secure casket were the severely decomposed remains of an individual dressed in black clothing. Virtually completely skeletonized, this body had among its other anomalous features, a round wooden dowel protruding from the chest and apparently driven through the clothing of the individual.

Once the body is removed from the casket, they are placed on stainless steel tables with casters for easy portability around the morgue. The bodies are digitally X-rayed both for whole body and Dental X-rays and the file sent across the parking lot to a server storing hundreds of similar files awaiting their turn at evaluation and hopefully identification. Any Personal effects that are seen either in the casket or on the body or observed in x-ray are catalogued and photographed separately.

My first encounter with the body was indirect. I was called to the Dental groups offices to assist with what they believed were corrupt files. The view on the monitor when I walked in was of the lower half of a skull oddly stretched left to right showing the entire upper jaw. Included in the view I was able to see were two massive canine teeth. The dentists all agreed they were vastly oversized from normal and extended to what would have been the gumline of the lower jaw.

“So…. You guys found Lestat?” was my only thought. Dentists have NO sense of humor about patients apparently.

As the sun went down on December 30th I drove away from the facility, back to my apartment, looking forward to just a half day work on new years eve and then a couple of days off for the New Year celebration. The first death occurred before I got home that night I am positive. No one was there to see it, but I can imagine it. The trailers that held the dead were in orderly rows, the freezer units running keeping them at just above freezing. The codes of the number and locations of bodies along the sides of the units. These trailers are managed by a group wearing red coats and shirts who move them and care for them and monitor them to keep them safe and running. I am positive that Mudflap (yes, this was his name) heard something…. If it was like later on, it was a banging inside the trailer that got his attention. He certainly had keys to the unit. I can only imagine what he must have had as his last thought, opening the door of that trailer, shining his flash inside. Did he see the horror shambling towards him or was he just fallen upon and consumed? What fetid breath greeted his light? He must have died almost instantly, I know now we all hope he did as the later victims often lived for many hours while being consumed.

Happiest of new years. It has been in the 80’s the last few days, and while I do not expect that to continue, the days ARE getting longer and I am sure there will be spring flowers in five or six weeks. Mardi Gras is Feb 28th this year (Fat Tuesday) …… I had hoped to be able to get to the New Orleans celebration but we will likely not be able to do so because we are going to be moving the JFO “somewhere” as yet undetermined. There are parades and parties everywhere down here for Mardi Gras so I will likely take in one or two in Baton Rouge during that time instead of braving the crowds in New Orleans, the bad parking and the drive down and back…..play it by ear.

Newest news from here is that the city of New Orleans has retained a private firm to try to line up corporate sponsors for Mardi Gras… so you might see “American Express Baccus Parade”, or Prudential Financial Rex Parade as corporate sponsors for Mardi Gras… the locals are rolling their eyes over that one…. Seems this company is supposed to assemble a list of candidates and present it to the Mayor (remember mr FEMA lied to us?)who will make the final selections as to who the corporate sponsors are….it all seems so bizarre……

I have been camera shopping. Some of the photographs that were taken by the strike team that I displayed before and some of the personal effects photos I have seen but not displayed were taken with very high quality digital single lens reflex cameras. This is such photogenic country that having been exposed to high quality cameras again and these sights I really got the photography bug similar to grad school. Fog shrouded fields of sugar cane, sunrise along the Mississippi river and levee, frost on the grass… giant refineries…quaint buildings… gallon jars of pig lips,,, all crying out for a photo… :-D anyway.. the cameras are Nikon D2 and D200….. I also looked at the Nikon D70S with these two honker lenses for all three cameras (The Elite package…… now I expect OOOOOOO’s and AAHhhhhhhh’s from you each and every one) from this website called royalcamera.com... They got packages of lenses and accessories that are actually a very good deal….

Went to dinner this evening at the Casino Royale... they have a nice buffett... and excellent deserts including Bananas Foster.... One of the dishes was Fried Frog legs... which completely grossed out my dinner companion (this person actually ate something called "Gator Sausage" and pickled Okra but does not believe Pickled Watermelon exists and I cannot find it here to prove it). Now I am going to dispell all myth here as Frog legs do not taste like chicken. It is a tender white meat and tastes perfectly like Amphibian. This is still a delicacy in the South and I do not recall having it since I was in Jr High or something back in Oklahoma. So.. come to Louisiana and have frog legs.. and comment loudly.. "Yummm.. tastes JUST like Rana".