USA SAVED!!!! UN offers Hurricane Aid

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - USA SAVED!!!! UN offers Hurricane Aid

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:11:58 AM EDT

New Orleans in chaos as Bush calls disaster historic
Thu Sep 1, 2005 4:12 AM BST

By Jason Reed

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - Thousands of desperate people waited for hours in sweltering heat to be evacuated from hurricane-hit New Orleans on Wednesday as President George W. Bush said it would take years to recover from one of the worst natural disasters ever to hit the United States.

Food and water grew scarce and looters roamed the streets, but the floodwaters finally stopped rising in the historic city after Hurricane Katrina struck the U.S. Gulf Coast a fierce blow on Monday.

Authorities prepared to evacuate thousands of residents remaining in New Orleans, many of them to Houston's Astrodome. Others waited for hours in parking lots and at highway underpasses for rides from buses and Army trucks.

Some piled into the back of pickup trucks or rode on delivery vans, their legs dangling over the sides.

Katrina is believed to have killed at least hundreds of people in Louisiana and Mississippi when it struck the Gulf Coast with 140-mph (225 kph) winds and a 30-foot (9-metre) wall of water that inundated a wide swath of coastline, trapping people in attics or on rooftops.

More than 78,000 people were already in emergency shelters and tens of thousands of homes and businesses were beyond repair, Bush said after flying over the disaster zone in Air Force One earlier in the day.

"We are dealing with one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history," Bush said after returning early to the White House from his Texas vacation to oversee recovery efforts.

"This recovery will take a long time. This recovery will take years," Bush said.

U.N. emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland, who oversaw the Asian tsunami relief effort, said Katrina could easily dwarf the devastation of other recent natural disasters in terms of economic costs.

Egeland called Katrina one of "the largest, most destructive natural disasters ever" and offered U.N assistance.

LOOTING, FEAR

State governors ordered 10,000 additional National Guard troops to the area -- in part to quell the looting -- bringing the total to 21,000.

Many food and convenience stores in New Orleans had their doors or windows smashed. Some looters were seen calmly carrying contents out of stores.

The extent of the looting spread fear in the city famous for its jazz and easygoing lifestyle.

Cheryl Richou, from St. Charles Parish, a rural area west of New Orleans, said of the looters, "Everybody's scared they'll start coming to St. Charles."

Several television networks reported that New Orleans was pulling 1,500 police from the search-and-rescue mission to deal with looting and lawlessness in the streets.

A fleet of prison buses arrived at the storm-battered Superdome stadium to take 23,000 refugees to the Houston Astrodome 350 miles (550 km) away.

Stranded people were running out of food and water and growing desperate. Some pushed shopping carts filled with their belongings along freeways, with one cart holding a young girl who had passed out. Others asked for food and water.

"It's a lot of chaos right now," Louisiana state police Director H.L. Whitehorn said.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin estimated it would be 12 to 16 weeks before residents could return. A million people fled the New Orleans area before Katrina arrived. But former Mayor Sidney Barthelemy estimated 80,000 were trapped in the city.

The stricken city got some good news as water finally stopped flowing in and started flowing out, a senior official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said.

"It's not a significant decrease but it's not rising any more," said Al Naomi, a senior project manager with the Corps. "It will still take a while to get the water out of the city.

The U.S. military set out to stanch the flow of water into New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain through breaches in the levee system that holds water out of the city, much of which sits below sea level.

MISSISSIPPI DEVASTATION

Katrina's death toll was more than 200 in one Mississippi county alone, and U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu said she had heard at least 50 to 100 people were dead in New Orleans.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told CNN's "Larry King Live," The coast is just the greatest devastation I've ever seen ... but I spent most of the day inland -- 100 miles (160 km inland, we had winds 110 to 130 miles (180 to 210 km). This is not just a calamity of the coast for us. This goes way up into our state."

The Bush administration declared a public-health emergency as officials feared outbreaks of disease.

In Biloxi, Mississippi, some corpses were under too much rubble to collect safely, and two lay partly exposed to the hot sun in the remnants of a seaside apartment building.

"We don't know what we're going to do with them. It just leaves you numb," said hearse driver Jakel Marshall.

The U.S. military was sending a hospital ship and two helicopter-carriers to assist two other Navy ships already conducting rescues in the area.

Louisiana officials said 3,000 people had been rescued, but many more waited to be picked up in boats that cruised flooded streets or helicopters that buzzed overhead.

"I'm alive. I'm alive," shouted a joyous woman as she was ferried from a home nearly swallowed by the flood.

The administration said it would release oil from the nation's strategic reserves to offset losses in the Gulf of Mexico, where the storm had shut down production.

The U.S. Coast Guard said at least 20 oil rigs and platforms were missing in the Gulf, either sunk or adrift.

U.S. crude-oil prices eased below $70 per barrel, but analysts said they expected retail gasoline prices to vault well over $3 (1.67 pounds) a gallon as early as this weekend.

Katrina knocked out electricity to nearly 5 million people in four states, utility companies said, and restoring power could take weeks.

(Additional reporting by Paul Simao in Mobile, Alabama)

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:20:32 AM EDT

[#1]

Oh, great, the costs of the hurricane just increased by at least a factor of 10.

For the DUm-DUm trolls out there, take what the original estimates were going to be, multiply the final costs by 10, and reduce the effectiveness of repairs to one tenth of what they could have been.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:23:02 AM EDT

[#2]

Quoted:
U.N. emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland, who oversaw the Asian tsunami relief effort, said Katrina could easily dwarf the devastation of other recent natural disasters in terms of economic costs.

Egeland called Katrina one of "the largest, most destructive natural disasters ever" and offered U.N assistance.

Wasn't that the asshole who said the US wasn't doing enough to help Indonesia?

And the next day we had aid workers on the ground, weeks before the UN could pull their head out of their ass.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:27:25 AM EDT

[#3]

I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:29:21 AM EDT

[#4]

Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Oil for food, what else?

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:30:46 AM EDT

[#5]

Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:33:27 AM EDT

[#6]

Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Any assistance we need as long as ~~they can borrow~~ we give them the money from us in order to supply it. Basically, anything we'll pay for...
Don't they owe us like $9 billion or something like that?

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:34:25 AM EDT

[#7]

Prepping for a UN invasion.

Lock and load.
Weapons are free
Fire at will

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:34:44 AM EDT

[#8]

Funniest thread title EVER!

I had beer foam through my nose

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:38:52 AM EDT

[#9]

Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.

That's what I fear.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:42:37 AM EDT

[#10]

Quoted:
Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.
That's what I fear.

This is bad.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:45:03 AM EDT

[#11]

Fooking Smurfs.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:48:08 AM EDT

[#12]

Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.
That's what I fear.

This is bad.

Oh please.

Try bottled water and health workers if anything at all.

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:51:09 AM EDT

[#13]

Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Hopefully not this sort of 'aid'…

UN action over DR Congo abuse

The abuse allegations rocked the UN mission in DR Congo
The UN has fired one employee and suspended six others without pay over allegations of sexual misconduct in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
UN spokesman Fred Eckhardt said one other member of the peacekeeping mission in DR Congo had resigned instead of facing disciplinary action.

He said action had now been taken against 17 civilian mission staff.

UN peacekeepers have been accused of using food and money to pay girls as young as 12 to have sex with them.

QUICK GUIDE

The war in DR Congo
The former chief of staff of the DR Congo mission (Monuc), Jacque Grinberg, was among three people cleared of charges.

Allegations of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers in DR Congo started emerging around the eastern town of Bunia in early 2004. About 150 cases were reported.

In February, the UN announced that its troops in DR Congo had been ordered not to have sexual relations with Congolese.

About 16,700 UN peacekeepers are deployed in Congo to help secure a peace deal that ended the 1998-2002 war involving half a dozen African nations.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4360231.stm

Posted: 9/1/2005 12:53:14 AM EDT

[#14]

Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.
That's what I fear.

This is bad.

Oh please.

Try bottled water and health workers if anything at all.

If you say so. Who's going to disburse all that "aid"? I bet they wear blue lids.

Posted: 9/1/2005 1:38:20 AM EDT

[#15]

Quoted:
Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Any assistance we need as long as ~~they can borrow~~ we give them the money from us in order to supply it. Basically, anything we'll pay for...
Don't they owe us like $9 billion or something like that?

I don't know exactly how much we've paid for the UN but I'm sure it's astronomical. We don't need "UN Aid"!!!! We just need the UN to pay their debt to the USA back within the next 72 months at 4.99% interest - that sounds like a fair deal to me. Maybe toss in a fair re-allocation of who pays what percentage into the UN each year and how much back rent is owed to the USA for the nice headquarters.

<ETA more rant

: ...and reimburse us (and our allies - thanks Vito) for fixing what they botched up in eye-rack and maybe apologizing to the world for their WMD screw-up, etc. etc. etc.>

Posted: 9/1/2005 1:44:48 AM EDT

[#16]

The only "assistance" we need from the UN is for them to leave this hemisphere. Africa is a nice place for them. Try Zimbabwae.

Posted: 9/1/2005 1:58:38 AM EDT

[#17]

USA SAVED!!!! UN offers Hurricane Aid

So that's what bile tastes like...

Posted: 9/1/2005 2:05:44 AM EDT

[#18]

I guess it's a nice thought. But the truth is that most UN missions are mostly self-serving for the bureaucrats and representatives who spend most of their timehaving meetings with each other and ensuring that they do so in style. There's a whole class of people, UN types, who have a lifestyle of getting around the world to the various tragedies and flashpoints of human misery and disaster. They set themselves in nice digs, zoom around in Toyota Landcruisers, write proposals and meet with local dignitaries, all with expense accounts that allow them to live like pashas in impoverished countries.

Maybe all this would be tolerable if the UN was competent, effective, and made noticeable impacts of relief of human suffering. But that's not the case.

Posted: 9/1/2005 3:05:59 AM EDT

[#19]

Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?

Another layer or two of organizations to pay before the help gets where it needs to be?

Posted: 9/1/2005 3:20:00 AM EDT

[#20]

Well, don't get too worked up about the news. It took them forever to get their shit together in Somolia for a rescue mission, I expect them to arrive, oh, about the second week in December. Since most of them will be from places like Pakistan, India etc., the vast majority will toss their blue helmet and defect to the U.S. and ask for asylum thus becoming part of the problem instead of the solution.

Posted: 9/1/2005 3:27:55 AM EDT

[#21]

Quoted:
Quoted:
I wonder what kind of "assistance" they're offering?
Oil for food, what else?

Now that's funny...I don't care who ya are

It's a deal...we stand to make billions

Posted: 9/1/2005 10:08:18 AM EDT

[#22]

bump for the day crew…

Posted: 9/1/2005 10:19:04 AM EDT

[#23]

Keep those blue helmets off our soil!

Posted: 9/1/2005 10:25:14 AM EDT

[#24]

Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.

I have a friend who has some Norinco Steel core ammo.

Posted: 9/1/2005 10:34:43 AM EDT

[#25]

Quoted:
Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.
That's what I fear.

Then you ought to stop taking the paranoid pills

Posted: 9/1/2005 10:47:11 AM EDT

[#26]

Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Quoted:
Blue helmets with boots on U.S. soil is what they're offering.
That's what I fear.

This is bad.

Oh please.

Try bottled water and health workers if anything at all.

+1

It pains me to repeat the cliche... but please remove the tinfoil. I don't think that Bush is anywhere NEAR letting armed UN personnel in the continental US. Maybe if Heir Klinton was in charge though...

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - USA SAVED!!!! UN offers Hurricane Aid

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