Thoughts on Hurricane Katrina - By N.L. Belardes
I would not be a good person if I kept writing blogs and ignored what’s happening in the American South over the past several days. I am just as surprised as everyone at the devastation from Hurricane Katrina. I’ve only passed through New Orleans and the South. Some of the folks where I work are from the South as well as the company I work for deals with distributors from the area. Now the distributors are missing...
Historically, New Orleans has been a city of wars, pestilence and great devastation. The Battle of New Orleans is a famous American vs. British tale of death, as well as Civil War stories... American slavery ran rampant there. People to this day rent old renovated slave quarters as New Orleans once had an incredible urban slave population. A lot of people who haven’t studied slave history would find some really interesting tales in how many urban slaves led some incredible secret night lives while supposedly catering to a master’s needs during the day...
One of my good friends used to go to the university in New Orleans. Later he attended graduate school with me at CSU Bakersfield where he wrote a major study of outbreaks of yellow fever in New Orleans around 1853 using original source material. Whereas I studied Philadelphia outbreaks in the 1790s, he was transfixed on New Orleans, a city ravaged by pestilence in a mosquito-borne outbreak of such a devastating hemorrhagic fever.
This was at a time folks didn’t realize the cause of the fever was mosquitoes feeding off infected blood, biting other humans, and spreading the infliction like wildfire…
Now death, disease and pestilence in New Orleans has the potential to reach terrible new levels because of such a vast population remaining in the city without water and electricity. Although reminiscent of yellow fever outbreaks that drove the city to abandon its locale, this new exodus is incredibly debilitating and horrible to watch...
Just read this blog by someone from New Orleans who survived while floating in a car. The survivor is holed up in some hotel, and I imagine, in a daze, is recounting the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina… reports indicate thousands are dead…there are many blogs on the aftermath of this disaster...here is another from a survivor in Florida...
Historically, New Orleans has been a city of wars, pestilence and great devastation. The Battle of New Orleans is a famous American vs. British tale of death, as well as Civil War stories... American slavery ran rampant there. People to this day rent old renovated slave quarters as New Orleans once had an incredible urban slave population. A lot of people who haven’t studied slave history would find some really interesting tales in how many urban slaves led some incredible secret night lives while supposedly catering to a master’s needs during the day...
One of my good friends used to go to the university in New Orleans. Later he attended graduate school with me at CSU Bakersfield where he wrote a major study of outbreaks of yellow fever in New Orleans around 1853 using original source material. Whereas I studied Philadelphia outbreaks in the 1790s, he was transfixed on New Orleans, a city ravaged by pestilence in a mosquito-borne outbreak of such a devastating hemorrhagic fever.
This was at a time folks didn’t realize the cause of the fever was mosquitoes feeding off infected blood, biting other humans, and spreading the infliction like wildfire…
Now death, disease and pestilence in New Orleans has the potential to reach terrible new levels because of such a vast population remaining in the city without water and electricity. Although reminiscent of yellow fever outbreaks that drove the city to abandon its locale, this new exodus is incredibly debilitating and horrible to watch...
Just read this blog by someone from New Orleans who survived while floating in a car. The survivor is holed up in some hotel, and I imagine, in a daze, is recounting the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina… reports indicate thousands are dead…there are many blogs on the aftermath of this disaster...here is another from a survivor in Florida...
This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on
Wednesday, August 31, 2005.
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