FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2005
THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
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H U R R I C A N E K AT R I N A A F T E R M AT H
Web sites
can be
difficult
to search
INTERNET, from A-1
STAFF PHOTO BY DAVID GRUNFELD
After seeing what Hurricane Katrina did three weeks ago to New
Orleans, the owners of NeNe’s Kitchen in downtown Cameron
turned to a higher power Thursday as Hurricane Rita approached. Officials expect the storm to make landfall Saturday
morning somewhere between southwest Louisiana and
Galveston, Texas.
State
readies
for blow
from
storm
RITA, from A-1
out of that storm’s path than
taking a chance on staying.”
On Thursday mor ning in
Cameron Parish, about 40 miles
east of the Texas-Louisiana line,
fewer than 500 of the 9,000 residents remained, and the National Guard was working with
sheriff ’s deputies to round up
stragglers and urge them to
flee.
“This is going to be worse
than Audrey,” Sheriff Theos
Duhon said, referring to the
1957 storm that killed about 530
people when it struck that part
of the state.
‘A massive storm’
Rita is expected to dump up
to 10 inches of rain, Blanco said,
and send out hurricane-force
winds across western Louisiana.
“This is a massive storm, a
powerful storm,” she said.
Because of Rita’s size, with
stor m surges and tropicalstorm-force winds that could extend as far as 160 miles from
the center, officials on the other
side of the state issued evacuation orders for Grand Isle,
Crown Point, Barataria and
low-lying parts of Plaquemines
Parish.
In New Orleans, evacuation
efforts continued, said Mayor
Ray Nagin, who had scrapped
his plan to let residents return
home earlier this week because
of Rita’s approach.
Stressing what individuals
can do to mitigate the storm’s
effects, Jefferson Parish Counc i l C h a i r m a n To m C a p e l l a
urged everyone to check storm
drains near their home to make
sure they are free of debris that
could clog the drain and make
water rise.
“It’s something that only
takes five minutes but really
can make a huge difference, especially with all the debris already on the streets,” he said.
At his news conference
Thursday afternoon, Nagin said
New Orleans stands a 50 percent to 60 percent chance of receiving tropical-storm-force
winds up to 75 mph, as well as
storm surges as high as 5 feet.
But citing information from
the Army Corps of Engineers,
he said, “They can handle that
type of storm surge.”
To protect the New Orleans
area from recurrences of levee
breaches that inundated much
of the city after Hurricane Katrina swept through last month,
the Corps of Engineers put
down 60-foot sheets of steel piling to block Lake Pontchartrain’s tidal surge from the 17th
Street and London Avenue
canals. The Orleans Canal is not
blocked.
“Metropolitan New Orleans
can take about 6 inches of rain,”
corps spokeswoman Susan
Jackson said. “Though a concern, it’s not our main concern. .
. . Storm surge is the real issue
because it stresses the levee repairs and some areas that we
haven’t had time to assess and
repair.”
While New Orleans can withstand a 10- to 12-foot surge
from the lake, St. Ber nard
Parish can take only a 5- to 6foot surge, she said, because its
pumps are working at 60 percent capacity.
At the 17th Street Canal levee on Thursday af ter noon,
workers used a bulldozer to load
sandbags around the sheet pilings to seal up any leaks.
“I’m pretty confident that,
based on current predictions,
we will weather this storm just
fine,” said Duane Gatinski, who
leads the corps task force
charged with getting floodwater
out of the city.
Water returns
Despite his confidence, a levee hurriedly rebuilt with riprap
and gravel after Katrina to stop
the flooding of the Industrial
See RITA, A-18
seemed to have a learning disability.
“It’s kind of hard to miss
somebody like that,” Jabon said,
adding that even before he dialed the number the woman
gave him for a north Louisiana
motel, he was sure he’d found
his cousin, Angelo, one of 70 or
so members of the
Saladino/DiBernarda/Maiaro
family cast out of New Orleans
when Hurricane Katrina swept
in Aug. 29.
Most of them already had
checked in, sending e-mail or
calling the phone number Jabon
posted on four of the dozens of
Web sites that have sprouted
since Katrina’s frenetic emptying of New Orleans left families
without their relatives’ out-oftown contact numbers and with
cell phone service largely disrupted.
Across the World Wide Web,
queries have continued cropping
up a full three weeks after the
hurricane on sites listing pleas
for sightings of cousins and
grandchildren and neighbors or
information where they might
have fled, or whether they made
it out at all. Elsewhere in cyberspace, e-mails and instant messages kept flying among those
who’d already found each other,
helping classmates and neighbors feel close to home despite
an evacuation that left them
hundreds of miles apart.
The indispensable nature of
new media after Katrina has
been evident at East Baton
Rouge Parish’s main public library, where the number of daily visitors ballooned from 1,500
to 3,600 after Katrina, with
most heading straight to the
computers to check digital mail,
surf person-locator sites or chat
over instant messaging programs, which provide real-time
text-based conferences.
“ The Internet has been a
godsend,” said Mary Stein, the
library’s assistant director. “In
the first couple of weeks, land
lines and cell phones aren’t
working right. But people can email.”
Mac Young, a junior at Jesuit
High School in New Orleans,
has located most of the 80
friends on his instant messaging
contact list during his evacuation jaunts to Covington, Baton
Rouge, Lafayette and finally
Houston, where he and about
400 other boys from the MidCity Catholic school have enrolled at Strake Jesuit College
Preparatory.
Even before Katrina hit,
Young said, he was in touch with
his buddies, many also Jesuit
students. Beginning Aug. 28,
they figured out where everyone planned to evacuate and
whether any were following a
similar path.
“I was online Sunday night,
then Monday night the power’s
out, then I was basically online
everywhere,” he said, adding
that his computer chats have
linked friends as far away as Orlando and in cities throughout
Louisiana.
Now, many of the guys are
joining digital forces to persuade their parents to let them
return to New Orleans to
restart school at other local
Catholic high schools until their
own flooded campus is restored.
“I know a couple of my friends
are going to, and I want to go
too because I just want to sleep
in my own bed,” he said.
Making such connections,
however, has proven elusive for
evacuees unfamiliar with the Internet or for those searching for
friends whom they wouldn’t ex-
pect to go online. Jackie Lewis,
holed up since Katrina at the La
Quinta Inn near Alabama’s
Huntsville Space Center, posted
a message to two of her sisters,
who rode out the storm with a
dozen children in a pair of shotgun doubles on Myrtle Street in
Gentilly.
But Lewis had little hope this
week that Brenda Strong and
Teresina Toledano ever would
see
the
note
at
neworleans.craigslist.org.
“They’re not computer-savvy,”
she said. “They wouldn’t know
how to even start.”
And if they did somehow get
a Web connection, their chances
of actually hitting upon Lewis’
message probably would be
slim, Stein said. Huge depositories of online information have
bred as much aggravation as
success, with many databases
that list missing New Orleanians difficult or impossible to
navigate by keyword or phrase.
“It’s hard to search,” Stein
said. “After about the seventhousandth entry, you don’t see
them so well, and maybe you
miss that 2-year-old that you’re
searching for. They search by
name, age, destination, medical
condition, institution. We’re seeing that there’s a great need for
standardization in these things.”
At katrina.im-ok.org, users
could be linked only by primary
phone
n u m b e r.
At
katrinasafe.com, the American
Red Cross’s site, searchers
could look for individuals by
first and last name but could not
scroll through lists of evacuees
who had registered their location outside the storm-ravaged
area. At the Hurricane Katrina
Survivor Locator, a blog site,
447 Web pages about lost loved
ones were viewable one at a
time.
At t h e p e r s o n l o c a t o r a t
nola.com, a Web site affiliated
with The Times-Picayune, some
people searched for loved ones
by street address, some by
height and weight and others by
physical traits such as a missing
front tooth, a surgical scar or an
eagle tattoo. Others beckoned
relatives by their nicknames –
“Tootsie” and “Too Short” and
“Hammer” and “Cookie” – and
ended their notes with a simple
request: “If you are out there …
please call.”
Fo r Ke i t h D a b o n n e , j u s t
knowing his message about a
loved one had been posted at
the site provide solace as he
waited for some nugget of news.
Dabonne, who lives in New
York, first heard his grandfather was dead, swept away
through the Lower 9th Ward by
a surge too powerful for an elderly man to control. Then came
reports that Eldridge “Mr. Eddie” Gabriel, an entertainer for
more than six decades at Pat
O’Brien’s famous French Quarter bar, had been spotted at
refugee shelters, maybe in
Houston, maybe in Shreveport.
“I couldn’t get any information speaking to (people at) the
numbers that were given by the
organizations, the Red Cross
and all,” Dabonne said. “At that
point, I was as frustrated as I
could possibly be. We decided to
go to the Internet.”
Hours after the winds died
down, the photograph appeared
online: a bald, mustachioed man
dressed in a black sport jacket
and a black satin tie grinned at
the camera, a mole apparent on
his left cheek. “ We have not
been able to speak with him
since the night before Hurricane Katrina,” read a note below the picture. “He has not
been seen since. He takes heart
medication and medication for
high blood pressure.”
“Then the floodgates
opened,” Dabonne said, “pardon
my pun.”
The calls and e-mails arrived
from evacuees everywhere. Few
had real answers; indeed, three
weeks af ter the stor m, the
search for Gabriel trudged on.
But every response to his Internet message stoked Dabonne’s
hope that he would find his
grandfather.
“ Wi t h o u t i t , ” h e s a i d , “ I
wouldn’t be nowhere.”
At Eddie Tourelle’s
Northpark Nissan
We Care...
After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, we are all asking ourselves...”Where do we start?”
Thousands of people have lost most all their possessions as well as loved ones. But, we have a resilience
and we are all in this together. It will take an effort from us all in order to rebuild our lives.
At EDDIE TOURELLES NORTHPARK NISSAN, we have overcome the damage and have
made arrangements with the factory to take extra shipments of new and used vehicles in order to replace
the cars that were damaged during the storm. Having transportation will go a long way to helping us all
get our life back on track.
Right now we have put together huge savings and incentive programs for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
• ALL INSURANCE CLAIMS WILL BE ACCEPTED AND USED TOWARD YOUR
DOWN PAYMENT ON ANY VEHICLE IN STOCK.
• SPECIAL LOW FINANCE RATES HAVE BEEN PUT IN PLACE.
• OVER $3 MILLION DOLLARS IN FINANCING IS AVAILABLE FROM
BANKS THROUGHOUT THE U.S.
• VICTIMS OF HURRICANE KATRINA WILL BE VIRTUALLY PRE-APPROVED
FOR A LOAN UP TO $20,000*.
• USE THE VOUCHER BELOW FOR AN ADDITIONAL $1000 TOWARD YOUR
VEHICLE PURCHASE OR LEASE.
• EXTRA INVENTORY OF NEW AND USED VEHICLES WILL BE AVAILABLE
FOR THIS EVENT.
Our dealership has brought in extra personnel and inventory in order to accommodate the huge
transportation needs of our residents. Be prepared to take immediate delivery on your purchase.
We are all in this together. Take advantage of these offers while we still have them in place. This
offer will be available now through October 21, 2005. Get in early while the selection is good, because we
all know, most everyone will be needing a new ride.
This event is being held at:
EDDIE TOURELLE’S NORTHPARK NISSAN
955 Highway 190 North
Covington, LA 70433
Phone: 985-893-0079
*All offers with approved credit. Must present insurance claim to use as down payment.
Eddie Tourelle’s Northpark Nissan Hurricane Relief Voucher
Use this voucher for an additional
$
1,000 TOWARD
YOUR DOWN PAYMENT
on any new or used purchase or lease.
*Must present this voucher. With approved credit. Only valid during the dates of this event. See dealer for details. Non-redeemable for cash, non-transferrable.
...
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