Excerpts from a first-hand account emailed from Baton Rouge today by musician and New Orleans resident Jose Torres Tama:
I was able to get out on the Wednesday after Katrina hit when the city officials ordered the water shut down. The water was cut and it was time to go. And I had to flee this city that I have lived in for the past twenty years not via the efforts of authorized personnel but via a pirate bus, a yellow vehicle with the Jefferson Parish School Board brand on its side — a bus that operated the kind of rescue mission only imagined in a Louisiana Hollywood bayou version of "Hotel Rwanda." I escaped with my partner Claudia Copeland, my writer friend Jimmy Nolan, who is a fifth-generation native born in the middle of an unnamed hurricane, and his neighbor who I only know as Kip. Kip was on his third day of survival without access to a dialysis machine that cleans his liver and allows him to live.
By 9pm the buses had not arrived and the hotel management was as confused us all of us waiting as to why we were still standing there at this time of night with the city police escort they
had also hired just in case their missing buses were rushed by people without the proper tickets to board.When the yellow pirate school bus cut the dark like some night creature on the street pointing its blinding headlight eyes to the waiting hundreds some cheers broke the whisperings, and we finally thought our hired fleet of heroic rescue vehicles had arrived. The bus only arrived with the information that the fleet had been commandeered — confiscated–stolen by local police officials acting on martial law.
All along, I had placed myself in waiting close to the hotel management at the corner of Royal and Iberville to be in proximity to hear any information on what was unfolding. Only then did I speak to one of the yellow bus crew of two that told me there were no buses coming and that they were there relaying this difficult news while offering passage to Baton Rouge at fifty dollars a head. (…) Certainly, we made an offer to the bus driver for the four of us that was quite below their asking rate, and like any other transaction under the table in this city, it was accepted.
If the Monteleone could privately engineer a rescue effort to bring in ten buses, then how is it possible that the city and state could not organize a fleet of 100 buses to rescue all the people left behind? These officials could have used the stealth training of the pirate bus crew that seemed to come in and out of town through back roads that were quite dry as opposed to news accounts that water compromised all land rescue efforts. We, the citizens of New Orleans who have managed to escape, are willing to mount our own pirate and private efforts to come and rescue our friends and family members who are still trapped by the infinite and mounting incompetence of those in command.
I ask you to mount a collective scream of outrage and wolf howls into the airwaves, radio and TV stations (…)
Link to full text. (Thank you, Ned Sublette)
