Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Orleans and other stuff

The NY Times has a good photo comparison of the amount of water that the marshes in LA soaked up. You may have to register with the website to view the article.

I spoke with someone well informed on some of the events in Orleans Parish. A pattern seams to be emerging that the press is either getting things wrong or are not being allowed to tell the real story. There are still many rumors that are untrue. Below I will do my best to address these issues.

Prison Riots - there were some minor disturbances and yes guns were drawn but no prisoners or law enforcement officers were shot. No member of law enforcement or their family was taken hostage (I had heard this rumor from someone who was there). The Orleans Parish Jail did not have its roof ripped off with prisoners getting wet.

Prisoner Movement - this has been a huge issue with lots of misinformation. It is true that all prisoners were taken from the Orleans Parish Jail and moved to other prisons around the state. The prisoners that were walked down I-10 along other refugees were the misdemeanor prisoners who were in jail for 90 days or less. They probably should have been let go. No felony prisoners were anywhere near any law abiding citizens at any time. The felony prisoners were removed last and taken on special buses out of the city. All prisoners had to be boated out to a staging area where they eventually made it onto buses. The felony prisoners had plenty of guards with shotguns on them at all times.

Police deaths - as best I can tell, no NOPD or Orleans Criminal Sheriff personnel have been killed by any citizens - law abiding or criminal. 15 NOPD officers have been reported as drowning. At this point no one is sure of the circumstances. I have reports that 12 not 2 NOPD officers have committed suicide. I only know the circumstances of 1 and that individual's spouse had been killed as a result of the hurricane (presumably by flood). No Orleans Criminal Sheriff personnel have lost their lives (if some have, they are not known yet).

Police being shot at - yes, some police were shot at. Some of the people doing the shooting were killed and some got away with it. Much of the shooting was people shooting guns in the air. No idea why other than it's a Louisiana thing. Per previous paragraph, no officers were shot (that I can verify).

Lack of communication - NOPD, Orleans Criminal and Jefferson Sheriff use different radio systems. All of them failed. In the case of NOPD and Orleans criminal, the main towers are on top of the Entergy building. This site was chosen for 2 reasons. First, it is the tallest building in the city. Second, it is owned by the company that supplies electricity for the entire city. Guess what one of the first buildings to lost power was? There are generators in this building but I have no report on status. Additionally, most RF radio systems have a telco line from the dispatch building to the tower. With all of the telco problems this may be where the 1st failure was. I'm most interested in this failure. After 9/11, this was one area where all cities were focused on addressing. I have seen editorials with people claiming to have solutions to fix the communication problem. Given that all private and public systems failed, I want to find out what happened before believing anyones solution. I don't think the problem here was the technology, there were multiple areas that failed that were supposed to have redundancy built in. I have reports that Jefferson Sheriff radio system is back up.

Telecommunication failures - In New Orleans city there are some buildings that have various telco providers for voice and data working. There are some buildings where every vendor is completely dead (as of today). Since many of these building have nothing above ground to have been cut and the under ground lines get flooded all the time. I have no answer or intelligence as to how this type of failure occured. We know that Sprint had a major switch failure in the city but what about the other vendors? This is another good question to have answered. I'll post more info as I get it.

Violence at the Superdome - I can't figure out what to believe on this one. I have several NOPD and Criminal Sheriff contacts claiming there was almost no violence. The murders and rapes have been completely misrepresented. If you saw the TV Sunday night the National Guard screened everyone entering the building for weapons and drugs. I saw an interview with Charmaine Neville where she claimed to have witnessed all of this - I have other people telling me she is not a credible witness. We will have to watch this one.

Martial Law - I don't have time to research this one so if some Lawyer could comment, I would appreciate it. I was told that Martial Law was never declared anywhere in Louisiana. The reason is that since LA follows Napoleonic Code and not English Law there is no such thing and you can not declare it. I'm sure there is some equivalent that the state has the right to do but it is still an interesting technicality.

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