The first buses filled with refugees from New Orleans have arrived at the Houston Astrodome where it looks like someone has finally taken the time and trouble to prepare in advance for the influx of the desperate.

Unlike the authorities in New Orleans who apparently dumped 20,000 tired, hungry, sick, and hopeless people into the Superdome and forgot about them for a day or two, relief organizers at the Astrodome appear to have anticipated the basic needs of the refugees:

Officials said they hoped to resume their work on Thursday, using hundreds of school buses and municipal buses to take the rest of the refugees to the Astrodome in Houston, on a ride lasting more than six hours. Rest stops were planned at Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Beaumont, Tex.

If there was little comfort in the prospect of trading one sports arena for another, there was hope waiting in Houston, where Texas officials promised showers, food, medical care and perhaps most important, the freedom to come and go through a system of passes. At a news conference, Judge Robert Eckels, chief executive of Harris County, which owns the Astrodome, offered assurances that it was “not a jail.”

There will certainly be time enough after the living are rescued and the dead are buried to assess the performance of New Orleans officials in the immediate aftermath of the storm. But something must be said about the incredible stupidity that allowed conditions like this to exist at the Superdome:

They had flocked to the arena seeking sanctuary from the winds and waters of Hurricane Katrina. But understaffed, undersupplied and without air-conditioning or even much lighting, the domed stadium quickly became a sweltering and surreal vault, a place of overflowing toilets and no showers. Food and water, blankets and sheets, were in short supply. And the dome’s reluctant residents exchanged horror stories, including reports, which could not be confirmed by the authorities, of a suicide and of rapes.

By Wednesday the stink was staggering. Heaps of rotting garbage in bulging white plastic bags baked under a blazing Louisiana sun on the main entry plaza, choking new arrivals as they made their way into the stadium after being plucked off rooftops and balconies.

The odor billowing from toilets was even fouler. Trash spilled across corridors and aisles, slippery with smelly mud and scraps of food.

“They’re housing us like animals,” said Iiesha Rousell, 31, unemployed after four years in the Army in Germany, dripping with perspiration in the heat, unable to contain her fury and disappointment at being left with only National Guardsmen as overseers and no information about what might lie ahead.

Individual stories of the neglect are maddening:

Desperation was in the air. Danielle Shelby tugged at a reporter’s arm. “I have a handicapped daughter,” she said. “She’s over there with her wheelchair. She’s hot. We don’t have any water. I’m afraid she’s going to have a seizure.”

Others crowded around. “I’ve been in the food line twice, and every time I get to the front they tell me they don’t have any left,” said Juanita McFerrin, 80.

“My husband has cancer,” another woman said. “He’s not getting his regular treatment.”

Not enough food? Absolutely unforgivable. No plan for getting rid of the garbage? No allowances made for 20,000 people who have to go to the bathroom? No clearinghouse for information so that people could find out what was going on?

Unbelievable.

Couple this with the problems associated with closing the breach in the 17th street levee, the apparent unpreparedness of the police and fire departments, and the complaints by the mayor of “too many cooks” in the kitchen and you have a recipe for making a bad situation into a catastrophe.

And then there was this:

It got worse. Ms. Rousell recalled hearing a loud bang Tuesday afternoon as the body of a man slapped the concrete at the edge of the football field in a fatal suicidal plunge, after he apparently learned that his home had been destroyed. Others told of fights that broke out in food lines, and of a husband and wife who slugged each other in a wild argument.

Several residents said they had heard of children being raped, though it was not clear whether anyone reported such incidents to the authorities, and no officials could be found who could confirm the accounts.

Darcel Monroe, 21, a bakery cashier, stammered hysterically as she recounted seeing two young girls being raped in one of the women’s bathrooms. “A lot of people saw it but they were afraid to do anything,” she said. “He ran out past all of us.”

Dozens of National Guardsmen standing around with guns and they can’t guard places where women are most vulnerable? And if they didn’t have enough soldiers, why didn’t they ask for more?

Yesterday, I inadvertently spread a rumor that there had been shootings in the Superdome. The rumor proved false…we think. Given the dearth of information that came out of the Superdome while 20,000 human beings were being treated worse than cattle, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything that occurred in that black hole of Calcutta.

UPDATE

In the interest of balance, Aaron at Free Will has some sobering thoughts on the reality of what can actually be done by government in a crisis like this:

Years ago, when I was in school, I was invited to participate in a think-tank type of workshop at SIU on a similar scenario for Southern Illinois if the New Madrid were to blow and turn this joint into a sandbox. You know what we found? That we were screwed. There was no way to plan ourselves out of the worst-case-scenario. That, as it turned out, was the point of the exercise: To impress upon us that there was no Batman, there was no Superman, and that if the earthquake hit, with hundreds of thousands of people spread out across dozens of devastated towns, it would take days, at a bare minimum, before anyone could reach us, and that we had to take this threat seriously and convey to others the importance of preparing for the disaster, having a bugout kit, being at least moderately prepared for a survival situation. Same rule applies here:

New Orleans is not going to be “saved”. It’s not possible. It’s Atlantis. This is a disaster on an unprecedented scale, the kind of comic-book catastrophe like a major shift in the New Madrid, the La Palma tsunami, the Yellowstone caldera, or a significant meteor shattering over a major city and creating a firestorm that no society has the resources to really “shield” a city from and that no society has the technology to magically “fix” in the aftermath. For all intents and purposes, this may as well have been a nuclear meltdown. Nature is history’s greatest monster, and when it decides to go on a killing spree, even the most powerful superpower in human history is simply incapable of fighting back. Nothing within the scope of our imagination can make New Orleans a habitable place right now.

And some additional thoughts that relate to a post I did yesterday on the Compact of Civil Societies:

It’s a city. It’s huge, and there aren’t enough dig crews, dive teams, and SAR-capable helicopters in all of the Southland (especially after Katrina obliterated a significant portion of them), maybe in all the United States to attempt to excavate or search each of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of flooded, crushed structures across the city and, worse yet, across the wider devastated area along the Gulf Coast, much of which has been smashed into toothpicks.

There are 125,000 National Guardsmen activated and ready to go, 30,000 being mobilized, but they can’t secure the city. What are they going to do? Guard abandoned grocery stores in a deadzone from the hungry? Shoot looters and create more dead? End up in a street battle with people desperate to take their supplies? For what? For that matter, what about the logistics of a major deployment into the city? Anyone sent into that hellhole is just as likely to end up needing to be rescued themselves.

Okay, I’ll concede a little and cut the authorities some slack. But not enough food? Or medical supplies? That just smacks of piss-poor planning.

(HT: Instapundit)