Troubleshooter here...

[Troubleshooter]

...and things are a mess.

I live in Hammond, just across the lake from NO and I packed myself, Lady Sidhe and Little Sidhe up and headed for Pensacola.

I'm sure that seems a little counter intuitive, but my mother and grandmother live there and had just finished dealing with Ivan and had gone militia in their preperations for the next one, so they were set to ride out an extended catastrophe.

We're ok, and things are much better than they could be for us.

I came back to Hammond Wednesday and brought back a minivan full of relief supplies and a generator anf fuel and such. I've spent most of the past week riding around helping various families by delivering food, water and fuel and letting them use the generator to recharge their freezers and such. It's been a busy week.

I see a lot of arguments going on about relief being delayed because of racism, classism and ineptitude. All three are true.

I see a lot of arguments about so many people being left in the city because they're black. That is not true. Some people are refusing to get out. Some people refused to leave when they had the opportunity. Some bus drivers won't drive near the city because they don't want to get shot. Some people are too busy looting to leave.

There are enough true reasons for what is going on that people just need to quit focusing on blame until after the problem has been salved, and yes I meant to say salved. What happened in New Orleans is not the result of the hurricane, it is the result of so many different people with control of their own destiny chosing to not utilize that control.

Priorities need to be assigned, solutions need to be implemented, lives need to be saved. Save the ones that want to be saved, save the ones who can't save themselves, the rest have to make their own way.

We haven't even begun to see the long term ramifications of this. Access to fuel and food in the areas surrounding the gulf coast are in short supply. The supply lines that fed New Orleans don't stop here, they weren't meant to, so distribution is snarled like a bundle of yarn. Even here in Hammond someone tried to hijack a fuel truck, so now we have to have supply vehicles escorted by law enforcement. Someone was shot just up the road in a town of 8,000 for a tank full of gas.

Not to put too fine a point on it, people need to either provide solutions and supplies or shut the fuck up, I don't have word to describe what is happening down here.

Nurses are having to convince themselves to stop manually bagging patiets on external respiration so they can save other patients with less pressing needs.

It's crunch time.