For those of you in town, there’s going to be a group cleanup of Canal Street tomorrow. From nola.com:

New Orleans will hold its second city-sponsored cleanup Saturday, this time on Canal Street. Two weeks ago, volunteers were called upon to help clean Magazine Street following Hurricane Katrina.

“This is another way for us to help bring our businesses back,” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a press release. “It’s up to the other business owners and citizens of this great city to help them to get back on their feet. We need everybody to come out and help revive our famous Canal Street.”

Volunteers are asked to bring gloves, brooms, dust pans, rakes and garden clippers to the Aquarium of the Americas beginning at 9 a.m. Other cleaning supplies will be provided.

Residents and business owners are asked to move cars to allow for debris removal.

A New Orleans Halloween: Dear readers, living in exile isn’t easy. Neither is driving around Houston to find a replacement for this year’s Halloween costume, as the one previously-chosen is now irrelevant and not currently available in New Orleans or Houston. While I will not be able to make it to All Hallow’s Eve festivities in my city this year, NOLA.com Wants To Party With You in its first annual NOLA FEST.

… a free two-day Halloween weekend party, with live bands, dancing, masking and more – all streaming live on the Internet to a world-wide audience. Two nights of local celebrity-filled revelry will celebrate the city’s unquenchable cultural landscape as locals and tourists alike are invited to dress up for Halloween and show the world their support and love for New Orleans and its rebirth.

Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers will be featured Friday night from 9-midnight at the iconic Fat Harry’s on St. Charles Avenue in Uptown [4330 St. Charles Ave. near the intersection of St. Charles and Napoleon], as New Orleans residents and special guests celebrate their return to the city, live on NOLA.com. On Saturday, the party continues to the sounds of the Storyville Stompers, also from 9-midnight.

If I had known of such a beast well in advance of my intention to celebrate the spirits of ancestors in South Texas this year, I would have made the trip back home, of course. Who would want to miss Kermit Ruffins at Fat Harry’s, my most favorite Tulane meat market ever, where the young patrons oft wonder out loud if I’m one of their instructors?

“Better make it top shelf, or you get an F!”

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Katrina Aftermath Video From The Officers Of The Sixth District: The men of NOPD’s sixth district, who serve the Garden District and Central City, have compiled a video/slideshow on Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath. Some of the footage is quite disturbing … I miss New Orleans.

These are my guys and girls in uniform and I know how they have suffered, with little to no pay and, more importantly, no relief in sight for months. They are tired and frustrated, but stayed behind to protect their city and, ultimately, created her such a tribute. That is love.

The NOPD-Aid.org forums are a great source of information on our police and how to help them. Please heed the following advice from one of the officers: “As a New Orleans police officer, I can tell you that any fund that is administered by any group within NO itself will be subject to mis-direction. The fact that it is earmarked for officer relief will not guarantee it will be given to those who need it most.”

If you would like to make a donation, please do some online and offline research of your own to find out what you are most comfortable with. Here are some starters:

Police Helping Police
NO Police and Firefighters Disaster Relief Fund

Speaking of firefighters, I wonder how the boys of the Magazine St. Fire Station 5 Blue Team are doing. Hope they are all around when we go home, so as to make good on the baked goods I promised them.

Magazine St. Fire Station 5 on October 9, 2005

NOLA Public Services Map: CNN hosts yet another interactive map with New Orleans zip codes and the status of amenities – water, sewage, trash removal, power – for each area. Eight weeks after Hurricane Katrina and the flood, water is available throughout the city, but for New Orleans East. All public services have been restored to the Lower Garden District, Uptown west of the Garden District and the Westbank. North and east of there, the situation is not so good, but improves slowly and surely. Contrary to the map, the French Quarter and the part of the Marigny closest to the river also have all services. Now, we need a map of free wi-fi hot spots. This post in WiFiNetNews is a starter.

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One Month And One Week Before The Close Of Hurricane Season: s.b. just reminded me that the end of hurricane season is not a week but five weeks away. With every counterclockwise-moving swath of white I see on a screen, my chest hurts more and more. Gulf of Mexico hurricanes are quickly starting to resemble those sold at Pat O’Briens – too many of them and my stomach doesn’t want to be in me any longer. Feh.

For fear of sounding trite, it has been a very tough year on the Gulf of Mexico region, and it was all I could do to keep it together this afternoon, as almost everyone from the local gym to the grocery store spoke of nothing but Hurricane Wilma. My heart goes out to the residents of Cancun who were affected by Wilma’s floods, and we have another landfall to look forward to tomorrow.

… police shot into the air to scare away looters and quickly evacuated more than 30 tourists from a downtown area overrun by people raiding stores … some people, hungry and unable to find anything open, began taking things they needed. Downtown, the city handed out food packages that included rice, beans, crackers and cooking oil, and people stood in line for blocks to collect …

… the storm knocked out many of the island’s docks, making it difficult for the navy to arrive. State officials were trying to clear airstrips on Cozumel and nearby Isla Mujeres so that planes could land with aid.

Windows were blown out at the city’s main public hospital and about an inch of water stood on the floor of the intensive care unit, although a generator provided electricity.

The U.S. Embassy was sending consular officials to shelters to help tourists prepare to leave. The U.S. government also offered to donate $200,000 in hurricane aid.

Granted Mexico did not sustain the scale of devastation that our portion of the Gulf coast did after Katrina, I admire the responsiveness of the Mexican government who seem to have a better handle on emergency management than we do. Also, notice how quick we were to evacuate our people in Mexico, but could not and still cannot offer that level of aid to our very own in New Orleans and surrounding areas. Some people qualify as more American than others, I suppose.

Pop Culture Faux Pas Of The Day (via FoxNews TV) – Man boards up his property and spraypaints the following on one of the planks “Barny [sic] Wilma’s Not Here.” That would be Fred, unless something new has transpired in the Flintstones universe.

Louisiana Requests Illinois Mud: Remember my Wonders Of Science post from two days ago? Here’s another one that shames me into an inner silence so unbelievably quiet. What ARE we doing to this earth and, in the process, to ourselves?

In order to restore marshes destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana has requested for silt from Illinois River overflow. If the Mississippi River down in southern Louisiana were left to its own devices, the river would: a) not flow where it does, and b) overflow periodically and create its own levees by depositing the requisite amount of silt along the riverbanks, which in turn would provide natural protection against storm surges caused by tidal or hurricane activity.

Now, we are forced to import levee material from the midwest.

Louisiana officials want to bolster the marshes — already badly eroded before Katrina — as a barrier against potential storm surges from future hurricanes. They are in early talks with Illinois to transport by barge or pipeline large amounts of mud to the Louisiana coast. Scientists say the loss of the buffer-like marsh over the decades was a big factor in Katrina’s powerful storm surge, which overwhelmed the city’s levees.

2.7 miles of marsh knocks out 1 foot of storm surge. Since the 1950s, more than 8,000 miles of canals have been dug for oil and gas exploration and shipping in the area, causing more than a third of coastal Louisiana’s loss of 1,900 square miles of marsh since the 1930s …

Storm surge finds its way far inland by traveling up the canals and shipping channels, most of which lead straight to levees that protect homes and businesses … a lack of sediment is at the heart of the losing fight against hurricanes, experts say.

Before the levees were built, the Mississippi River overflowed in the spring and replenished Louisiana’s marshes and swamps with silt, sand and mud. But today the 200 million tons of sediment that come down the river flow straight into the Gulf …

Now the states quibble over how much transporting the mud is going to cost our state and the Sierra Club wonders whether or not we are introducing Illinois River toxins to the region and the Gulf.

Earth to Sierra Club, we already receive the toxins of our particular drainage basin all the way from Minnesota down and, oh, remember Cancer Alley? Illinois River material may actually ameliorate our marshes.

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Foaming At FEMA:

9 = Number of times FEMA has called me in the last 36 hours to leave automated voice messages informing me that “your home was in one of the worst-hit regions, we do not require to check your home, you will be provided with assistance, if you have any questions, please call …”

0 = Number of times they have called Machelle

A decent sum (which has been put aside in savings just in case FEMA manages to see daylight and logic through all of the red tape and asks for some or all of the money back) = Amount of money they have given relocated and employed me

$0 = Amount of money they have given unemployed student, Machelle. The woman has been to the FEMA/DHS office in New Orleans over and over again only to be told that her application is in perfect order, they just don’t know why she hasn’t received the money yet, and, sorry, they can’t give her any themselves. It has been two months now since the hurricane.

I love my country, but am fully irritated at my government’s abject inefficiency. How hard is it for one of the richest nations on the planet to help its own? With a Category 4/5 headed towards the United States. Again.