Saving Down Home

New Orleans native Chuck Taggart, a fellow DJ at 88.5 KCSN (he hosts the roots show "Down Home" on Thursdays), has been chronicling the devastation in his hometown via his excellent Looka! blog (part of his Gumbo Pages website).



Chuck has created a database of New Orleans musicians and whether or not they've been accounted for in the Katrina aftermath. He's also been talking to an architect about bringing together architects, architectural historians and others who are experts in New Orleans' unique style to help those who rebuild homes in New Orleans make those homes look like New Orleans houses.

Perhaps the most jarring image is from today's post, however: A close-up satellite shot of his parents' home in New Orleans East, under water.

From his blog:

My mom and I were talking last night, and we had both been thinking the same thing. New Orleans will return. It will be rebuilt, it will live again ... but as a smaller city, centered around the Quarter and Downtown, the Marigny and the Bywater, the Garden District and Uptown. There is no Lakeview right now, almost no Gentilly, no New Orleans East, almost nothing east of the Industrial Canal. All those homes are ruined.

Then there's the Tremé, the Lower Ninth Ward, the back part of the Bywater up by the Industrial Canal. Those people are generally all desperately poor, and are going to need all the help we can muster.

Chalmette and Arabi needs us too. Forty thousand homes in St. Bernard must come back, as must Rocky and Carlo's.

We need the desire to do it. We need the money to do it. And we need the will of our government to do it. It's only that third point about which I'm distrustful and frightened.



Chuck compiled the box set "Doctors, Professors, Kings and Queens: The Big Ol' Box of New Orleans" for Shout Factory, which is donating profits from its sale to relief efforts through the end of the year.

MEANWHILE:



:: If you haven't seen the video yet of Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard on Sunday's Meet The Press, go here right now. He spends much of the time slamming FEMA hard, and breaks down toward the end. I dare you to come away with dry eyes.

(Thanks to Joe for the Broussard link.)

:: Add MSNBC's Keith Olbermann to the list of newsies not tempering their anger over the government's response to this tragedy.

Check the video out here, as Keith says it all:

Nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn't even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans -- even though the government had heard all the "chatter" from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn't quite discern... a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection -- or at least amelioration -- against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

:: Good news: Via the grapevine, got word that college roommate Keith is safe in Houston, where he and Eddie are staying at a friend's house. They managed to leave on Saturday with important documents, some clothes and even a couple of bottles of wine. They believe their house is under a few feet of water, however.