The man in the attic. I woke today at my usual hour, got my usual bagel out of the freezer to thaw, began my usual morning blog-catchup. And there I was, not even 9am yet, and already I found that I'd burned through all my emotional reserves for the day.

It was this, excerpted by Billmon from a Guardian UK report, that did for me:

Volunteer rescuer Gregg Silverman, part of a 14-boat contingent from Columbus, Ohio, said he expected to find many more survivors in his excursion through the city's flooded streets. Instead, he found mostly bodies.

"They had me climb up on a roof, and I did bring an ax up to where a guy had tried to stick a pipe up through a vent,'' Silverman said. "Unfortunately, he had probably just recently perished. His dog was still there, barking. The dog wouldn't come. We had to leave the dog just up there in the attic.''

As for other bodies his group encountered: "Obviously we are not recovering them. We are just tying them up to banisters, leaving them on the roof.''

Call me a sentimentalist, but the pity of that twice left behind and surely dying dog—that noise of terrified, uncomprehending barking—put me right over the edge of tears.

Billmon thinks of the man in the attic as pushing that pipe out the ventilator grate as the waters rose, making desperate shift for breath, but I don't think that's right. His dog was still alive in the attic, after all; the rescuer believes the man "had probably just recently perished." No, I'd guess he was one of the survivors—one of the ones who thought they were lucky, and who lingered for days, hungry, dehydrated, infirm or perhaps injured, while the hope of rescue dwindled, and curdled, and turned at last into a cruel taunt. One of all those for whom help was delayed just a day or an hour too long.

Maybe the pipe was a gesture he'd made before the hope had died; maybe he was trying to fashion whatever poor signal he could to the people who he knew had to be out there, on their way, any time now. Maybe there'd been a cloth at the end of it, before it fell off. Maybe he'd waved it at intervals till his strength gave out. Or maybe, on the contrary, it was something he did late in the game. Maybe he just wanted a taste of air not fouled with his own hopeless captivity. Maybe he wanted to remind himself at the last that there was a world out there, a sky, an elsewhere.

We'll never know. We can imagine, though.

Imagine hearing the chatter of helicopters swelling and receding, and none of them ever swelling loud and staying. (And then, after a period, no chatter at all.) Imagine the helpless gusts of hope, and fear, and grief that swept through the man in the attic as the days lengthened without aid, without word. Imagine him having to suffer in mind, not just for himself but for his trapped and dumbly suffering pet. Imagine him in those endless moments, who knows how many there were, when he blamed and raged against himself for what was happening to them both.

Imagine the endless, suffocating, dripping heat, the choking stench. Imagine the torturing delirium that makes you believe there's clean, clear water just out of your reach. Imagine trying to self-ration whatever scraps of food you'd saved, if you'd saved any, in your panicked scramble to stay ahead of the flood. Imagine wringing a bit of gratitude out of your hunger when the food's gone, that at least you won't have anything left in you to soil yourself with.

Imagine crossing over into the certainty that this airless, windowless place is your last place in the world. Imagine the moment of no hope, only waiting. Imagine sleeping, and then waking, and cursing the waking with what little force you have left.

Imagine the desperate loneliness of that death.

We all of us have to die. But no one should have to die so utterly abandoned. Bad enough that thousands are needlessly dead: but dead, and in such needless torment? As distressing as it was, in the days after 9/11, to picture to oneself the deaths of those people in the towers, with no choice but to fall or burn: there was at least this much to mitigate it, that no power on earth could have saved them. It was possible to think that they realized that, might even have won (however unlikely) some kind of peace from it, from the inevitability of it. Whatever else, they at least didn't have to perish in the full knowledge that they'd been left to rot.

I'd like not to have to imagine any of this, any more than you want to. But it's not simply that I can't help myself. I'm not religious: I don't like throwing around words like "holy" and "sacred." But if anything deserves the name, then I think that imagining the death of the man in the attic is a sacred duty.

Because conscienceless men are in power over us. Because conscience, in their conception of power, has no place, no standing: and should be extirpated from public discourse, as an unnecessary drag on the doing of business. Because if we, we conscienced people, fail to imagine what we can of this death, as vividly as we can, we connive in spite of ourselves at their purposes, we assist the general smothering of scruple. We let our country slide that much further into the Hobbesian order. Because as we wish ourselves not to be abandoned in our last hours, as the man in the attic was abandoned, his world contracted to a length and diameter of pipe, we must not abandon him in thought. We must feel, we must remember, and we must accuse.

It's all we can do now for our brothers and sisters who perished in their distress. Those who let them perish must be made accountable for it. For god's sake, don't let go. Hold them to account. Hold them to account.

posted by michael  2:46:57 PM  
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Chernobyl. That's a word you won't find in this Salon article on the environmental disaster in Katrina's wake, but it seems unavoidable.

In an effort to drain New Orleans and rid it of the bacteria-laden water, the Army Corps of Engineers has begun pumping floodwater into Lake Pontchartrain, the huge but shallow lake on the city's northern border. Yet this water, as it recedes past New Orleans' highly polluted areas, is most likely laced with a frightening amount of dangerous chemicals.

From 1941 to 1986 the Thompson-Hayward Chemical Plant, near Xavier University in the center of town, packaged and mixed pesticides such as DDT, the herbicide 2,4,5-T (the main constituent of Agent Orange, which contains dioxin), and the fungicide pentachlorophenal, which also contains dioxin. While the city and federal governments launched a massive cleanup effort throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the remediation was not entirely successful: 2,600 tons of herbicide-contaminated soil reportedly couldn't be removed because it was too toxic to legally dispose of in any state, according to a 1995 article by Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

At the Agriculture Street Landfill, soil and debris are laden with DDT, lead, asbestos, and industrial waste — ironically, everything that was scraped from the city floor after Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. In 1962, reports Solid Waste and Recycling magazine, "300,000 cubic yards of excess fill were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires. (The site was nicknamed 'Dante's Inferno' because of the fires.)" While the EPA eventually declared the dump a Superfund site (after the city had filled the area and built homes and a school above the infill of trash), the only cleanup the landfill underwent was the removal 5 inches of soil. A plastic barrier was put down and clean soil thrown on top.

"The New Orleans area that was flooded was an industrial area where you have all the lubricants and batteries and heavy-metal plating — it's just hideously dangerous," says geographer Wells. "We can't wait around to test the floodwater before we pump it back into the lake — people are already dying of disease from it — but it's a terrible thing to do. We're going to avoid a great human disaster by doing this, but we could be creating a damn big environmental one."

"Forget for a moment the scenario of a toxic lake in the middle of a major American city," says Rebecca Claren; "should a future hurricane breach the levees again, New Orleans could literally be submerged in poison."

For a century, chemical companies have been dumping poisons onto the ground and into the water in southeastern Louisiana—long before, but also well after, they should have known better, and after laws and regulations were supposedly in place to stop them. But nobody down there stops the chemical companies from doing whatever the hell they want to do. Or makes them pay.

The Superfund bank account, money that would normally be used to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste sites that are "an act of God," is essentially broke. The tax on chemical and oil industries that pays for Superfund cleanups expired in December 1995. According to the most recent statistics, a 1998 report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an environmental and health advocacy agency, $4 million for cleaning up hazardous waste sites goes uncollected every day the tax is not restored.

In fact, every year for the past decade congressional representatives have attempted to reauthorize the polluter payments, and every year the bill has been voted down. The Bush administration has consistently opposed the fee. Without the inflow of industry's money, taxpayers have instead funded the Superfund budget. Today, most of the $1.2 billion currently appropriated from the general revenue fund has already been committed to other sites around the country.

"The Superfund is supposed to be our safety net when Mother Nature is at fault," says Lois Gibbs, director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, a nonprofit group based in Falls Church, Va. "These fees could make a large dent in the costs of cleanup." Gibbs poses the question that geographer Wells also asked, one that the nation will likely spend the next several years trying to answer. "The entire community is now a hazardous waste dump. How do you clean up an entire city, an entire region?"

The business elites want a new New Orleans, one even less hospitable to the poor (and black) than formerly? It's Chernobyl. Who's going to locate there if they've got a choice about it, if they know what they'll be getting themselves and their children into?

posted by michael  12:29:44 PM  
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Straits. Arthur makes it sound as though there's little or nothing to be done to help him in this pass—but read it anyhow. He's one of the good guys.
posted by michael  11:02:06 AM  
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