From nola.com: The water is receding at a rate of 1/2 inch per hour on its own, and …“concrete jersey-barriers are being dumped into the flood-wall breach” by the Army Corps of Engineers. Also, to temporarily plug the breach in the 17th Street Canal sheet-pilings will be driven into the junction of the canal at Lake Pontchartain; rock may be used as well.

Here is an except from an e-mail from my sister, who is not far from there: “I guess New Orleans is Louisiana’s ‘twin towers’, and even though this was an act of nature, the human suffering is just as great. I say ‘is’ instead of ‘was’ since there seems to be no end in sight.”

And how widely known is the fact that residents of South Louisiana were not given enough warning for all of them to evacuate? All day Friday into Saturday morning they were told by the authorities that the storm was headed for Florida, and that it was_not_coming to Louisiana. There are only so many roads out, only so many gas stations with only so much gas, only so many motel and hotel rooms. The later someone left, the further they had to travel to find a place to stay….So many people who did leave did so only to find themselves moving at 25 mph for hundreds and hundreds of miles, then stranded on the road, out of gas, with nowhere to go. With this terrible storm coming. But that’s a whole other story.

There are so very many tragic effects: emergency workers in boats having to ignore the dead bodies floating past them–people they might even have known–because they are still trying to find and rescue anyone who is or might be still alive. No one knows how many people are at this moment trapped in their attics, with nothing to eat or drink and with no way to hack their way out onto their rooftops or to communicate that they are there. …And families stranded away from home, with those from Jefferson Parish (the Greater New Orleans area, not including New Orleans itself) able to come back next week only to pick up a few belongings if indeed anything they owned remains or remains intact. Everyone out of work and unable to even go home for at least a month. How many of them have the resources even for gasoline for the round trip, not to mention how they will sustain themselves and their families for the duration? Tens of thousands of people–true refugees–are being bussed from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome, where makeshift quarters are being built.

…Not to mention the economic and symbolic losses.