Band together to survive

from Website: http://hurricanegrrl.livejournal.com
Thank you so much for this article. I wish it had been written a few years ago. I was stuck in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and lost everything. I banded together with a group of people, and together we managed to clear the main streets of our area, feed up to 60 people per day, organize a rudimentary field hospital, located trapped pets and provided them with food and water...and a lot more. We were able to accomplish all of this only because several of us had military training and could teach the others what to do. One thing the article failed to mention is the absolute necessity of banding together for security reasons...we fortified our neighborhood and set up perimeter patrols, which kept out the looters. The first five days in New Orleans, no one at all came to help us. Groups of gangbangers and drug addicts filtered down into the residential neighborhoods in search of drugs. There were several times where we had to shoot over these people's heads to discourage them from entering our territory. Danger, unfortunately, is just as likely to arise from humans as from natural disasters, and the breakdown of organized society immediately following the hurricane showed people's true colors.