August 30, late evening:
I have been following more news reports on New Orleans and now I have a sinking feeling that this city may be possibly gone for a long time - maybe for good - as Nature has proven to be more potent than history. The levees on the Pontchartrain Lake side were damaged and no amount of sandbags seems to stop the lake's waters from reclaiming the basin where the city sits. In fact, flood control measures and levees, according to some experts, may have aggravated this disaster.
The situation of the refugees everywhere specially those in the Superdome is a real cliffhanger and it is amply believed that deaths and disappearances inside the city may reach a four-figure mark. Now as I sit in the evening at my computer at my reasonably dry Puerto Rico house I muse about all the lives, and records of past ones, that slowly dissolve in the New Orleanian basin, and about how now everything - even the traces of the past - are so ephemeral and fragile in an every-day-more uncertain world. This is bound to be a major loss to history and to the multiculturalism that this city embodied for so long in a relatively homogeneous South.
I think, pessimistically, that now we'll have to bid New Orleans goodbye. Though, I don't close the doors on good news in the future.
I am in a sense suffering as if I were there...
