Dismal Morning

On my drive to work this morning, the newscaster listed the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Along with the news about the devastation of New Orleans, he also said that 80% of Mississippi is without power. Here's a story about the power outages so far in Katrina's wake.

New Orleans, for all practical purposes, doesn't exist anymore. They're going to move the refugees in the damaged Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston. There's widespread looting, the dead bodies will soon be a disease risk for anyone who stays behind, and prisoners in the Orleans Parish Prison rioted and are holding hostages. The governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, has ordered New Orleans to be completely evacuated, because the city is uninhabitable.

The dismal news isn't limited to Katrina, though. Today, the AP reported on a deadly incident in Baghdad:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - At least 648 people were killed in a stampede on a bridge Wednesday when panic engulfed a Shiite religious procession amid rumors that a suicide bomber was about to attack, officials said. It was the single biggest confirmed loss of life in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion.

The stampede caused the bridge railing to collapse in one spot, and many of the dead were the result of falling or being pushed into the river by the crowd.

The head of the country's major Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Scholars, told Al-Jazeera television that Wednesday's disaster was "another catastrophe and something else that could be added to the list of ongoing Iraqi tragedies."

"On this occasion we want to express our condolences to all the Iraqis and the parents of the martyrs, who fell today in Kazimiyah and all over Iraq," said the cleric, Haith al-Dhari.

So much death and devastation in so short a time. So much grief. The thought of it can get hard to bear, and I don't even know anybody in any of these places. The best thing to do is help with the relief efforts in whatever way we can.

Salvation Army

International Disaster Emergency Service (IDES)

Red Cross