Latest hurricane Katrina news from my friends (I would have written last night, but I got deathly ill to my stomach, another story... bad food or just nerves?):

The hospital my friend's husband had gone back to work at decided with no electricity or water to evacuate the patients and close down. Her husband had been told that there was nothing left but rice and tomato sauce before he arrived, but when he got there the local police had gotten into a grocery store and they were having barbecues in the parking lot instead, so at least they had food to get by with. Armed guards patrolled the perimeters to keep away looters that were after drugs, he said several were persuaded to "turn back, and walk away" at gunpoint. Apparently, people were being allowed to walk across the Mississippi River bridge at first, but after a mall near the bridge was set on fire, through traffic was stopped.

So her husband has been reassigned to another hospital near the Louisiana/Texas border, and he was given an armed escort to their home in Uptown to retrieve his car, which had been left behind. There was no flood damage to their home, thank goodness, though the upstairs french doors had blown open during the storm and gotten some water had gotten in the master bedroom and dripped down to the kitchen below. The other side of the house had just been hand painted and stenciled, so fortunately it was undamaged. He secured the house once more, and headed his Land Rover back to Texas. After another nightmarishly long drive, 18 wheelers had run into each other on I10 in one of the wetland "no exit" areas in East Texas, he finally made it back to his wife and child and the safety of Beaumont. My friend Mary feels she is so incredibly lucky to have escaped the wrath of the storm without harm to her family or her home.

An interesting image he saw that hadn't made it to the AP newswire - a woman walking through the floodwaters in a full-length mink coat carrying an automatic rifle (apparently Sak's was looted before it was burned down). Also the story that guns were stolen from a Walmart by looters is untrue, the police actually removed the guns before the store was looted.

Also per my friend, while Dubya was getting his photo op at the New Orleans airport, all other (i.e. rescue) activity was brought to a halt. People were dying stuck on the runway while he chatted and waxed nostalgic about the Big Easy.

From the truly horrifying end of the spectrum - a friend of my husband's had called and left a message last Sunday that he had gone to the Superdome to wait out the storm. He is unfortunately (fortunate in retrospect?) basically homeless and was actually planning to come back to Houston over the last few weeks because of the difficulty of keeping a job in New Orleans. He called this afternoon to report that he was now in Fort Worth, where he was ironically evacuated to after spending what he describes as a week in Hell inside the dark, damp and violent Superdome. He said (these are his words alone) he had seen people killed in fights right in front of him, seen people urinating on the dead bodies that were strewn about, he said he'd never really been around dead people before, but they were everywhere. He hadn't eaten or slept in may days, but he had helped out when the rescuers did come, and had been finally put on a bus to Texas, where he stated they "were treating him very well" now. My husband and I had been seriously wondering about his fate, because he is also one of those people who tends to say the first thing that comes out of his head, and had gotten in arguments and fights regularly here in Houston. But he is also a NOLA native, so apparently some survival instinct to keep his mouth shut must have kicked in.