You MUST Go See This Documentary

This film filled me with outrage. It is a documentary of what really happened during and after Hurricane Katrina.

The majority of the footage shot during the hurricane is filmed by a couple who didn't have the means to leave New Orleans. They shot the footage with a camera they had bought off the street for $20 the week prior to the storm. They documented what was happening to them during teh storm because they thought they were going to die and wanted to leave a document to be found in their home.

It is absolutely SICK how the government abandoned the lower 9th ward of New Orleans prior, during and after the storm. Some of it I had heard bits and pieces of via the news, but nothing on the news portrayed the reality. The biggest misconception I had prior to watching this film was that residents who stayed behind had chosen to do so. That is NOT true. There was no public plan by the mayor or governor to evacuate the city. If folks didn't have money or a vehicle, they had no choice in the matter. The same was true after the storm blew threw - the government DID NOT bring in transportation to get people out of the toxic areas and to safety where food, water and assistance awaited them. There is footage of hundreds of thousands of people from New Orleans who are walking out of the city, trying to get to the superdome or a shelter, and they are so weak from the heat/humidity and lack of food and water that they are moving at a snail's pace.

Hospital patients were abandoned while the staff and personnel left them to die in the storm and water. You read that right - they were found drowned in the hospital building in their rooms. The county jail was abandoned by the guards and the detainees were left to die. Thankfully, many of them did not drown, although without guards, it was chaos inside the walls.

911 audio clips are inserted where folks were calling from cell phones in their roofs, begging for someone to come in a boat and get them out because the water was already in their roof at that point and they couldn't break a hole to get out. The 911 operators had to tell these people that no emergency personnel were going in to save people until weather conditions got better. (FYI - when the second hurricane blew through shortly thereafter, they had the nerve to ask residents to write their social security number in magic marker on their arm or leg to make it easier to identify their bodies.)

Meanwhile, residents who had found a way to get out of their house when the water rose above their ceilings were trying their best to go from house to house, saving those they could. If residents, with no life jackets and without boats could save people in their homes and get them to higher ground, I find it hard to believe that emergency personnel or the national guard couldn't have been deployed.

When the couple filming and a large group went to the nearby Naval base to find shelter, they were threatened with M16s, ready to fire. FYI - the government was in the process of shutting down said Navy base prior to the storm coming, and there were over 500 empty barracks yet the military wouldn't open it up for the now homeless people who hadn't had water or food for two or three days.

The lack of humanity prior, during and in the aftermath was literally astonishing. The part that I couldn't grasp was how Christians could do this to other human beings. The most powerful line in the movie came from a resident who saved dozens of people from their homes by using a floating punching bag for them to ride on. It didn't matter who the people were, he saved them. He was a gang-banger, and he even saved one of his sworn enemies. Two weeks later, he was smiling and happy and said, "I never thought that God would use a guy like me." All of those hospital, emergency, government and jail personnel could so easily abandon people for their SURE death, yet a drug using/selling gang banger was one who God chose because he knew he wouldn't say no. Absolutely astonishing to me.

Please support this film. It needs people to come out in numbers for the distribution company to continute to send it to cities. These astrocities MUST be seen by the greater public in order to hold the government accountable and get new policies in place that value ALL human life, regardless of where they live, what color skin they have and what they may or may not do to earn money.