Katrina

Friday

This whole week has been a blur book-ended with news coverage of Hurricane Katrina. My TV has been tuned to CNN since Sunday. I watched Anderson Cooper and Miles O’Brian as the hurricane raged. I couldn’t help but think, what the hell are they doing out there? But, like everyone else, I figured that once the storm ended, it would all be over but the insurance claims.

But here it is, days later, and the news gets worse every day: flooding, rescues, failed rescues, hospitals with no electricity, sports arenas turned into shelters, price gouging, car jacking, fires, dead bodies, bull sharks swimming in the streets, urban cowboys terrorizing survivors with guns stolen from sporting goods stores.

I can’t believe that New Orleans, where so many of us have spent time trolling through the convention center trying to steal ideas from our competitors during trade shows, is destroyed. I remembered that one of my sorority sisters lives on the beach in Biloxi with her husband and two kids. No one has heard from them.

My brother is the GM of the Hyatt in Atlanta. His hotel is a first response center for the Hyatt in NOLA. In the “good news for once” category, he told me that Starbucks is looking to rent 500 hotel rooms for 90 days so that they can offer temporary housing to some of their displaced employees. Nice one, Starbucks!