Quotes of the Day
posted by Rick at 9:53 PM

I couldn't pick just one. We report, you decide.

Most of these quotes are one to four years old; the last one, though, is quite current.


"A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. . . . Boxes of body bags are stacked eight feet high. . . . A direct hit is inevitable. . . . the low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now, another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh -- an area the size of Manhattan -- will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes."

"Drowning New Orleans"
Scientific American
October, 2001



"More than 1.2 million people in metropolitan New Orleans were warned to get out Tuesday as [the] 140-mph hurricane churned toward the Gulf Coast, threatening to submerge this below-sea-level city in what could be the most disastrous storm to hit in nearly 40 years."

USA Today
September 14, 2004



"The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath."

"Poor, Black, and Left Behind"
tomdispatch.com
September 23, 2004



"So many of the people in the arenas here, you know, were - were underprivileged anyway, this is - this is working [chuckle] very well for them."

Barbara Bush, discussing evacuees housed in the Astrodome
Marketplace
September 5, 2005
Audio clip at Crooks and Liars