Last year, when we were in Mobile, Al., covering Hurricane Ivan, we heard the stories of poor people, many of them black stranded downtown because they had no way out.
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While Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the dangers of failing to evacuate hospitals from the path of a storm, Hurricane Gustav demonstrated that moving thousands of sick people has its own risks. Gustav also highlighted a critical vulnerability of American hospitals - an inability to withstand prolonged blackouts.
There's a great deal of disturbance in this country and how black feel about what happened in Katrina, and, you know, many of the comics, many of performers are in Las Vegas and New Orleans trying to raise money for what happened there.
The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.
The reality of Katrina didn't really strike me until the first time I flew up in a helicopter and saw areas of the city that I had ridden my bicycle as a youth being fully flooded.
What happened after Katrina is that people were stirred to action; there were an enormous number of contributions by people trying to make a difference. But then we forget. We've forgotten Katrina victims, we've forgotten the face of poverty.
There are more than 300,000 families in the Gulf region that lost their homes and are waiting for peace of mind. The hurricane exposed the sad reality of poverty in America. We saw, in all its horrific detail, the vulnerabilities of living in inadequate housing and the heartbreak of losing one's home.
We had had several mine disasters where workers, some of the workers were rescued. It was, you know, who was lucky and who weren't. Some would find the air pockets But, in this one, bam, it was just, everybody was gone and it greatly depressed the state.
I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.
Oklahoma City, Katrina... those happened to other unfortunate people. But 9/11, that happened to us all. And that was pretty much the genesis of 'Reign Over Me.'
I've been through quite a few hurricanes. I worked in North Carolina, where there's a housing development whose name was Landfall.
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