181. A very tragic week

A very tragic week.

A very tragic week has passed. Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc, first in southern Florida, and then with much more catastrophic results in the southern Gulf coasts of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama. Upward of 500,000 people may have lost everything, their homes, jobs, all their belongings, cars, and many family members. This is a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions in the United States. The area depicted on the map portion below is only one of several areas involved. Due to a levee break in two Canals extending out from Lake Pontchartrain (the body of water between Mandeville and Metairie/New Orleans) houses are totally flooded and inhabitable in the areas south and southeast of the Lake. That is a huge area. And while most of the people of New Orleans have been evacuated, many hundred are still in attics of the houses, either dead or alive. Today begins the removal of the people still in this area by means of a very large force of soldiers of all branches of service (National Guard, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, local police forces) using boats, helicopters or whatever conveyance will work for them in the current situation.

Many hundreds of people are already known dead. There could be hundreds more. The standing water is toxic and probably deadly. There is oil and gasoline floating on it, and every sort of sewage imaginable. The scary part is that all people who live along water in the South and Southeastern United States know that the same thing can happen to them, because hurricanes have a mind of their own.

Look at Hurricane Andrew in August of 1992...there was terrible destruction in the Miami-Homestead, Florida, area, and many thousands died, but even that Category 5 storm does not compare to Hurricane Katrina of August 29, 2005. Then there were the five hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004. The area where I live was hit by two of these storms in September 2004, and Hurricane Jeanne created vast destruction - but there was no storm-surge associated with the latter, and that made it less deadly. With Hurricane Katrina, there was a 20-feet storm surge that obliterated anything and anyone in its path.

Let us continue to pray for all who are homeless, lost everything, that they will find a new home, and let us be thankful for people who have opened their homes to the people involved. Let us also pray for all the people in the military services and medical staffs involved in retrieving the rest of the living and dead, for strength, endurance and safety.

On the home front, I'm still plugging away on this website, adding this and subtracting that, but for the past three weeks I've been really busy with the other website I have taking under my wing, so to speak, and that is the website of the International Council of the Secular Franciscan Order, in Rome, Italy, attached to the Minister General of the SFO and her staff (many of whom do not live in Italy) - I'm responsible for modernizing it, but I could not have accomplished this without the good help of Fr. Benitius Brevoort, OFM Cap., whose main ministry is Guardian of the OFM Generalate in Rome. He began the www.ciofs.org website a dozen years ago, and he is a tremendous help to me. That website uses several programming languages (HTML, PHP, CSS, and some Java & Perl) and some of these techniques I'm not very familiar with. It is somewhat larger than our website. The results of the modernization are now very visible, although we're not through yet, and there is a lot of Franciscan worldwide information on it, as well as general Franciscan topics of interest. There is a weekly bulletin (CIOFS bulletin) that goes back to 1995 and has many interesting articles in it. Occasionally, I've used some of these articles on our website.

If you can help those in need in this area, please contact either the Red Cross or Catholic Charities. There are many other organizations helping out there, for a complete list, see here (CNN)

Peace & Good!

Fred S. Schaeffer, SFO
9-5-2005