Two years later

mr_ed:  It's hard to know what to think or say about the Hurricane Katrina disaster, even with two years' perspective.

I was going to pull info from different articles and try to come up with an overall view. To heck with that. Not only is it late at night (again), but anybody can surf a little and drown in information and retrospectives.

Just one item. Years ago, Brown University's Robert Kates came up with a rule of thumb for the time required to recover from a disaster. His Rule of Ten says you multiply the time that a place was uninhabitable by 10, and that's how long is needed just to function again. For New Orleans that's 8 weeks and 80 weeks.

If you count from 8/29/05, 80 weeks came in mid-March of this year. If you start 8 weeks later (and the article doesn't say which you do), then it was 80 weeks in early May.

But to totally rebuild? Multiply that by 10 once more - 15 years and a few months.

Katrina dog Pearl at MaxFund

I spent some time Wednesday at the MaxFund animal shelter, where we still have at least one animal rescued from Hurricane Katrina. Pearl had emotional as well as physical problems when she arrived, and she still seems to have a scary reputation.

But when I go to her kennel, she wags her tail and tips up her head so the chain slides right on. As far as I can tell, she's a sweetheart now. But for some reason Pearl still seems to look like a Rottweiler   ;-)   and that would make her hard to adopt out even without the reluctance that shelter people show toward her.

I wish I knew how to help besides trying to see that she doesn't forget about an outside world.

-- photo of Pearl by Nicole Howard