Other Hurricanes
Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans - 2005
The devastation of nature amplified into a humanitarian disaster by governmental failure. Two eye-witness accounts:
Larry Bradshaw & Lorrie Beth Slonsky - forwarded by Susan Nash (to whom thanks)
'We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen’s in the French Quarter'
Charmaine Neville - a resident's point of view.
'What I want people to understand is that, if we hadn't been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened. People are trying to say that we stayed in that city because we wanted to be rioting and we wanted to do this and, we didn't have resources to get out, we had no way to leave.'
"Wild Gilbert": Hurricane Gilbert 1988 inna Jamaican style
'It is not Theosophical but it is western. It could I suppose be called an eclogue, but it could be called a dialogic work, all about looting after Gilbert, with the singer both complaining of his losses and speaking for those who are thanking Gilbert for having provided them with new luxuries like radios and colour televisions! I suspect that William Gilbert would have disapproved. A pop-up of the eye of the hurricane (from NASA simulations) will appear and swirl around briefly while the calypso plays'. - Nora Crook.
The same website also has a comprehensive history of Caribbean hurricanes with extracts from contemporary accounts. 1780 is particularly striking. 'God smote Savannah-la-Mar' wrote De Quincey in the Finale to Part 1 of Suspiria de Profundis. De Quincey refers to an earthquake only, but the linked account makes it clear that a hurricane and an earthquake both coincided with dreadful results. De Quincey's haunting prose poem starts with a vision of the aftermath - a submerged city visible to sailors.
And God said... "She shall be a monument to men of my mysterious anger; set in azure light through generations to come: for I will enshrine her in a crystal dome of my tropic seas'.
The full e-text is available here - to be read while listening to Debussy's La Cathedrale engloutie. Or, on the other hand....
Neil Young's - Like a Hurricane
Like standing in a wind tunnel. Or in Neil Young's own words, 'It's like [Del Shannon's] "Runaway" with the organ solo going on for ten minutes' - thanks to Tim Fulford.