Listen to Katrina Stories [UPDATED]

This American Life ran its Katrina show this weekend, and it's well worth listening to. If you've missed its normal broadcast, you can listen to it on Real Audio. There wasn't a lot of information I hadn't already been aware of, but to hear them spoken brings these stories home much more powerfully than reading similar accounts.

There's an interview with one woman who was stuck in the Superdome, where an overwhelming rumor spread that authorities were planning to open the doors to flood the structure or intended to leave the people there to die of neglect (which some of those trapped inside certainly did). The radio show also talks to Lorrie Beth Slonsky, a San Francisco paramedic who was in New Orleans with her partner (also a paramedic), Larry Bradshaw, at an EMS convention. You can read about Slonsky and Bradshaw in various news sources (here's The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and they tell their own story at Socialist Worker), but it's worth it to listen. Slonsky talks about what it was like to be trapped in the city, prevented by armed police from leaving, and finally having to rely on Bradshaw's personal EMS contacts to evacuate the disaster area.

It's important to hear all the stories coming out of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, but it's stories like these that will convince those of us who feel we have some resources to take care of ourselves in a similar situation that all it takes is the wrong set of arbitrary circumstances to leave us bereft and helpless. I'm afraid that only our own individual feelings of personal vulnerability will bring about changes to protect the poor and disadvantaged who are always more vulnerable.

UPDATE--I added the link to hear the show on Real Audio.