100 Days of Outrage In and Around New Orleans

The 100 days of outrage began at 9am, with 15 us of holding our 8 foot long black banner – The People Must Act to Stop the Gulf Oil Catastrophe - 100 Days of Outrage – in the street in front of the Joint Unified Command Headquarters (BP and all the US government agencies involved in the oil disaster) in downtown New Orleans as commuters drove by. We then held a press conference and speak out – the theme was this crisis is not over! A number of folks took the bullhorn and spoke about why they were outraged on this 100th day, beginning with Fredrick-Douglass Knowles reading of the first 20 or so stanzas of the collective poem marking the 100th day of the disaster that he organized online (which has grown to over 200 stanzas!).

As the speakout was taking place, we took snapshots of everyone there, one-by-one, holding the same florescent orange sign: “Gulf Oil Disaster - 100 Days of Outrage”, and making a brief statement about their thoughts on the day.
See pictures below.

Afterward, a group of us went to a café on Frenchman Street in the Faubourg Marigny for ice tea (extremely hot here) and more conversation and snapshots of people we met there. Then it was on to the fish market at Westwego, on the west bank of the Mississippi just south and west of New Orleans. There was talked to vendors about the devastation wrecked on the fishing industry by the oil gusher – about half the shops there were closed because fishing, shrimping and oystering has been shut down. There too, more people wanted to have their pictures taken and make their comments on the 100 days.

Finally we drove south, to the small fishing town of Jean Lafitte (named after an early 18th Century pirate based in New Orleans) on Bayou Barataria in Jefferson Parish, to get a first hand look at the bayous and inner coastal waterways threatened by this catastrophe.