Power Back On For Bush Speech, Back Off An Hour Later

Sploid
Sep. 16, 2005

"No more than an hour after the President departed, the lights went out. The entire area was plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans. It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it ... jump to certain conclusions."

That grim yet hardly surprising report comes from NBC anchorman Brian Williams, writing here at MSNBC.

I am duty-bound to report the talk of the New Orleans warehouse district last night: there was rejoicing (well, there would have been without the curfew, but the few people I saw on the streets were excited) when the power came back on for blocks on end. Kevin Tibbles was positively jubilant on the live update edition of Nightly News that we fed to the West Coast. The mini-mart, long ago cleaned out by looters, was nonetheless bathed in light, including the empty, roped-off gas pumps. The motorcade route through the district was partially lit no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through.

And as soon as Bush had delivered his propaganda and was zoomed out of the doomed city, the power was turned off -- plunging the nervous survivors back into total darkness.