A small footnote to the human tragedy & disaster in New Orleans: _preventable_ deterioration/destruction of possibly millions of notarial documents:

“6:50 P.M. - (AP): Specialists trying to rescue some of the most historic documents New Orleans history have been stymied in their efforts to get downtown.

The New Orleans Notarial Archives is trying to save documents ranging from original land grants to slave sale records and title records. But federal troops have refused to let workers through checkpoints into the city.
The Notarial Archives has hired a Swedish document salvage firm that freezes and then freeze-dries records to slowly remove moisture from them, to rescue the documents. But the refrigerated trucks were turned away by uniformed troops as they tried to enter the city.
The city was just about to hire a firm to transfer many of the documents in the archive to a computer. But at the Notarial Archives, most abstractors still do hand searches of the 12 million stored documents.”

From WWLTV 4 in New Orleans: http://www.wwltv.com/