When I read reports like this…

Three babies died at the New Orleans Convention Center from heat exhaustion, said Mark Kyle, a medical relief provider.

…I don’t feel much like writing about polls or the history of levee funding or the stupidity of celebrities.

I feel, instead, like weeping and screaming and holding on extra-tight to my own two kids and praying, praying, praying for the souls of the smallest victims of natural disaster and deadly bureaucratic myopia who were left to die in a hellhole.

This is intolerable:

In the rush to evacuate people from the storm-ravaged New Orleans area, at least two dozen children have been separated from their parents in Louisiana, according to the state social services department.

Some children and parents also have been separated and sent to neighboring states in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and as the evacuation continues officials expect that number to grow larger, according to Marketa Garner Gautreau, an assistant secretary with the social services office.

“As people have been pushed onto buses and jumped onto buses, they’ve gotten separated from their families,” Gautreau said.

Other children needed medical care and their parents couldn’t get airlifted with them, she said, pledging that all children separated from parents are being well-taken care of with about five social services volunteers to each child.

As anyone who has been paying attention to the social services nightmares of the past few years knows, the line about “five social services volunteers” is bound to make parents more fearful and worried about their children, not less.

Look hard at these photos, send them around, e-mail the networks and cable news stations and press them to air the names and faces of Katrina’s lost children–every night until they are all found, if need be. Let’s get O’Reilly and Greta and Shep and Steve Harrigan and Nancy Grace and Rita Cosby on the search team. Let’s start with these kids who were found alone on a New Orleans causeway:

More missing children shown here (bottom row), including 5-month-old baby Jordan Barnes:

According to this report, at least 500 others have been listed as missing.

Stories like 1-year-old Leah’s from AP are too few:

The only word 1-year-old Leah knew was “Da-da.” She lay in a stranger’s arms as her mother, Christi Scott, floated away in a hot tub.

“I thought, there’s no way I’m going to find her,” said Scott, who drifted in her makeshift lifeboat atop Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters for 20 minutes before reaching land. “She doesn’t know her name. She can’t say my name.”

Read the whole thing to find out how Scott was reunited with Leah. Scott’s message:

“Don’t give up.”

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Related/previous: 9/2 The renegade bus

New: Speaking of school buses, Bryan Preston has more blood-boiling details of squandered buses left to sit in a New Orleans parking lot while children drowned. See here and here.

Reader Kent O. points out that Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco finally just got around to authorizing the use of school buses for Katrina evacuations.

How many lives might have been saved? How many families might have been spared their curent agony of searching, hoping, and praying for the return of their lost children?

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