Please, let this not be true

I've been overwhelmed with all the awful stories coming out of Louisiana and Mississippi. Barbara Bush's Marie Antoinette impression yesterday made me feel pretty queasy, and Shakespeare's Sister's post cataloging the myriad ways in which FEMA intentionally slowed disaster relief efforts left me stunned. But this, via Feministing, really takes the cake:

"I couldn't describe how bad the authorities were - just little things like taking photographs of us, as we are standing on the roof waving for help, for their own personal photo albums, little snapshot photographs.

"At one point, there were a load of girls on the roof of the lobby of the hotel saying 'Can you help us?' and the policemen said 'Show us what you've got' and made signs for them to lift their T-shirts.

"When they said no, they said 'fine' and motored off down the road in their motorboat."

The quotes are from a Mersey (UK) man who was stranded, with his family, at the Ramada hotel in NOLA. There's a part of me that really hopes this is some kind of exaggeration, a fish-tale from a survivor. But there's another part that finds this sadly believable. What a disaster.