This news is now a week or so old. Hurricane Katrina came down on the Big Easy with a gale’o’fury and, with levees breeching at multiple points, New Orleans drowned. Some 80% remains under water, and drying it out will take months and months. In the meantime its population is displaced, industries ruined, employment lost, houses gone, possessions vanished, and all sorts of other unpleasantness that happens in disasters such as this.
But the worst aspect of what happened was the people left behind. Many could not afford to leave ahead of the storm, lacking the money or a car to do so. Some 20,000 went to the Super dome and took shelter there – directed to that location by emergency workers.
Somehow they were forgotten. It was revealed today that those who sheltered there were forgotten for over four days. Four days without food, water, in mind numbing humid heat (40 degrees inside), with no government protection or assistance. It became a hell hole. A dark, fetid pit of human despair. People died from basic needs of sustenance and from violence – with murder and rape witnessed by many.
Whatever comes out of this, I’m guessing that this will be held up as the example of what can happen when society frays, and when a government lacks resources and direction.
With the population of New Orleans around 70% African American, and with black Americans being in the poorer social strata, they represented almost all the people trapped at the Super dome. 20,000 African Americans forgotten by their government.
Great mention was made of armed gangs terrorizing the submerged remains of the city. And of course great mention was made of looters, and that the looters were black. But as Jesse Jackson pointed out, many of those looting were not looting for enrichment, but looting to survive – with what few white Americans and tourists that remained, along with some of the police, forced to do likewise.
There’s this old adage that a society is but three meals away from anarchy. I’m guessing this is sort of what happened here. Many of the state’s resources were apparently in Iraq which did not help matters. There’s also tales of military assets nearby sitting idle for what of direction that did not come, and overburdened police quitting, and even two cases, suiciding by their own weapons.
Comment was made by the US head of FEMA that Katrina was the perfect storm, and that the destruction would not have been lessened by whatever modifications they had made to the levees that protected a fragile city. That may be the case, but it seems on balance to have also been a perfect f_ck up by relief agencies and those charged with protecting the public.
Heads are going to roll. Or are they? I suspect with so many fingers in the pie, no one finger will get the smack.
America rallied for those who died in S11. And the families affected received a substantial payout, with white-collar workers protected by a multiple series of insurance policies and company benefits. Their houses were left intact. Not in New Orleans.
This has been declared the worst natural disaster in US history. And I don’t doubt it. But it’s how they recover, and how they look after those that lost everything, that will define them as a great nation.
I hope they measure up. But with so many resources committed elsewhere, and with the largest budget deficit in US history, it’s going to be pushing shit up hill for a long, long time.
And Bush may actually have to reinstate the taxes he lifted off the rich.
Will he? I doubt it.
I like to think Oz is prepared for a mega-destruction event. We survived Cyclone Tracey, but Darwin was a small town. The Canberra bushfires were terrifying to go through, and I wasn’t even threatened living in the north, but our destruction was mostly at the fringes of suburbs – the wind changing just in time to prevent wholesale loss of entire suburbs. Sydney has experienced a number of fire scares in the past decade thanks to the drought, and it is only by luck that they have escaped a Canberra scenario.
I was thinking of writing a blog about Katrina and the way the entire thing has been handled by the US authorities, but the truth is that my thoughts are all so jumbled up on the whole thing that I couldn't think of anything coherent to add.
ReplyDeleteI just don't get how a government can be SO disorganised! Can you imagine if we'd had several days warning in Canberra before the bushfires? It would've been luxury compared to what we got. Afterwards, the only people that tried to loot were generally caught by other citizens.
Of course, every second Australian doesn't have a gun. And we didn't leave people for days without assistance either.
Unbelievable.
Worse than the response is going to be what happens afterward. We don't have any sort of social safety net worth speaking of in the US. Most of the poor couldn't afford insurance on their houses, and even if they could most people in the US don't know that hurricane insurance doesn't protect against flood damage -- and technically, the damage in NO was flood damage -- so few people have both.
ReplyDeleteAs for the government disorganization, look back about a decade to how FEMA responded to disasters during Clinton's presidency. The difference is night and day.
What you're really seeing in New Orleans is the utter failure of the modern US consevative movement. Sycophancy, nepotism, ideology trumping reality, and the gutting of government services.
I don't get the media's characterisation of the storm's victims as largely black, and the looters as largely black. That's racialisation of the issue right there. The people who could not or did not leave New Orleans were largely *poor*, because they didn't have cars. The looters were largely *poor*, because they're less likely to have a convenient week's worth of tinned food in the cupboard at home. And the mad behaviour - the non-survival-related looting, the shootings and rapes, are probably related to the very high crime rate in New Orleans (I read that the murder rate there is about six times that of Boston, which is a similarly-sized city). You can say that this or that is about black people. I say it's about people. Most needing help, and some needing arrest. Sure the poverty rate among african-americans is higher than the median, and african-americans are disproportionately represented among those stuck in New Orleans as a result. But that's not the same thing as government at any level going "Screw 'em, they're black."
ReplyDeleteI also don't get all the disbelief from people about how dreadful it all is and why isn't it fixed already. It's a big effin' mess. It was a big effin' storm, that hit a city which had levees and whatnot built for a maximum storm smaller than Katrina. The city is flooded, the whole region is flooded, and the three highways into the city - the primary means of evacuating people and providing aid - are severely flood-effected, with water on the roads and bridges washed out. Being the most powerful nation doesn't make every city immune to the vagaries of nature. And being the most powerful nation doesn't provide the magical ability to "fix" disasters in a week. It takes planning (which seems to have been done, but not entirely acted on), preparation, patience, and persistence. We're still waiting on the last two.
I'm terribly impressed by the way that whenever there is a disaster, however well it's handled - and nothing is ever handled *really* well - there always seem to be accusations of incompetence. There should always be an after-review, there are always improvements to be made. But most of the coverage on any western disaster now always seems to be whose fault it was. Blame the storm first.
And Sam Jooky, I think the primary failures seem to have been at the Mayoral and Governoral levels in New Orleans and Louisiana. Actually implementing the city's evacuation plan would have been a good start. And the city's only been rated for a Cat3 hurricane for maybe 10 years. Anything more was considered too expensive, or impossible to reach agreement on.
Hmm. valid points. It was a failure across all levels. It was a disaster waiting to happen. And the local/state efforts were severely lacking.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, it was a nasty, kick arsed storm, that smacked into the US with a power beyond that of which man can make (no terrorist could have done that much damage unless they'd had a nuke).
But, that being said, the US has endured disasters before. Witness Hurricane Andrew (which not as bad, was a similiar event). Now it was 12 years ago, but I don't recall anything then about failures of the federal government in getting relief to the right people.
And while 20k people being sent to the Superdome instead of being evacuated was a mistake, why, oh why, did they not get assistance to them in four days. I know relief efforts are a complex, difficult process, but there would be basic levels of response - like getting supplies to concentrations of people. It seems they failed on that level. And note that the right in the US are already pointing the finger the state's way ... who happen to be governed by Democrats.
Stand by for a shit fight.