Class, Race and Looting: the Case of Katrina
As the following reports point out, economic recovery may be especially slow, since Louisiana and Mississippi are among the lowest in the nation as far as per capita income are concerned. Looking at all the photos of the disaster, it seems as if almost all of those homeless are black or poor or both. Interwoven throughout these articles (and they are mere samples of those that have been written lately) is the constant theme of the importance of class and race. Several have commented on the over-emphasis on “looting” by the mainstream press (which are invariably taken out of context and tinged with racism). Some of these are news reports, while others are commentaries.
Region's Recovery May Be Slow
Bill Sing
Los Angeles Times
September 1, 2005
Like other disaster-ravaged areas, Louisiana and Mississippi are expected to
eventually see massive rebuilding efforts that could boost their economic
growth.
But unlike Florida, which is undergoing a speedy recovery from an onslaught of
hurricanes last year, the two southern neighbors could find their revival much
slower and tougher.
That's because a recovery's speed and strength can depend on several factors,
including wealth, the condition of a disaster area's infrastructure, population
growth — and even presidential politics.
The area hit by Hurricane Katrina has few, if any, of these factors going for
it, economists said.
Florida's recovery from hurricanes last year was helped in part by the state's
relative affluence and its status as a battleground state in the presidential
election. The state is now adding jobs at a faster pace than the nation, thanks
partly to rebuilding efforts.
The San Francisco and Los Angeles areas bounced back from earthquakes in 1989
and 1994 in part because their key economic engines — including technology and
finance in the Bay Area and entertainment and trade in the Southland — were not
severely hampered.
But Louisiana and Mississippi have two of the nation's lowest per capita
incomes. And their economic engines — energy, ports and tourism — all suffered
massive blows.
"If you add it all up, it feels like Katrina will be the most economically
costly natural disaster in our history," said Mark Zandi, chief economist for
Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa.
President Bush acknowledged that Wednesday when he said, "We are dealing with
one of the worst natural disasters in our nation's history," and recovery will
take years.
Still, economic activity almost always picks up after a disaster, thanks to
rebuilding efforts supported by government aid and insurance, said Mark Vitner,
senior economist at Wachovia Corp., a banking company based in Charlotte, N.C.
Stronger growth won't be hard to achieve in Louisiana — its economy has actually
shrunk since 2000, he said.
But that doesn't mean a devastated region will end up better off, because a lot
of wealth gets wiped out, Vitner said.
"Rebuilding efforts do provide a lift to measurable economic activity, but what
we rarely see in the data is the immense permanent loss of wealth," Vitner said.
In the case of Mississippi and Louisiana, "the loss of wealth will severely
hinder the recovery efforts."
Among key factors that can determine the economic rebound from a disaster:
• Damage to a region's economic engines. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 inflicted
severe damage to certain parts of Miami, but didn't knock out the city's key
economic drivers, Zandi said.
The 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks hurt Wall Street's financial
infrastructure, but backups allowed trading operations to continue a few days
later, said Nariman Behravesh, chief global economist at Global Insight, a
consulting firm in Waltham, Mass.
No such luck with Katrina. Its economic victims of energy, trade and tourism
have no alternative systems to replace them.
"All three have been laid low and might remain off line for some time," Zandi
said.
• Damage to physical infrastructure. In last year's Florida hurricanes,
electricity in affected areas was knocked out for three to four weeks, but other
infrastructure was largely intact, Zandi said. "Once the power is up, things get
going pretty quickly," he said. The Los Angeles area suffered only a few highway
closures and temporary power outages after the 1994 Northridge quake.
No such mercy from Katrina. It appears to have knocked out many of the area's
major bridges, electrical systems and other key infrastructure.
• Affluence. Typically only 50% to 60% of disaster losses are insured, so
people often draw on their own finances to rebuild, Vitner said.
It helped that Florida is one of the nation's wealthiest states. That won't work
as well for Katrina's victims. Mississippi has the nation's lowest per capita
income, while Louisiana ranks 42nd, Vitner said.
"That means that folks who are underinsured or uninsured won't have their own
means to repair properties," Vitner said.
A lack of money also reduces victims' incentive to return and rebuild, he said.
After back-to-back hurricanes and floods in 1999 hit eastern North Carolina, a
relatively less affluent part of the state, many victims simply took their
government aid and moved to Raleigh and Charlotte, Vitner said.
Adding to the difficulties facing New Orleans: People are even less likely to
have flood insurance than other types of coverage, Vitner said.
• Availability of resources. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, the
nation's economy was coming out of a recession, leaving ample supplies of
unemployed construction workers and building materials, Vitner said.
That's not the case now. The nation's booming housing industry has produced
shortages of roofing material, cement and workers, Vitner said. "If you go to
Florida today, you'll still see thousands of homes with tarps over their roofs,"
he said.
• Population growth. A fast-growing state can draw on new residents to help
bail out victims. If victims lack insurance or money to rebuild, at least
somebody else will buy their property, Vitner said. But without newcomers, "the
property might sit on the market for awhile."
That could happen after Katrina. Louisiana's population is only growing 0.2% a
year, while Mississippi's, at 0.5%, isn't much faster, Vitner said. By contrast,
Florida's is ballooning by 1.9% a year. "Florida's population grows 10 times
faster than Louisiana's every year," Vitner said.
• Presidential politics. Florida was a battleground state in 2004, so
government aid was quick and generous, Zandi said.
"Nobody wanted there to be any stories that people weren't getting any help,"
Zandi said. Florida recovered nearly 100% of its Hurricane Ivan losses through
government aid and insurance — 50% to 70% is more typical in hurricanes or
quakes, Zandi said.
In fact, he said, the government now is trying to get some of its money back
from victims who allegedly applied for multiple relief loans or committed other
fraud.
By contrast, North Carolina in 1999 wasn't a swing state and President Clinton
wasn't running for reelection. He promised a water treatment plant, Vitner said,
but it was never built.
Scott Gold, Lianne Hart and Stephen Braun
Los Angeles Times
September 1, 2005
The city's police and emergency officials worked desperately Wednesday to
prevent complete social disintegration as widespread looting continued for a
second day and cresting floodwaters hid untold numbers of dead.
Though the flooding appeared to stabilize, 90% of New Orleans' homes were
underwater, officials said. Repair crews readied 20,000-pound sandbags to plug
gaping breaches in the city's levees, but officials bickered over the slow
progress.
Bus caravans started to move 23,000 exhausted Superdome refugees to shelter in
Texas. A few hundred people left Wednesday, and the full-scale evacuation was to
begin at midnight. On a stretch of interstate near the stadium, a mob of flood
victims began an anarchic march of their own, abandoning the ruined city.
Federal officials dispatched National Guard convoys and U.S. warships to the
Gulf Coast to aid in rescues and deliver supplies.
The immense scale of the disaster spawned after Hurricane Katrina struck Monday,
and the pressing burden of new emergencies, continued to threaten thousands of
the dispossessed in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, where survivors
scavenged for food and shelter and were at risk for dehydration as they waited
on rooftops to be rescued.
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin predicted that "at minimum, hundreds" and "most
likely thousands" of city residents lay in underwater graves. "We know there is
a significant number of dead bodies in the water," he said.
Despite the urgency of the situation for victims in need of rescue, Nagin
ordered the city's police force Wednesday night to discontinue such missions and
return to the streets to counter waves of looting that had turned violent.
"They are starting to get closer to heavily populated areas — hotels, hospitals
— and we're going to stop it right now," Nagin said. The mayor said 1,500 police
officers, nearly the entire department, were being redeployed on the city's
remaining stretches of dry land.
At flood-swamped Charity Hospital, looters with handguns forced doctors to give
up stores of narcotics. Wal-Mart gun racks and ammunition supplies were
stripped.
Thieves commandeered a forklift to smash the security glass window of one
pharmacy, fleeing with so much ice, water and food that they left a trail behind
them. Brazen gangs chased down a state police truck filled with food, and even
city officials were accused of commandeering equipment from a looted Office
Depot.
"It started with people running out of food, and you can't really argue with
that too much," Nagin said. "Then it escalated to this kind of mass chaos where
people are taking electronic stuff and all that."
The fraying conditions of life in the flood zones could be measured in the sighs
and short tempers of frustrated public officials. Nagin found a measure of hope
in the decision by Texas officials to house thousands of flood refugees in the
Houston Astrodome. But he turned grim as he echoed mounting reports from police
and National Guard troops who said bodies were floating in the waters.
Nagin said medical examiners were setting up a temporary morgue and would soon
begin a methodical search for those who drowned, trapped in bedrooms and attics
or carried by the currents.
A New Orleans television station reported that one woman waded through the
floodwaters, floating her husband's body downstream to Charity Hospital on a
door.
Nagin said officials would be able to fully deal with the crisis only when there
was "total evacuation of the city. We have to. The city will not be functional
for two or three months," he said.
The mayor added that residents would probably not be allowed back into their
homes for at least a month or two.
During another long day, rescuers concentrated on the living. Helicopters darted
over Chalmette Medical Center in inundated St. Bernard Parish, southeast of the
French Quarter, trying to evacuate more than 300 patients, medical staff and
refugees who clambered to the roof for safety. Other hospitals throughout the
city were on the verge of shutting down as supplies of generator fuel dwindled.
"The situation is grave," said Donald Smithburg, chief executive of the
Louisiana State University hospital system.
Two LSU hospitals in New Orleans "are desperately short of raw materials,"
Smithburg said. "We have no power, no water, no toilets, and we don't have fuel
to operate our generators…. We're simply out of juice. Now it boils down to
transporting the rawest materials, fuel, so we can buy another few hours or
another day."
More ruptures were found in the city's overwhelmed levees, but the swelling
floodwaters had finally leveled with the storm surges flowing from Lake
Pontchartrain. The Army Corps of Engineers planned to drop 20,000-pound sandbags
by helicopter over the porous dikes and to float in barges carrying massive
concrete highway barriers that will be wedged against the gaps.
Late in the day, the Corps appeared to alter its plans, saying crews would slice
notches in the tops of levees to allow water to flow out of the city and into
Lake Pontchartrain. The lake level is already receding — 2 feet since Tuesday —
and at the 17th Street Canal, they hope to wedge in sheet pilings to stem the
flow.
"That's the plan now," said Mike Rogers, director of programs for the
Mississippi Valley division of the Corps. "It can change," he added.
Four amphibious warships dispatched by President Bush were heading toward New
Orleans with stores of provisions, medical supplies and equipment to aid in
rescue efforts, medical treatment and even shelter for thousands of homeless
residents.
"Our first priority is to save lives," said Bush, who returned early to
Washington from vacation at his Texas ranch. "We're assisting local officials in
New Orleans in evacuating any remaining citizens from the affected area."
The armada sent to the Gulf Coast included the Bataan, which will conduct rescue
missions; four ships to direct disaster response; and the Comfort, a hospital
ship.
More than 10,000 National Guard troops from other states were also being
deployed, Bush said, joining 18,000 Guard personnel already stationed in the
area. Most were being used to patrol government facilities and aid police in
search missions and treatment of those brought to safety.
The Pentagon also authorized Adm. Timothy Keating, head of the Northern Command,
to lay plans for possibly deploying active-duty troops — a move that can be
ordered only by the president under the rarely used Insurrection Act.
Looters moved freely through New Orleans' shuttered shopping districts
Wednesday, wading through floodwaters with mounds of clothing, jewelry and
stolen guns. On the few spits of dry land, there were carjackings. One furious
city resident surrendered his pickup truck to a machete-wielding assailant.
Nagin acknowledged that there were too few officers to stop the crime wave.
"We are going to try to contain the looting," he said. "But we know that we are
not going to be able to stop it."
Federal authorities said they were investigating whether looters had struck at
Wal-Mart stores, stealing guns and ammunition that were then used for street
crimes and further escalated the looting.
Justice Department officials confirmed that they also were working with local
authorities to investigate cases of price-gouging in the New Orleans area and
other hurricane zones, including sales of gasoline and water at inflated prices.
Louisiana National Guard 1st Sgt. John Jewell said Guard snipers had been sent
in to flooded Charity Hospital to try to find looters who were seen racing
through the facility with pistols.
The Guard patrols were a welcome sight for police, who are "multi-tasking right
now," said New Orleans Police Capt. Marlon Defillo. "Rescue, recovery,
stabilization of looting, we're trying to feed the hungry."
Looters also swarmed through stores in the Mississippi coastal town of Gulfport,
where Hurricane Katrina demolished the city police station.
Across the numbed Gulf Coast states, 1.5 million people made do without
electricity, food, water and functioning toilets.
More than 60,000 people were reportedly left homeless in New Orleans. They slept
in the sun on the interstate near the Superdome, where they waited for the buses
that would take them to Houston and northern Louisiana.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry said many Superdome refugees would be housed temporarily
in the Astrodome, a former venue for professional football and baseball, until
other housing could be found. And their children, Perry said, would be welcomed
into Texas schools. "We're going to get through this together as one American
family," he said.
Inside the Superdome, where officials said one despairing man committed suicide
Tuesday by leaping from an upper ramp, the air reeked of urine, feces and sweat,
and the floor was puddled from roof leaks.
"People are trying to keep things clean," said Terry Broussard, 47, who moved
outside. "But it's getting worse and worse."
Thousands of lost people with nowhere to go began trudging in a march of
desperation west along Interstate 10.
Many came from the poorest neighborhoods of east New Orleans, streaming out of
several housing projects and the submerged 9th Ward.
Many milling refugees were turned away Wednesday when they tried to force their
way into the Superdome. But with its roof tattered by Katrina's winds and its
toilets overflowing, the stadium was being abandoned. "We cannot accommodate
anyone else in the Superdome," Nagin said.
"It's very hot. There is no shade. We need to get provisions to them," he said
Wednesday night. "They have zero."
Nagin said he hoped the evacuation of the Superdome would take only a day.
Refugees were to be bused to six locations, including Lafayette, La., as well as
Houston.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Coast of crises
The Gulf Coast's miseries continue to mount as the toll from Hurricane Katrina
becomes more apparent. Damage information as of 5 p.m. PDT Wednesday:
Coastal damage
Areawide
Early estimates of $25 billion in damage.
Rescue agencies are sending medical and search teams, 1,700 trucks carrying
millions of liters of water and more than 100 generators.
Louisiana
Thousands of people may have been killed in the hurricane, according to New
Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin.
As many as 100,000 people remain in New Orleans.
New Orleans has no drinkable water and no electricity.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency may house people on cruise ships, in
tent cities and mobile home parks.
3,000 people are rescued by boat and air.
Mississippi
Along the coastline, nearly every structure from the beach to half a mile inland
is destroyed.
An estimated 110 storm-related deaths are reported.
About 1 million people are reported without power.
In Biloxi, the historic home of Jefferson Davis is destroyed.
In Jackson County, an estimated 14 people are killed and one-third of the
131,000 residents lose their homes.
Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi is decimated by the hurricane's floodwater and
wind.
Alabama
Some 375,000 people are without power.
Georgia
Damaged pipelines send gasoline prices soaring to as much as $3.55 a gallon, and
even $4.99 a gallon in Atlanta, according to some reports.
Sources: ESRI, TeleAtlas, GlobeXplorer, Earthsat (1999), Times sources,
Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNN
Graphics reporting by Joel Greenberg
The storm that ruptured the roof of the Louisiana Superdome is also putting a dent in the nation's economy. Even as rescuers pushed Wednesday to contain a mounting death toll and help stranded residents in the ravaged Gulf Coast, hurricane Katrina's financial impact was also emerging as an issue that reaches far beyond Louisiana levees or Alabama inlets.
Whether that cost proves to be relatively modest -- shaving perhaps 0.5 percentage points off of an economy growing at a 3.3 percent pace -- or a more severe shock depends on one key factor: energy.
The Bush administration moved Wednesday to open the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help ease looming supply shortages. With 10 percent of the nation's refining capacity, and pipelines through which much of America's domestic and imported oil passes, the region has an outsized oil and gas role that makes this storm's impact much broader than that of other major hurricanes, or even the combined wallop of four hurricanes in Florida last year.
"This is more significant," says economist John Silvia of Wachovia Corp., a banking giant in the region. And if supply disruptions prove difficult to fix quickly, "it's a very big complication."
The prospect of $3-a-gallon gasoline, rising airline ticket costs, and soaring winter heating bills is accompanied by Katrina's more local effects: insured losses that could exceed the record (in current dollars) of $21 billion set by hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Indeed, even as it ripples through the economy in coming weeks, this storm's effects could be big enough to spur longer-term changes at a time when the intensity of tropical storms appears to be rising. These issues range from the local -- how to better fortify New Orleans in its below-sea-level vulnerability -- to whether the nation's energy infrastructure is too geographically concentrated and whether disaster planning is hampered by incomplete forecasting of risks.
The storm left hundreds of thousands homeless in the region, at least 100 dead in hardest--hit Mississippi alone, and homes damaged by floods and winds well inland from Tennessee to Georgia. Estimates of insured losses go as high as $25 billion, although many experts believe the total will come in lower.
The Gulf region accounts for only about 3 percent of US economic output, but financial markets are focused on its much greater role in energy production and processing. Stocks crept higher in early trading Wednesday as oil prices retreated because of the government's decision to make an unspecified amount of oil available from its strategic reserve.
Before the announcement, prices had surged above $70 a barrel. Light, sweet crude for October delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange fell to $69.55 a barrel, down 26 cents from Tuesday's settlement price. Still, the government's move does not remedy destruction to refineries that churn out much of the unleaded regular and premium grade used in the United States. That damage, the extent of which is still being assessed, is expected to drive up gas-pump prices.
Katrina's effect on America's gross domestic product are mere guesswork at this point. The government reported Wednesday that in the second quarter of this year, GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, down from a 3.8 percent pace at the beginning of the year.
Global Insight, an economic forecasting firm based in Lexington, Mass., offered a "best" and "worst" scenario for Katrina. In the best case, oil prices stay at $70 or so per barrel for a few weeks, gasoline tops $3 for a few months, and the nation's economic growth is reduced by 0.5 percent to 1 percent for the year's second half.
In Global Insight's pessimistic projection, oil could soar above $100 a barrel for a month, gas-pump prices could exceed $3.50, and economic growth could fall to nearly zero by the fourth quarter.
Beyond the immediate damage, it's possible that Katrina could permanently alter consumer prices for things like insurance and gasoline, Mr. Silvia says. "Retail prices have to rise," he explains, if energy companies invest in new refineries (none has been built in the US for three decades) or if insurers reassess the likelihood of major storms. A high hurricane level over the past decade is seen by many as cyclical, but one recent assessment found that global warming, too, is playing a role in a rising intensity of storms traceable over the past 30 years.
"If you get a storm like this every 20 years," instead of every 100 years, "you're going to have to price that in," says Silvia. The questions of risk assessment go beyond insurance companies. A disaster such as Katrina has billions of dollars in indirect but very real impacts that aren't captured in tallies of insured losses, notes Frederick Krimgold, director of the disaster risk reduction program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg.
In Katrina's case these include disruptions of businesses, from restaurants to fishing and shipping. They include the ordeal of residents who may go without phone service for days or electricity for weeks. Workers lose income, and state and local governments lose tax revenues, in part because some properties such as boats or homes no longer exist to be taxed.
"You have a cascading pattern of economic consequences," says Dr. Krimgold. "We tend to underestimate the cost of these events, and we tend to underinvest in their mitigation."
He's not sure if the Katrina experience will change that, but it is surely bringing home the potential magnitude of these indirect impacts.
New Orleans didn't face the full fury of the storm, yet the city is for now virtually uninhabitable. Flooding has affected everything from electricity to potable water supplies.
"They built those levees for an 18-foot storm surge," Krimgold says. With a better understanding of the costs of a breach in the levees, officials could have spent a bit more "to build those levees for a 25-foot storm surge."
How to better protect New Orleans has already been a concern in Washington in recent years, but a multibillion-dollar cost has complicated the debate. Katrina promises to refocus the discussions.
Mark Trumbull is a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor.
***********
Katrina Exposes Racism
Lee Sustar ; August 31, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=8625
DECADES OF OFFICIAL neglect, racism and the impact of global warming magnified the destructive impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and other parts of the South.
The mainstream media focused most on the big-money property losses--for example, the heavily damaged casinos on the Mississippi coast that took a direct hit from Katrina, and the tourist hotels in the French Quarter in New Orleans. But beyond the media spotlight are countless others who don’t have sufficient insurance--or any insurance at all--to rebuild their lives.
As in all "natural" disasters, a far-from-natural logic asserted itself: Those who had the least to begin with stood to lose the most.
Thus, in the Gulf Coast cities of Mississippi that took a direct hit when the hurricane came ashore, the big hotels were left standing, though heavily damaged. Other structures--even whole neighborhoods and communities--were erased from the map. "This is our tsunami," said one person, drawing a comparison with last December’s disaster around the rim of the Indian Ocean.
A last-minute shift in the path of the storm sent Katrina east of New Orleans, prompting city officials to think that they had avoided a catastrophe. But the day after the hurricane hit, conditions began to deteriorate rapidly. Parts of the levee system that protects the below-sea-level city from flooding gave way--apparently to the north, along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain--leaving up to 80 percent of New Orleans underwater.
With electricity and communications out, little was known about New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods, other than that they--predictably--bore the brunt of the disaster. Rumors spread that corpses could be seen floating in the floodwaters. No one had electrical power--nor much chance of getting it for days, and probably weeks.
The worst may be yet to come. The waters that inundated New Orleans were polluted by garbage and debris. And when the floods finally recede, they will leave behind a breeding ground for disease.
The impact of Katrina was visible even before the storm hit land, most obviously in the images of evacuees lined up to take shelter inside New Orleans’ Superdome--mostly poor and African American people forced to go for refuge to a football stadium for lack of a car or want of money.
"By afternoon [the day before the hurricane struck], the Superdome descended into sweaty chaos," the Miami Herald reported. "About 30,000 refugees eventually arrived under the vigilance of the Louisiana National Guard. The frustrated line to get into the stadium stretched the length of several football fields. People sucked at empty water bottles, lugged their belongings in plastic grocery bags, fanned themselves in the humid air, brought their beer and cigarettes and braced for what could be a two-day stay as torrents of rain started soaking them about 4 p.m."
Once inside the Superdome, the evacuees were ordered to stay in their seats after curfew. There were insufficient numbers of toilets, and when electrical power failed, the generators could support lights, but not air conditioning. The storm ripped several holes in the roof, and those below had to scramble away from the rain that poured in.
When the levee system failed and New Orleans started flooding after the hurricane passed, the Superdome became an island surrounded by hip-deep water, polluted by oil and debris. Conditions inside the stadium continued to "deteriorate," as press reports put it--at least two people had died inside the Superdome within the first 36 hours.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
While New Orleans is inherently vulnerable to hurricanes--much of the city lies below sea level--governments at all levels refused to take necessary precautions to minimize risk or ensure a safe and orderly evacuation procedure.
The levee system, crucial to the survival of a city surrounded on three sides by
water, hasn’t been upgraded to withstand a Category 4 or 5 storm. Thanks to
George Bush and his "war on terror." During the 1990s, following floods that
killed six people, the federal government established the Southeast Louisiana
Urban Flood Control Project (known as SELA). The Army Corps of Engineers was put
in charge of implementing the project and spent nearly $500 million shoring up
levees and building pumping stations.
"But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained," wrote a blogger on the Philadelphia Daily News Web site who goes by the name Attytood. "Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security--coming at the same time as federal tax cuts--was the reason for the strain…In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to [a] Feb. 16 , 2004 article in New Orleans CityBusiness."
According to Attytood’s research, though 2004 was one of the worst hurricane seasons in history, the federal government this year imposed "the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history."
Why the neglect? Though it is best known as a tourist destination, New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., with a population that is 67 percent African American. In the parish, or county, of Orleans, 34 percent of households live below the federal poverty line--an issue that was the focus of a new community coalition at a meeting just a few days before Katrina hit.
The scale of the threat has been well known for years. Oceanographer Joe Suhayda created a detailed model of the impact of a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans, showing that much of the city could be plunged under 20 feet of water, causing tens of thousands of casualties. And in 2004, Hurricane Ivan barely missed the city, again highlighting the urgent need for a viable evacuation plan.
"Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less--mainly Black--were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath," activist Mike Davis wrote of the evacuation plans for Ivan. "New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had 10,000 body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city’s poorest or most infirm residents."
Global warming is almost certainly to blame for the increasing strength and frequency of hurricanes, Davis told Socialist Worker last year. A number of climatic factors are at work. For example, something known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which involves variations in air pressure and sea temperatures, is a contributing factor to the above-normal number of hurricanes. But global warming caused by air pollution has probably made matters worse.
"Sea temperatures in the tropical Atlantic are higher than normal, thus supplying more energy to hurricanes," Davis said. "This can’t be directly attributed to global warming, but an intensification of the NAO is exactly what you might expect. Every North Hemisphere summer now seems to guarantee climate disaster of one kind or another."
But climate disaster can be profitable--if you happen to be a stockholder or executive for a major U.S. oil company. The oil giants were set to use the excuse of Katrina to hike gas prices still further beyond the record pump prices set last month.
The scale of the devastation resulting from the hurricane won’t be known for weeks. But we know already who will suffer the brunt of this tragedy--the poor in New Orleans and all along the Gulf Coast.
***********
By Tomas Alex Tizon
Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2005
SEATTLE — The multitude of anguished black faces telecast from New Orleans over
the last six days has stirred a national discussion in living rooms, chat rooms
and radio talk shows.
The central questions seem to be: Why are most of Hurricane Katrina's victims
black, and does the color of their skin have any bearing on authorities'
response, which has been criticized as slow?
In a radio interview Friday on hundreds of stations across North America,
Beverly Wright, director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at
Xavier University in New Orleans, summarized the concerns this way:
"I am very angry, and I really, really believe that [the crisis] is driven by
race," Wright said. "People can say what they want, but when you look at who is
left behind, it is very disturbing to me."
Wright was referring to the thousands of predominantly lower-income blacks still
stranded inside New Orleans. Media images have been dominated by scenes of dead,
dying and crying blacks, their desperation and pleas for help sometimes laced
with anger.
News reports have also described looters and armed gangs. There have been
sporadic shootings and physical confrontations among the stranded.
The violence — and the fear of it — has slowed efforts to bring aid to the
neediest parts of the city.
New Orleans is one of the poorest large cities in the United States.
Its population is 67% African American, about half of whom live below the
poverty line.
Most middle-class blacks, like most white residents, were able to leave the
city.
Some say the hurricane has exposed a racial fault line between blacks and whites
in America.
In general, whites tend to see the situation one way, blacks another, said David
Wellman, sociology professor at UC Santa Cruz and co-author of the book
"Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (University of California
Press).
"Many whites will focus on the lawlessness of what's going on in New Orleans,"
Wellman said. "Many blacks will focus on the desperation of the victims, the
fact that they're being neglected and ignored."
Wellman said the racial fault line operated the same as a geological fault line:
"They're invisible until there's an earthquake."
He said evidence of the racial divide was found in studies that showed 65% of
white Americans do not believe that racial discrimination exists, and 75% of
black Americans believe it does.
Ward Connerly, chairman of the conservative think tank American Civil Rights
Institute, in Sacramento, said it was simply coincidence that most of the
hurricane victims on television are black.
Connerly said the hurricane happened to hit New Orleans, which happens to be
predominantly black and poor.
To seek out deeper, more insidious reasons for the crisis in New Orleans is to
focus on the wrong thing, Connerly said.
"I wish we were not talking about race at all. It's a needless distraction," he
said. "We all ought to be praying and crying about the people whose lives have
been totally ripped asunder. Those who are misbehaving are doing it out of
desperation. It just so happens those who are doing it are black, but the city
of New Orleans has a lot of black people."
Connerly said he was disappointed with those African American leaders and whites
who were accusing the government of being lackadaisical in its response. The
underlying charge is that the sluggish response is because of racism.
"The people accusing the government of racism are looking for someone to blame.
They can't blame God, so they're going to blame the government or the president.
Or racism," Connerly said. "So many blacks have been conditioned to view
everything through the prism of race that it's easy to come to that conclusion.
But for the black leaders who are blaming racism, shame on them."
Damu Smith, executive director of the National Black Environmental Justice
Network, said on a Friday broadcast of the "Democracy Now!" radio program that
this was the exact time to point fingers — while the attention of the nation was
fixed on the issue.
Smith avoided the word "racism" during the program, but he implied that policy
decisions made by state and federal governments opened the way for catastrophe
to reach the lives of the region's poorest people.
"I want to focus on the federal assets because that's what was needed to be
brought to bear in this situation, and they were not brought to bear," Smith
said. "So mostly the poor and black poverty-stricken people of New Orleans and
Louisiana and Mississippi are paying the price for our government's neglect."
One blogger, John Bambenek, said in a Friday entry on Blogcritics.org that
accusing government officials of racism or incompetence steered the search for
true answers in the wrong direction. The real blame, he said, lies in something
as mundane as bureaucratic ineptitude.
The "Kyoto [climate pact] had nothing to with this. Racism had nothing to do
with this. Iraq had nothing to do with this. Federal spending had nothing to do
with this," Bambenek wrote. "Poor and/or nonexistent planning and poor execution
had everything to do with this."
Wellman, the sociology professor, said there was another way to interpret the
situation in New Orleans. He said sociologists had found for years that social
structures replicated themselves after natural disasters: The most vulnerable
people in society are the most vulnerable people during and after a disaster.
The issue is whether the government took enough measures to protect the most
vulnerable people in society.
Wellman said in this case it appeared the government did not, and some of it had
to do with institutional racism.
Bruce Gordon, president and CEO of the National Assn. for the Advancement of
Colored People, said from his Baltimore office that he would very much like to
chime in on the discussion of race because he had a lot to say.
But the timing isn't right.
"Right now, all of our time and energy are going to saving lives of people in
New Orleans," Gordon said. "The race aspect is a little bit of a distraction,
but let me say that once we get ourselves square on this, and once our people
are safe and secure, there's no question we're going to be all over this issue."
*******
How the Free Market Killed New Orleans
By Michael Parenti
September 03, 2005
The free market played a crucial role in the destruction of New Orleans and the death of thousands of its residents. Armed with advanced warning that a momentous (force 5) hurricane was going to hit that city and surrounding areas, what did officials do? They played the free market.
They announced that everyone should evacuate. Everyone was expected to devise their own way out of the disaster area by private means, just as the free market dictates, just like people do when disaster hits free-market Third World countries.
It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby affects an optimal outcome for the entire society. This is the way the invisible hand works its wonders.
There would be none of the collectivistic regimented evacuation as occurred in Cuba. When an especially powerful hurricane hit that island last year, the Castro government, abetted by neighborhood citizen committees and local Communist party cadres, evacuated 1.3 million people, more than 10 percent of the country's population, with not a single life lost, a heartening feat that went largely unmentioned in the U.S. press.
On Day One of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina, it was already clear that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of American lives had been lost in New Orleans. Many people had "refused" to evacuate, media reporters explained, because they were just plain "stubborn."
It was not until Day Three that the relatively affluent telecasters began to realize that tens of thousands of people had failed to flee because they had nowhere to go and no means of getting there. With hardly any cash at hand or no motor vehicle to call their own, they had to sit tight and hope for the best. In the end, the free market did not work so well for them.
Many of these people were low-income African Americans, along with fewer numbers of poor whites. It should be remembered that most of them had jobs before Katrina's lethal visit. That's what most poor people do in this country: they work, usually quite hard at dismally paying jobs, sometimes more than one job at a time. They are poor not because they're lazy but because they have a hard time surviving on poverty wages while burdened by high prices, high rents, and regressive taxes.
The free market played a role in other ways. Bush's agenda is to cut government services to the bone and make people rely on the private sector for the things they might need. So he sliced $71.2 million from the budget of the New Orleans Corps of Engineers, a 44 percent reduction. Plans to fortify New Orleans levees and upgrade the system of pumping out water had to be shelved.
Bush took to the airways and said that no one could have foreseen this disaster. Just another lie tumbling from his lips. All sorts of people had been predicting disaster for New Orleans, pointing to the need to strengthen the levees and the pumps, and fortify the coastlands.
In their campaign to starve out the public sector, the Bushite reactionaries also allowed developers to drain vast areas of wetlands. Again, that old invisible hand of the free market would take care of things. The developers, pursuing their own private profit, would devise outcomes that would benefit us all.
But wetlands served as a natural absorbent and barrier between New Orleans and the storms riding in from across the sea. And for some years now, the wetlands have been disappearing at a frightening pace on the Gulf coast. All this was of no concern to the reactionaries in the White House.
As for the rescue operation, the free-marketeers like to say that relief to the more unfortunate among us should be left to private charity. It was a favorite preachment of President Ronald Reagan that "private charity can do the job." And for the first few days that indeed seemed to be the policy with the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina.
The federal government was nowhere in sight but the Red Cross went into action. Its message: "Don't send food or blankets; send money." Meanwhile Pat Robertson and the Christian Broadcasting Network---taking a moment off from God's work of pushing John Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court---called for donations and announced "Operation Blessing" which consisted of a highly-publicized but totally inadequate shipment of canned goods and bibles.
By Day Three even the myopic media began to realize the immense failure of the rescue operation. People were dying because relief had not arrived. The authorities seemed more concerned with the looting than with rescuing people. It was property before people, just like the free marketeers always want.
But questions arose that the free market did not seem capable of answering: Who was in charge of the rescue operation? Why so few helicopters and just a scattering of Coast Guard rescuers? Why did it take helicopters five hours to get six people out of one hospital? When would the rescue operation gather some steam? Where were the feds? The state troopers? The National Guard? Where were the buses and trucks? The shelters and portable toilets? The medical supplies and water?
Where was Homeland Security? What has Homeland Security done with the $33.8 billions allocated to it in fiscal 2005? Even ABC-TV evening news (September 1, 2005) quoted local officials as saying that "the federal government's response has been a national disgrace."
In a moment of delicious (and perhaps mischievous) irony, offers of foreign aid were tendered by France, Germany and several other nations. Russia offered to send two plane loads of food and other materials for the victims. Predictably, all these proposals were quickly refused by the White House. America the Beautiful and Powerful, America the Supreme Rescuer and World Leader, America the Purveyor of Global Prosperity could not accept foreign aid from others. That would be a most deflating and insulting role reversal. Were the French looking for another punch in the nose?
Besides, to have accepted foreign aid would have been to admit the truth---that the Bushite reactionaries had neither the desire nor the decency to provide for ordinary citizens, not even those in the most extreme straits. Next thing you know, people would start thinking that George W. Bush was really nothing more than a fulltime agent of Corporate America.
-------Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), both available in paperback. His forthcoming The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press) will be published in the fall. For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.
*******
The Wholesale Looting of the Gulf Coast
Brian Dominick; September 02, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8639
If you are more interested in and disgusted by rumors of civilian "troublemakers" on the streets of New Orleans and other Gulf Coastal communities than in the massive failings of the United States government before, during and since this tragedy began, consider a career in journalism.
The real criminals are sitting in positions of authority: the president, the director of FEMA, and the hundreds of congresspersons cutting their excessive vacations short to pat one another on the back as they pass emergency funding provisions for the hardly-operative relief efforts centered in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The brazen cruelty with which the government deprived the New Orleans area of funding it needed to rebuild wetlands and reinforce its long-threatened levee system is the place to look the very minute the last survivor is out of harm’s way (NewStandard, 9/1/05). But the simply reprehensible slowness of the emergency response effort should be the focal point of our outrage right now.
The government and media have tried to concentrate our attention on what appear to be anecdotal -- and often unverifiable -- stories about isolated incidents of violence, allegedly on the part of some surviving New Orleanians (NewStandard, 9/1/05). They insist on casting the incidents in the "established narrative" style hard-news reporters are supposed to reserve for overwhelmingly proven facts, and in terms that generalize the incidents such that they sound overwhelmingly representative of the situation on the ground.
For instance, CNN's Anderson Cooper and other correspondents have cast the stories like so: "Snipers are shooting at emergency workers who try to evacuate hospitals." There are reports of one such incident -- relayed by witnesses, but because of the uncertainty of such situations, by no means verified as strictly accurate perspectives.
The reporters have no idea the extent to which these incidents are actually taking place, and they actually admit as much – sometimes -- after their initial onslaught of rumor and innuendo. To portray them as representative, while hours and hours of news footage shows no signs whatsoever of anything that could be called real violence on the part of civilian survivors, is truly indefensible.
Nevertheless, instead of posing hard questions to government officials on Wednesday – a full two days after the storm struck – about where needed relief was, correspondents and anchors repeatedly harped on whether the government should send in ground troops to “restore law and order.” Almost as if on cue, the mayor and governor ordered police and national guard personnel away from search and rescue to rein in the civilian lawbreakers.
When the story of New Orleans became about the "monstrous" people taking inanimate objects from vacated retail stores, the media and state found themselves with a comfortable, familiar mission: reporting and governing in the interest of the wealthy.
Expose and prosecute the retail looters, lest the story turn to the wholesale looters…
Sure, they offered some leeway, at first, to those who restricted their non-monetary acquisitions to food and water -- though a number of reporters couldn't resist ranting against people who took clothing and shoes, wondering aloud why a young man might possibly need shoes or clean clothes in a flood zone.
But when people whose shitty, low-wage jobs were literally decimated and their homes wiped out caught a glimpse of merchandise they could not afford even in the best of times -- how dare they lay claim to televisions and jewelry!
In doing so, we are informed, these civilian troublemakers are spoiling the emergency response and putting tens of thousands of their fellow New Orleanians in danger.
How dare anyone let greed put people at risk!
(Now, where again is that missing third of the Louisiana National Guard, with most of its heavy equipment? And where went that money that was supposed to fund Army Corps of Engineers efforts to build up those hurricane defense systems? We seem to have misplaced it around the same time we gave members of Congress and their friends whopping tax breaks and needed money for overseas adventures.)
The garbage that passed for journalism nearly all week, in the interest of fulfilling our society's newfound, media-induced addiction to "breaking news" coverage, should be appalling enough. But the fact that authorities are using these anecdotal reports as an excuse for their sheer failure to respond in more than a barely helpful manner -- and for consciously ordering the postponement of rescue and relief efforts "until law and order can be restored" -- actually one-ups the bad reporting.
What we do know if we watch CNN or other news outlets is that tens of thousands of people are gathered as peaceful (if outraged) mobs in places that are safe enough for camera crews to film unscathed, yet nary a bottle of water or a first-aid kit had been so much as tossed out the side of a helicopter as late as Thursday morning.
The winds died down over the Gulf region on Monday. Why have emergency operations been so scarce and so ineffective that people are dying in the streets of New Orleans for lack of basic medical attention? How is it that "troublemakers" are to blame -- let alone to be the focus of blame -- when the troublemaking apparently began only after days passed with no sign whatsoever that relief was on its way?
Last I heard, snipers are barely able to obstruct killing operations in a single Iraqi neighborhood. How are they able to paralyze an entire citywide rescue effort?
When a government knowingly decides to let those without means to evacuate ahead of a natural disaster bear the brunt of the effects of a disaster – having offered no significant help before or after the storm passes -- that government stands blameworthy for the entire outcome. The wind damage, the flooding, and yes any pillaging and violence that occur in the aftermath -- to the extent these things impact the lives of people who were unable to help themselves, the government should be held accountable. Not just financially, but morally.
A moral accounting would include a reevaluation of the structures and leadership that fostered a situation of neglect and deprivation. A full evaluation of the government's priorities, including the racial and economic motives that gave way to those priorities, is in order.
The sheer failure of official agencies at nearly every level warms the core of this colossal tragedy. Katrina gave days of warning -- really a final warning following up years of doomsday predictions from climatologists. Lake Pontchartrain and its levees and the missing wetlands gave years of advance notice as well, by way of engineers and others sounding alarms to little avail.
Even those mystery snipers and roving gangs, if they really exist in any numbers, are a product -- more than a cause -- of the failure of those whose most basic job should be the safeguarding of the public. Sometimes scapegoats are morally reprehensible, but those who scapegoat are worse still.
Brian Dominick is an editor at The NewStandard.
********
By Scott
Gold
Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2005
NEW ORLEANS — Forty-four troops pressed together in their truck, swaying as one
at every bump and turn like reeds in a river.
As they plunged into the dark water engulfing the business district of New
Orleans, their wake pushed the body of a woman onto the steps of the Superdome.
The floodwater had ripped her pants down to her knees. She was facedown in the
muck, a red ribbon still tied neatly around her graying hair.
The troops, members of an elite Special Response Team from the Louisiana Army
National Guard, were the first convoy out of what was rapidly becoming a massive
military staging ground.
Their mission, simply, is to turn New Orleans into a police state — to "regain
the city," 1st Sgt. John Jewell said.
The truck lurched through the streets, past buildings burning unabated and MPs
in gun turrets. When they stopped to gear up for their arrival at the New
Orleans Convention Center, where more than 15,000 people had been living in
squalor since Katrina, these words echoed — for the first time, one would
imagine — through the intersection of Poydras Avenue and Carondelet Street:
"Lock and load!"
"Sixteen in the clip!" one Guardsman shouted, a common refrain used to indicate
that rifles are fully loaded.
But when they arrived, they did not find marauding mobs. They did not come under
fire. They found people who had lost everything in the storm and, since then,
their dignity.
The troops were part of the Superdome team that came to town before the
hurricane. For days, they had been cut off from news reports, sleeping and
working among the refugees and the vicious rumor mill at the Superdome.
Their Superdome duties left them with a terrible image of the city. They knew
that out on the streets, a police officer had been shot in the head, that
looting was widespread, that snipers were taking shots even at boaters trying to
rescue victims from rooftops and attics.
Now assigned to patrol the streets, they headed for the New Orleans Convention
Center, in the city's central business district. Many had wads of tobacco in
their bottom lip and emitted long, dense streams of spittle into the streets
below.
Their mission was to establish a command post at the center, which officials
have increasingly turned their attention to, particularly as the evacuation of
the Superdome nears its end. They would then build a staging area to bring in
food and water. Finally, they would send in teams to seize control of a massive
and lawless facility.
The troops braced for the worst.
"Is this the calm before the storm?" one asked as they rolled through the
streets.
"There are a lot of gangs out here in the water," said Sgt. 1st Class Maris
Pichon, a 26-year veteran of the National Guard who served in Afghanistan last
year. "This is not going to be a cakewalk."
Two trucks pulled beside them, one carrying water and one a massive pile of
ready-to-eat military meals in boxes.
"Tell me they're not letting the food go in before the troops," one Guardsman
said.
"That's called bait," another said.
They pulled into a parking lot next to the convention center in full battle
mode. They spilled over the sides of the truck, formed a tight circle and began
walking outward, stepping over the detritus of the refugees. Dirty underwear. A
CD that included the song "Thank God I'm a Country Boy."
A troop carrier rolled over an empty water bottle, popping it like a balloon.
The troops yanked their weapons to a firing position before realizing what it
was.
"No civilians in this parking lot!" a sergeant shouted. "Hold your perimeter!"
No one came at them but a nurse. She was wearing a T-shirt that read "I love New
Orleans." She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when
she saw the guns.
"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted. "We have dehydrated kids! One kid with
sickle cell!"
Another storm victim, Cory Williams, 50, a respiratory therapist spending his
third day at the convention center, greeted the troops as they came up the
stairs.
He had ridden out the storm at his 9th Ward house. On Tuesday morning, when the
flooding began in earnest, 6 feet of water came inside in five minutes, he said.
He tried to stay on top of a car in the garage but the water continued to rise,
so he made a run for it, dragging several neighbors out behind him on an
inflatable raft as he swam, then waded, through the water.
He made it several miles west, toward downtown and higher ground, then watched
police stop at gunpoint a Ryder van that had been hot-wired by thieves. The
officers told the men inside that they had to stop looting and must try to get
people out of the neighborhoods, that people were dying.
"Believe it or not, those dudes got the message," Williams said.
The thieves began ferrying people out of the devastated neighborhoods to the
east. The police had deputized looters.
"They had to," Williams said. "There was no other way to get people out."
The thieves dropped him off at the convention center, where he stayed until the
troops arrived.
Though there have been reports of shootings and several rapes, the crowd at the
convention center does not appear to have degenerated into the kind of chaos and
violence seen at the Superdome.
Physically, however, the masses at the center might have been in worse condition
than those at the stadium, which was at least prepped as a storm shelter.
People at the convention center had received a single deposit of food and water,
dropped from a helicopter, since Katrina's strike. The drop caused a riot;
Williams, an Army veteran, said he feared the people clambering onto the pallet
of food as it neared the ground were going to pull the helicopter into the
parking lot. The craft never returned.
Children slept on laps and on the ground. There was an elderly emphysema
patient. A diabetic. The boy suffering from sickle cell anemia, his eyes puffy
and his skin yellowish-brown.
The troops arrived Friday, ready for anything.
"You've got to do something," said the nurse in the New Orleans T-shirt.
"We'll get you some help as soon as some people get here," Lt. James Magee said
as the troops arrived. "OK?"
Inside, human waste covered the floor. An elderly woman tumbled out of her
wheelchair and landed on the ground. Her housedress was soiled. A man had poured
fruit punch into an industrial-size bottle of floor cleaner and was drinking it
with a straw.
"If you kept a dog in an environment like this, they would arrest you for animal
cruelty," said Cindy Davis, 39, the nurse, who had been separated from her group
while caring for a patient and stranded at the convention center three days ago.
"It's like a cesspool."
Frankie Estes, 80, said she was glad to finally see the troops. It was a glimmer
of hope. Friday night marked her fifth night sleeping on the sidewalk in front
of the center.
"I haven't had food or water for three days," she said. "I didn't know if I was
going to make it."
By Friday night, dinner had been served to a seemingly endless line of refugees.
Helicopters had begun descending on the convention center, airlifting the most
critically ill. The troops had found their mission. It just wasn't what they
thought it was going to be.
*******
Hurricane Katrina – View From Asia
By Andre Vltchek
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-09/03vltchek.cfm
More than 8 months ago, one of the worst natural disasters in a human history destroyed substantial part of a province under Indonesian control - Aceh. Although exact number will never be known, close to 250 thousand people lost their lives during the under-ocean earthquake and consequent tsunami; tens of thousands died in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand combined. It is now clear that tens of thousands more people died due to inadequate response of Indonesian government and military, stranded in remote areas with no food, drinking water, shelter and medical care.
Your correspondent went to Thailand and then to Aceh; to cover extend of disaster, almost immediately accusing Indonesian authorities of disorganized, chaotic reaction; of deployment of religious "volunteers" instead of professionals. He accused Indonesian military of sabotaging the aid, of stealing food and water desperately needed for those who managed to survive. In one of his reports he concluded that most of the people in Aceh "died because they were poor": would such a disaster strike in Singapore or in other wealthy nation instead of in Indonesia where tens of millions live in appalling shantytowns, there would be only a fraction of the casualties.
It is now September 2nd, and the cameras of almost all important international news networks are zoomed on the desperate men, women and children, begging for help, abandoned under the brutal sun with almost no food, water and shelter; in one of the greatest historical cities of The United States of America - New Orleans.
Today, one of the reports by Reuters starts with these words: "U.S. troops poured into New Orleans of Friday with shoot-to-kill orders to scare off looting gangs so rescuers can help thousands of people stranded by Hurricane Katrina, find the dead and clean up the carnage." But during the previous days, cameras recorded "looting" by desperate men and women, breaking into the supermarkets and stores, simply trying to survive. Of course there are gangs terrorizing the people in New Orleans area; of course there is shooting and anarchy; but is it the whole story? If the help would arrive sooner; there would be obviously no need for looting and no chance for gangs to organize.
After flying over New Orleans (no doubt great sacrifice and expression of solidarity), President Bush spoke about restoring order. It was obvious that defending private property was higher on his mind than suffering of his fellow citizens. He didn't explain what good is rotting food in partially submerged supermarkets and convenience stores anyway. One wonders whether this is a new and powerful message from his administration: no matter what, the private property is untouchable and defending it is of greater importance than saving human lives.
Why did it take US troops so much time to enter New Orleans? Where was all that heavy, high-tech equipment used all over the world, mainly for shameful deeds? On September 1st, official argument went that the aircraft carrier and several war ships just left East Coast, and it will take them some time to reach Gulf of Mexico. But why didn't they leave earlier; right away; few hours after extend of disaster became known?
Eight months ago reaction of the Republic of Indonesia was similar: while it takes just a few minutes, at most hours, for its military to blow sky-high known positions of the rebels in Aceh or Papua; after the tsunami, for many days, there was suddenly almost no hardware available for the rescue missions. There was "not enough ships in the area"; soldiers and police on the ground were "too overwhelmed". Government refused to take any decisive action, instead relying on the glorification of the "volunteers".
On the other hand, Thai Royal Air Force and navy mobilized almost immediately after tsunami damaged great parts of its Southwest coast. Helicopter crews, some risking their lives, were flying thousands of sorties, trying to save people from the high seas and from affected areas. I encountered several pilots close to the airport of Phuket, late at night, their eyes red from lack of sleep; grabbing something fast to eat before returning to the air - exhausted but determined.
On Thursday, the whole world watched as buses were shuttling people from the Dome in New Orleans (where almost everything collapsed; from air conditioning to the toilets) to Astrodome in Huston, Texas (where thousands of victims of the hurricane were expected to sleep on the military beds and share just a few toilets originally designed for the athletes). It was hard to avoid asking: is this really the best the US government can do for those who are experiencing severe trauma; for those who lost everything? This is not Aceh but Houston, Texas, the center of the US oil industry and space program, with hundreds of hotels and motels spread all over the area!
In Thailand, dozens of hotels (and private homes) opened their doors to survivors and to the family members (local and foreign) who were searching for their loved ones. Was it lack of solidarity of corporate America that prevented this from happening in the United States? And if it was, why didn't the government force these hotel doors open for refugees - through an emergency decree? Or is this just another proof that private sector and private property is sacred; more sacred than human life? Should it be taken as a warning: that from now on things will become this way?
For several days, there were countless images of the Coast Guard helicopters rescuing residents in the flooded areas from their rooftops and from their damaged homes. Helicopters were dropping baskets, pulling victims on board. Most of those rescued did have home as they lived in the residential areas. In the same time, we were learning that people elsewhere were starving, literally dropping dead in the middle of the streets in the centre of New Orleans.
New Orleans is no doubt a segregated city. While it is surrounded by posh neighborhoods (inhabited mainly by the whites), the city center and several suburbs are homes to minorities. Some people living there are poor; others very poor. Could it be possible that even during the tragedy rescue operations are treating differently rich and poor, black and white? Is there really a lack of helicopters to airlift everyone; to bring them promptly to safety, to give them decent temporary accommodation, private bathrooms and showers?
No matter what are the reasons, response to the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico was inadequate, scandalously slow; unforgivable. The mightiest military power on earth couldn't (or refused to) deploy soldiers right after the tragedy; it stood-by as people were dying in the centre of New Orleans which was just a few hours after the hurricane definitely reachable from the air. The government of the United States failed.
Months ago, your correspondent mistakenly claimed that what happened in Aceh could never happen in any developed country. The government which would show such incompetence would be forced to resign. His analyses were proven wrong by recent events in his own country.
In Washington, there are no calls for impeachment and it seems that no heads will roll as a result of what this outrageous failure which took lives of many men, women and children. Criticism in the US mainstream press is half-hearted and when it appears, it is diluted by the stories (always so much in demand and on offer) about the heroism and self-sacrifice of the rescue workers. It may appear that although some mistakes were made, society is still governed by the sound principles; that in essence everything is correct.
In reality almost nothing went right for the citizens of New Orleans, especially for the poor; and nothing is going right even as these words are being written. White bags are covering corpses of those who recently died on the streets of New Orleans; those who died after the disaster - long after. Men, women and children are spread on the ground, many almost motionless, in the center of the city. They are hungry and thirsty; they have no place to wash and to urinate. And they are supposed to stay where they are; they are not suppose to "loot" and if they, by any chance, decide to break into some store and take food and water, there are orders to shoot and kill them!
Andre Vltchek is a writer, political analyst and filmmaker and he can be reached at: andre-wcn@usa.net
********
The National Guard Belongs in New Orleans and Biloxi. Not Baghdad
Norman Solomon; August 31, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=8623
The men and women of the
National Guard shouldn’t be killing in Iraq.
They should be helping in New Orleans and Biloxi.
The catastrophic hurricane was an act of God. But the U.S. war effort in Iraq is a continuing act of the president. And now, that effort is hampering the capacity of the National Guard to save lives at home.
Before the flooding of New
Orleans drastically escalated on Tuesday, the White House tried to disarm
questions that could be politically explosive. “To those of you who are
concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be, we are,”
President Bush said.
“We’re in place, we’ve got equipment in place, supplies in place, and once the
-- once we’re able to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those
good folks in the affected areas.”
Echoing the official assurances, CBS News reported: “Even though more than a third of Mississippi’s and Louisiana’s National Guard troops are either in Iraq or supporting the war effort, the National Guard says there are more than enough at home to do the job.”
But after New Orleans levees collapsed and the scope of the catastrophe became more clear, such reassuring claims lost credibility. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday: “With thousands of their citizen-soldiers away fighting in Iraq, states hit hard by Hurricane Katrina scrambled to muster forces for rescue and security missions yesterday -- calling up Army bands and water-purification teams, among other units, and requesting help from distant states and the active-duty military.”
The back-page Post story added: “National Guard officials in the states acknowledged that the scale of the destruction is stretching the limits of available manpower while placing another extraordinary demand on their troops -- most of whom have already served tours in Iraq or Afghanistan or in homeland defense missions since 2001.”
Speaking for the
Mississippi National Guard, Lt. Andy Thaggard said:
“Missing the personnel is the big thing in this particular event. We need our
people.” According to the Washington Post, the Mississippi National Guard “has a
brigade of more than 4,000 troops in central Iraq” while “Louisiana also has
about 3,000 Guard troops in Baghdad.”
National Guard troops don’t belong in Iraq. They should be rescuing and protecting in Louisiana and Mississippi, not patrolling and killing in a country that was invaded on the basis of presidential deception. They should be fighting the effects of flood waters at home -- helping people in the communities they know best -- not battling Iraqi people who want them to go away.
Let’s use the Internet today to forward and post this demand so widely that the politicians in Washington can no longer ignore it:
Bring the National Guard home. Immediately.
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com
**********
By Alan Zarembo
Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2005
NEW ORLEANS — Tim King paddled his metal skiff to the doorstep of his house and
pushed open his front door for the first time since he had fled three days
earlier.
He shoved aside a black, moldy sofa and lumbered through the sludge-coated
living room.
A boat is the only way to get around in much of the city's 9th Ward, one of New
Orleans' poorest neighborhoods — and among the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina.
A friend had loaned King his fishing rig and dropped him on the eastern side of
the Industrial Canal Bridge, where St. Claude Avenue descends into thick, black
water and the stench of sewage-tainted air fills your nostrils.
In his back pocket, King carried a little insurance.
"I ain't going nowhere without this pistol, trust me," said King, a 43-year-old
truck driver.
It was one of the few things he was able to grab on Tuesday night, when a rescue
crew pulled him out of his attic with his pit bull, Scully.
King had stayed as long as he could. As the puddles in his living room grew into
a muddy pool, the street became a raging river. The water almost reached the
ceiling.
His girlfriend had gone the night before in another rescue boat, but those
rescuers had refused to take the dog, so King refused to go.
Now he was returning to a nightmare.
The water had receded to his front stoop, but the storm had rearranged his
furniture. The stereo cabinet and television were toppled, and VHS tapes
protruded from the slime.
King went for his three bass guitars in the kitchen. Water spilled out when he
opened the first case.
The refrigerator lay on its side and insulation streamed down from the ceiling.
King filled two garbage bags with muck-covered clothes he was hoping to wash and
loaded them into the boat, along with the guitars, and took another look at the
slime-coated Harley-Davidson he had been overhauling in the back room.
He struggled to shut the front door.
It didn't matter. There was little here worth stealing. And besides, the streets
on this side of the bridge were mostly deserted.
One block away, Rubin Etienne, 57, stood at the bow of another boat, poling his
way down the street here in this eastern portion of the city.
He had lived all week on the tiny boat, borrowed from a neighbor who had heeded
the early storm warnings and fled.
Etienne stayed, first in his one-story house, then in the boat as the waters
rose. As the winds peaked, he crawled from the boat into his attic. When it was
over, he plied the streets for any signs of life.
He said he saw little but could hear people "hollering for help."
Now the only sound was the ripple of water. Etienne was taking Charles Lewis,
25, into the flood zone. The names of Lewis' three young children were tattooed
on his arms and chest, and he wanted to make sure they and their mother had
gotten out.
The two men propelled themselves past floating garbage, power lines dangling
into the water and cars flooded to the headrests.
The house was boarded up, and when he called his family's names, he said, there
was no response.
Strangers until Friday afternoon, Lewis and Etienne shared a cigarette.
Etienne said he would have to rewrite a letter he had started composing to his
Vietnam buddies before the storm hit. The first letter was soaked. And now he
had a story to tell.
He had ferried about a half-dozen people to the bridge.
Civilization began on the other side. But it was grim.
Many people evacuated from the hardest-hit areas and wound up several blocks
west at the Charles Drew Elementary School.
One evacuee died there Tuesday afternoon, possibly of a heart attack. Nobody
knows for sure.
At least 100 people remain there.
They sleep on desks, under signs displaying the discipline policy, the morning
routine and vocabulary words.
They cook on a butane stove outside the library, slowly depleting the cafeteria
supplies of thawing hamburgers and chicken. Basketball hoops poke up through the
water out back.
Drying shoes line the windowsills.
Many of the newly homeless sit on the front step, watching joy riders dodge
fallen trees.
Some rooms have light bulbs connected to car batteries.
Life is better here than at the teeming Superdome.
Still, many have felt neglected, since the authorities have yet to deliver water
or supplies.
"They dropped us off and they said they would come back," said Hattie Leslie,
56, who arrived with her daughter and granddaughter. "They never did."
"They took care of the tsunami," she said. "What about us?"
They also didn't come for the body.
Shawn Smith, a 33-year-old refugee at the school, helped carry the dead man down
to a basement classroom. There the body lies, arched on his back over a metal
television cart.
*********
By Héctor Tobar
Los Angeles
Times
September 3, 2005
MEXICO CITY — Around the world, the irony was too deep to ignore.
In teeming Mexico City, the newspaper Ovaciones took a break from its daily diet
of kidnappings and gore to splash across its front page images of an American
city reduced to "starvation, refugees … and helicopters under fire."
"Just Like Haiti!" the banner headline screamed.
From Beijing and Havana, as well as Paris and Berlin, there were offers of
assistance to the most powerful nation on Earth as it struggled to cope in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Pledges of help came from more than 50
countries, including oil from Venezuela, generators from Japan and cash from
Australia. Others offered boats, aircraft, medical supplies and blankets.
Even impoverished Sri Lanka made a $25,000 donation, a gesture in recognition of
Americans' response to last year's tsunami.
But the expressions of sympathy were mixed with a worldwide sense of amazement
and disgust at the failure of American authorities to effectively deal with the
crisis.
After describing the plight of two Brazilians caught up in the fetid drama at
the Louisiana Superdome in an editorial titled "Collapse," the Jornal do Brasil
in Rio de Janeiro said New Orleans had been reduced to a "tribal area."
"To see homeless dying of thirst and lack of medical care in the middle of the
street escapes comprehension," the paper said. "The world asks how [the
Americans] were able to take food and water so quickly to remote Indonesia and
cannot save New Orleans."
In Europe, some commentators saw links between the disaster and unpopular U.S.
policies in Iraq. Germany's environment minister associated the catastrophe with
the Bush administration's position on global warming. Others saw a racial
dimension to the tragedy.
"The fast and secure evacuation has been of white people," said the German
leftist daily Die Tageszeitung. "Poor and black people stayed behind. It is as
if time had stopped between the racial unrest of the '60s and today."
Some of the most heartfelt expressions of sympathy were from Southeast Asia,
where memories of the tsunami — another surge of angry waters that took tens of
thousands of lives — are still fresh.
"The people of Aceh and Nias learned from the tsunami last year, and we are also
grateful for the American people's generosity to help us here," said Kuntoro
Mangkusubroto, Indonesia's director of tsunami reconstruction. "Perhaps we can
find some lesson learned that we can share with the people of America."
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said his government was dispatching 20
disaster experts to the region and contributing $7.5 million to the Red Cross.
"There should not be an assumption that because America is the wealthiest and
most powerful country in the world, this isn't a major challenge and a major
crisis," he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.
Other nations have offered help during previous U.S. emergencies, such as the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But never in recent history has there been such an
outpouring, said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.
The Bush administration has offered mixed signals on whether it would accept
such aid. In an interview with ABC on Thursday, President Bush said the U.S. was
not seeking foreign assistance. "This country is going to rise up and take care
of it," he said.
That statement prompted an angry editorial Friday from the Jamaican newspaper
the Gleaner: "Sometimes even the high and mighty need to realize that we all
need each other and that they would not lose face were they to accept some
tangible help from others who have been the beneficiaries of their generosity in
the past."
But on Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed "the heartfelt
thanks of the president, the United States government and all Americans" to
those who had offered support. She said she was "deeply touched" by Sri Lanka's
gesture.
"We've turned down no offers," she said.
A few offers of aid were not likely to be accepted.
In a nationally televised speech in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez said he was
prepared to send 2,000 troops to New Orleans to help quell looting. Chavez is an
ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and the Bush administration has accused the
Venezuelan president of destabilizing the region.
Chavez also proffered $1 million in fuel aid and criticized the American relief
effort. "As more information comes out now, a terrible truth is becoming
evident: That government doesn't have evacuation plans," he said.
Castro offered to send 1,100 doctors from Cuba.
Around the world, people heard that unlucky compatriots had been trapped in the
disaster zone.
Student Darya Grigorenko, speaking by telephone Wednesday with a Moscow
television station, told of being stuck on the upper floors of a New Orleans
hotel with about 30 other Russians. "A National Guard helicopter is flying over
the city, but they can't help us," she said.
The Mexican TV network Televisa interviewed a Mexican doctor marooned amid
scenes of horror in a New Orleans hospital.
"We've seen people dying, women kidnapped," Rafael Rojas said, his voice
quavering. "But the truth is, we're better off than most people…. We drank some
vegetable juice yesterday."
Suddenly he began to weep. "Ayúdenos, por favor!" he cried out — "Help
us, please!"
Afterward, Televisa anchor Joaquin Lopez Doriga opined: "The government of the
United States is bankrupt…. It can't deal with the disaster."
Some critics of American foreign policy saw the anarchy in New Orleans as a kind
of karmic retribution for the perceived sins of the Bush presidency.
"A modern metropolis which collapses under water and in chaos is a cruel show
for a champion of security like Bush," Gerard Dupuy wrote in the Paris daily
Liberation.
In China, some questioned why any nation would feel the need to provide disaster
relief to the United States.
"Why should we donate money to the Americans?" asked an anonymous poster in an
Internet chat room. "We have so many farmers who don't have enough to eat…. We
should solve our own problems first."
In Baghdad, Hakim Khafaji, an unemployed former soldier, said he felt sympathy
for the U.S. victims despite his anger about the U.S. troop presence.
"Our dispute is with the U.S. government, which has treated us like second-class
humans," he said. "But we are friends with the people of all nations. We don't
like to see a nation or people subjected to a natural disaster, especially of
this magnitude."
Everyday life in Baghdad, other Iraqis noted, bears some resemblance to the
horrors of flooded New Orleans.
"In America, their whole life depends on electricity, for elevators, for doors,
for factories," said Maan Dohi, a Baghdad policeman. "On the other hand, Iraqis
are used to having the power cut off and living a hard life."
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Henry Chu in Rio de Janeiro; John Daniszewski in London; Petra Falkenberg in Berlin; David Holley in Moscow; Mark Magnier in Beijing; Richard C. Paddock in Singapore; Sebastian Rotella in Paris; Edmund Sanders in Baghdad; Carol J. Williams in Kingston, Jamaica; and Paul Richter in Washington and special correspondents Dinda Jouhana in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Claire Rocher in Paris.
**********
Richard A. Serrano and
Nicole Gaouette
Los Angeles Times
September 4, 2005
WASHINGTON — For years, Washington had been warned that doom lurked just beyond
the levees. And for years, the White House and Congress had dickered over how
much money to put into shoring up century-old dikes and carrying out newer flood
control projects to protect the city of New Orleans.
As recently as three months ago, the alarms were sounding — and being brushed
aside.
In late May, the New Orleans district of the Army Corps of Engineers formally
notified Washington that hurricane storm surges could knock out two of the big
pumping stations that must operate night and day even under normal conditions to
keep the city dry.
Also, the Corps said, several levees had settled and would soon need to be
raised. And it reminded Washington that an ambitious flood-control study
proposed four years before remained just that — a written proposal never put
into action for lack of funding.
What a powerful hurricane could do to New Orleans and the area's critical
transportation, energy and petrochemical facilities had been well understood. So
now, nearly a week into the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, hard
questions are being raised about Washington officials who crossed their fingers
and counted on luck once too often. The reasons the city's defenses were not
strengthened enough to handle such a storm are deeply rooted in the politics and
bureaucracy of Washington.
With the advantage of hindsight, the miscues seem even broader. Construction
proposals were often underfunded or not completed. Washington officials could
never agree on how much money would be needed to protect New Orleans. And there
hung in the air a false sense of security that a storm like Katrina was a long
shot anyway.
As a result, when the immediate crisis eases and inquiries into what went wrong
begin, there is likely to be responsibility and blame enough for almost every
institution in Washington, including the White House, Congress, the Army Corps
of Engineers and a host of other federal agencies.
For example, Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps commander, conceded Friday that the
government had known the New Orleans levees could never withstand a hurricane
higher than a Category 3. Corps officials shuddered, he said, when they realized
that Katrina was barreling down on the Gulf Coast with the vastly greater
destructive force of a Category 5 — the strongest type of hurricane.
Washington, he said, had rolled the dice.
Rather than come up with the extra millions of dollars needed to make the city
safer, officials believed that such a devastating storm was a small probability
and that, with the level of protection that had been funded, "99.5% of the time
this would work."
Unfortunately, Strock said, "we did not address the 0.5%."
Corps officials said the floodwaters breached at two spots: the 17th Street
Canal Levee and the London Avenue Canal Levee. Connie Gillette, a Corps
spokeswoman, said Saturday there never had been any plans or funds allocated to
shore up those spots — another sign the government expected them to hold.
Nevertheless, the Corps hardly was alone in failing to address what it meant to
have a major metropolitan area situated mostly below sea level, sitting squarely
in the middle of the Gulf Coast's Hurricane Alley.
Many federal, state and local flood improvement officials kept asking for more
dollars for more ambitious protection projects. But the White House kept scaling
down those requests. And each time, although congressional leaders were more
generous with funding than the White House, the House and Senate never got
anywhere near to approving the amounts that experts had said was needed.
What happened this year was typical: Local levee and flood prevention officials,
along with Sen. Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), asked for $78 million in project
funds. President Bush offered them less than half that — $30 million. Congress
ended up authorizing $36.5 million.
Since Bush took office in 2001, local experts and Landrieu have asked for just
short of $500 million. Altogether, Bush in his yearly budgets asked for $166
million, and Congress approved about $250 million.
These budget decisions reflect a reality in Washington: to act with an eye
toward short-term political rewards instead of making long-term investments to
deal with problems.
Vincent Gawronski, an assistant professor at Birmingham Southern College in
Alabama who studies the political impact of natural disasters, said the lost
chances to shore up the levees were a classic example of government leaders who,
although meaning well, clashed over priorities.
"Elected politicians are in office for a limited amount of time and with a
limited amount of money, and they don't really have a long-term vision for
spending it," he said.
"So you spend your pot of money where you feel you're going to get the most
political support so you can get reelected. It's very difficult to think
long-term. If you invest in these levees, is that going to show an immediate
return or does it take away from anything else?"
Gawronski said flood control projects do not have the appeal of other endeavors,
such as cancer research and police protection. At the same time, Congress
habitually approves billions of dollars for highways and bridges and other
infrastructure that politically benefits individual congressmen.
Gawronski called it inexcusable for the United States to have been "gambling so
long" that the old levee system in New Orleans would hold.
"Disasters are often low probability, high consequence events, so there's a
gamble there," he said. "It's not going to happen on my watch, there's the
potential it might, but I'll bet it won't."
In the case of New Orleans and flood control, another factor was at work: the
reputation of the Corps of Engineers. Over the years, many in Washington had
come to regard the Corps as an out-of-control agency that championed huge
projects and sometimes exaggerated need and benefits.
The Corps began as a tiny regiment during the Revolutionary War era; it now
employs about 35,000 people to build dams, deepen harbors, dig ditches and erect
seawalls, among other things. But critics say some projects are make-work
boondoggles.
In 2000, Corps leaders were found to have manipulated an economic study to
justify a Mississippi River project that would have cost billions. The agency
also launched a secret growth initiative to boost its budget by 50%. And the
Pentagon found in 2000 that the Corps' cost-benefit analyses were systematically
skewed to warrant large-scale construction projects.
As a result, said a senior staffer with the Senate Appropriations Committee who
spoke on condition of anonymity, requests by the Corps for flood control money
were especially vulnerable to budget cutting. "A lot of people just look at it
as pork," said the staffer.
The Bush administration's former budget director, Mitch Daniels, was known as an
aggressive advocate for Corps reform who cast a skeptical eye on its budget
requests.
"The Army Corps of Engineers has a very large budget, and it has grown a lot
over recent years," Daniels, now the governor of Indiana, said. "To the extent
there's been any limitation of [the Corps'] budget, it has to do with previous
tendencies to build marinas and things that don't have much to do with preparing
us for disaster."
The Bush White House maintains it never ignored the security needs of the Gulf
Coast. "Flood control has been a priority of this administration from Day One,"
said White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
He said hundreds of millions of dollars were spent in the New Orleans area in
recent years for flood prevention, and he said the failure of the levees was not
a matter of money so much as a problem with drawing the right plans for the dike
work and other improvements.
"It's been more of a design issue with the levees," he said.
Other administration officials said there were not enough construction companies
and equipment to handle all the work that had been proposed.
John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works, who has
responsibility for the Corps of Engineers, said: "It's true, we cannot
accomplish all of our projects at full funding all the time. I think that's true
of any agency, particularly any public works agency, but we had a lot of work
underway in New Orleans, and I was personally supportive of it.
"As a native of Louisiana," Woodley said, "I understand the problems associated
with flooding in New Orleans. I don't think there's any lack of support for
flood control projects in New Orleans, particularly within the context of other
projects around the country."
On Capitol Hill in recent years, several Democrats warned that more money should
be marked for the protection of New Orleans. For instance, in September 2004,
Landrieu said she was tired of hearing there was no money to do more work on
levees.
"We're told, can't do it this year. Don't have enough money. It's not a high
enough priority," she said in a Senate speech. "Well, I know when it's going to
get to be a high enough priority."
She then told of a New Orleans emergency worker who had collected several
thousand body bags in the event of a major flood. "Let's hope that never
happens," she said.
But in May 2004, then Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he had
visited the levees as a guest of Landrieu and believed them adequate.
He praised the ancient water pumps for keeping the waters from cascading into
the city, proclaiming them "these old, old pumps that hadn't been changed since
before the turn of the century, that still keep New Orleans dry."
"It was as clean as a restaurant," he added. "These big old pumps work."
Today, eight of those 22 pumps are underwater and inoperable.
Over the years, several projects either were short-changed or never got started.
The Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project was authorized by Congress
after a rainstorm killed six people in May 1995. It was to be finished in 10
years, but funding reductions prevented its completion before Katrina struck.
The Army Corps of Engineers did spend $430 million to renovate pumping stations
and shore up the levees. But experts said the project fell behind schedule after
funding was reduced in 2003 and 2004.
The Lake Pontchartrain Project was a $750-million Corps operation for new levees
and beefed-up pumping stations. Because of funding cuts, it was only 80%
complete when the hurricane hit.
The project that never was started was an examination of storm surges from large
hurricanes. Congress approved the study but did not allocate the funds for it.
In May, Al Naomi, the Corps' senior project manager for the New Orleans
district, reminded political and business leaders and emergency management
officials that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane was always possible. After that
meeting, Walter Brooks, the regional planning commission director, came away
shaking his head.
"We've learned that we're not as safe as we thought we were," he told the local
newspaper, the Times-Picayune.
Last week, Corps commander Strock defended past work, saying, it was his
"personal and professional assessment" that work in New Orleans was never
underfunded. What he meant by that, he explained, was that no one expected such
a large disaster before all the renovations and other improvements could be
completed.
"That was as good as it was going to get," he said. " We knew that it would
protect from a Category 3 hurricane. In fact, it has been through a number of
Category 3 hurricanes."
But, he said, Katrina's intensity "simply exceeded the design capacity of the
levee."
Asked whether in hindsight he wished more had been done, Strock said: "I really
don't express surprise in my business. We don't sit around and say 'Gee whiz.' "
*********
Of Disasters, Natural and Otherwise
Tim Wise
September 02, 2005
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=8664
The city I called home for ten years is dying: a slow, agonizing, all-too-terribly public death, before the eyes of the nation and the world.
It is dying, as are far too many of its people, because our national leaders only have the stomach, or the talent (or both) for killing, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, but not for rebuilding eroding levees, nor rescuing people, as is desperately needed now. Fallujah? Oh yeah, we can do that. We can drop bombs and break things. New Orleans? Well, now wait a minute, we can't go in there. It might be dangerous.
And while New Orleans will certainly be re-born, let there be no doubt of her imminent demise at present. The Birthplace of Jazz, home of the nation's best food, most amazing architecture and many of its kindest people is headed for the status of a graveyard, in which will be buried not only tens of thousands of human souls, but businesses, entire neighborhoods, even a culture. Gone.
If you thought New Orleans was haunted before Hurricane Katrina, stick around. The dead will soon own every inch of it.
Children and old folks are perishing on national television; on streets I have walked a thousand times. People from the poorest sections of New Orleans are hanging on by the slimmest of threads: people from communities I have been in hundreds of times. People I know.
Bodies are floating in the streets; others are laid out on dry land, covered by blankets to provide them with what little dignity one can salvage in times such as this. Babies are dying of thirst; the elderly for lack of medicine.
Yet Congress took four days to come back from their vacation to arrange for an emergency aid bill. People who rushed back to work late one night not too long ago so they could save the life of Terry Schiavo--who couldn't even feel pain--because life is so precious to them, couldn't manage to hustle it back to D.C. for four days to help save the dying in New Orleans, who unlike Schiavo can indeed feel their own pain: every ache, every infection, every single bit of it. People who, unlike Schiavo are mostly poor and mostly black, and who provide less political capital one supposes for the so-called pro-life movement, than the persistently vegetative or the run-of the-mill fetus.
And even when they did return, they only allocated a little more than $10 billion to relief efforts. Ten billion dollars: merely a fraction of what our nation has spent to bomb and strafe and occupy Iraq, and a mere drop of piss in the ocean compared to what this nation forked over to bail out the Savings and Loan industry when it was looted by rich white guys.
Oh, and speaking of white people and looting.
To hear an awful lot of folks tell it--like several on forum boards like the one at nola.com--looting is a black thing, what with supposed gangs of armed men roaming the streets of the city, stealing big screen TVs and guns, all due to their savagery, their lack of values, their moral depravity. Apparently, in their world, white people don't loot. Not the S&L bandits, not Ken Lay and his buddies at Enron, not the crooks at Halliburton: never. Only the black and poor, and this they know because Fox News, and for that matter CNN, the networks and most every other media outlet told them so, by way of image after image of looters demonstrating a so-called break with civilized norms of behavior.
In the chat rooms you can spend only a few minutes before being assaulted by yet another bloodthirsty know-nothing, calling for the shoo