Hurricane Katrina Exposes Racism And Inequality

[Ayinde]

"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."

Full Article...
http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-sustar010905.htm

[kristine]

Blind to History

What They Should Have Learned from a Hurricane Named Ivan

By ELI STEPHENS

Let's start with a quote:

"The Superdome is not a shelter. If we were to lose power, if we were to lose plumbing facilities, if a storm were to hit and create flooding in the area; the Superdome would not be a desirable place to be."

Something somebody said last week? Nope. Something said on September 23, 2004 by a spokesperson for the Superdome, shortly after Category 4 hurricane Ivan hit the Gulf Coast.

Twice recently, I've mentioned the experience of Cuba in dealing with that hurricane (which was a Category 5 when it hit Cuba) - 1.3 million people, more than 10% of the population, evacuated under the direction and with transportation provided by the government, not a single person dead, compared to 18 killed in Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and 70 more in the Caribbean.

I decided to dig a little into this a provide a little more detail. Here's one interesting tidbit from the Cuban experience. I'm sure we've all noticed the difficulty the U.S. is having evacuating people from New Orleans due to all the water on the roads. An insurmountable problem? Hardly:

"Amphibious tanks were deployed to evacuate people from floodwaters caused by torrential rains."

Anyone want to speculate on whether the U.S. has more amphibious tanks than Cuba?

Here's what happened in New Orleans less than a year ago:

Orleans looks for a better plan for those who can't evacuate

"When thousands fled the city last week to get out of Ivan,s way, Gladys and Walter Elzey stayed behind. It wasn,t that they didn,t want to evacuate; they couldn,t.

"'Number one, we didn,t have any money and didn,t have anywhere to go,' said Gladys, who added that they also didn,t have a car.

"The Elzeys are two of approximately 80,000 residents in Orleans Parish who had no way to get out of the city and with the Superdome restricted initially to special needs patients only they had no where to go inside of the city.

"In Orleans mass transit isn,t a viable option for everyone because there aren,t enough busses to get everyone to the shelters in a timely fashion.

"There appears to be no easy answer, but officials will try to tackle the problem to at least have a plan before the next storm heads this way."

Yeah, let us know how that's working out.

Here's another followup story to Hurricane Ivan:

Ivan exposes flaws in N.O.'s disaster plans

"Those who had the money to flee Hurricane Ivan ran into hours-long traffic jams. Those too poor to leave the city had to find their own shelter - a policy that was eventually reversed, but only a few hours before the deadly storm struck land.

"New Orleans dodged the knockout punch many feared from the hurricane, but the storm exposed what some say are significant flaws in the Big Easy's civil disaster plans.

"'They say evacuate, but they don't say how I'm supposed to do that,' Latonya Hill, 57, said at the time. 'If I can't walk it or get there on the bus, I don't go. I don't got a car. My daughter don't either.'

"Advocates for the poor were indignant.

"'If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature,' said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU.

"It's always been a problem, but the situation is worse now that the Red Cross has stopped providing shelters in New Orleans for hurricanes rated above Category 2. Stronger hurricanes are too dangerous, and Ivan was a much more powerful Category 4.

"In this case, city officials first said they would provide no shelter, then agreed that the state-owned Louisiana Superdome would open to those with special medical needs. Only Wednesday afternoon, with Ivan just hours away, did the city open the 20-story-high domed stadium to the public."

I found these and other articles about Hurricane Ivan here; I have yet to hear or see any of this referred to anywhere. It wasn't just the problems with the levees, and the cutting of funds by the Federal Government to repair them, that was completely understood in advance; it was the entire gamut of problems associated with the aftermath as well.

Link to Article...

[Ayinde]

The Storm After the Storm

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: September 1, 2005

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history, it's striking how often political turbulence followed.
 
In 1889 in Pennsylvania, a great flood washed away much of Johnstown. The water's crushing destruction sounded to one person like a "lot of horses grinding oats." Witnesses watched hundreds of people trapped on a burning bridge, forced to choose between burning to death or throwing themselves into the churning waters to drown.

The flood was so abnormal that the country seemed to have trouble grasping what had happened. The national media were filled with wild exaggerations and fabrications: stories of rivers dammed with corpses, of children who died while playing ring-around-the-rosy and who were found with their hands still clasped and with smiles still on their faces.

Prejudices were let loose. Hungarians then were akin to today's illegal Mexican immigrants - hard-working people who took jobs no one else wanted. Newspapers carried accounts of gangs of Hungarian men cutting off dead women's fingers to steal their rings. "Drunken Hungarians, Dancing, Singing, Cursing and Fighting Amid the Ruins" a New York Herald headline blared.

Then, as David McCullough notes in "The Johnstown Flood," public fury turned on the Pittsburgh millionaires whose club's fishing pond had emptied on the town. The Chicago Herald depicted the millionaires as Roman aristocrats, seeking pleasure while the poor died like beasts in the Coliseum.

Even before the flood, public resentment was building against the newly rich industrialists. Protests were growing against the trusts, against industrialization and against the new concentrations of wealth. The Johnstown flood crystallized popular anger, for the fishing club was indeed partly to blame. Public reaction to the disaster helped set the stage for the progressive movement and the trust-busting that was to come.

In 1900, another great storm hit the U.S., killing over 6,000 people in Galveston, Tex. The storm exposed racial animosities, for this time stories (equally false) swept through the press accusing blacks of cutting off the fingers of corpses to steal wedding rings. The devastation ended Galveston's chance to beat out Houston as Texas' leading port.

Then in 1927, the great Mississippi flood rumbled down upon New Orleans. As Barry writes in his account, "Rising Tide," the disaster ripped the veil off the genteel, feudal relations between whites and blacks, and revealed the festering iniquities. Blacks were rounded up into work camps and held by armed guards. They were prevented from leaving as the waters rose. A steamer, the Capitol, played "Bye Bye Blackbird" as it sailed away. The racist violence that followed the floods helped persuade many blacks to move north.

Civic leaders intentionally flooded poor and middle-class areas to ease the water's pressure on the city, and then reneged on promises to compensate those whose homes were destroyed. That helped fuel the populist anger that led to Huey Long's success. Across the country people demanded that the federal government get involved in disaster relief, helping to set the stage for the New Deal. The local civic elite turned insular and reactionary, and New Orleans never really recovered its preflood vibrancy.

We'd like to think that the stories of hurricanes and floods are always stories of people rallying together to give aid and comfort. And, indeed, each of America's great floods has prompted a popular response both generous and inspiring. But floods are also civic examinations. Amid all the stories that recur with every disaster - tales of sudden death and miraculous survival, the displacement and the disease - there is also the testing.

Civic arrangements work or they fail. Leaders are found worthy or wanting. What's happening in New Orleans and Mississippi today is a human tragedy. But take a close look at the people you see wandering, devastated, around New Orleans: they are predominantly black and poor. The political disturbances are still to come.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01brooks.html?ex=1126238400&en=228755ffb6f5ed9b&ei=5070&emc=eta1

[Ayinde]

Warnings were loud and clear - but still city drowned

09/08/05 "The Times" -- -- IF THERE is a smoking gun in the Gulf Coast wreckage, it is the hurricane warning issued by the New Orleans office of the US National Weather Service soon after 10am on August 28, the eve of Katrina's arrival.

Full Article : informationclearinghouse.info

[Ayinde]

Cheney Runs Into Trouble With the Locals

"Go *uck Yourself, Mr. Cheney!"
Vice President Dick Cheney, in Gulfport, Mississippi on a tour of the Katrina hurricane zone, was told to "go *uck yourself, Mr. Cheney" twice on live television.

Full Article : thinkprogress.org