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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
The Blame Game
After Katrina - A Brewing Political Storm
Source: The Economist MagazineAlmost everyone in need of food and other supplies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina now has access to them, and the evacuation of New Orleans is largely complete. Who is to blame for the botched relief effort: George Bush, local officials, or no one in particular?
The evacuation of New Orleans was finally nearing completion on Monday September 5th, six days after the breaching of the low-lying city’s levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. National guardsmen, regular troops and federal marshals—many of whom had been brought in late last week following criticism of the sluggish relief effort—had moved into the worst-affected districts and were making house-to-house searches for the remaining survivors. However, some residents were still insisting on staying with their possessions.
With the survivors now mostly taken care of, the focus is shifting to those who perished in the storm and subsequent flood. The official death toll in the three worst-hit states—Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—is still in the low hundreds. But the final toll could be several thousand. Many corpses have sunk in the water that still covers four-fifths of New Orleans. Some rescuers have reportedly been told to mark the submerged bodies they find by attaching buoys to them, and then move on. It could be several months before the waters subside, and up to a year before the city is ready to take back those who have fled.
Perhaps 100,000 people either could not or would not leave New Orleans when warned to do so before Katrina struck. Tens of thousands ended up at the city’s official shelter at the Superdome stadium for days, turning it into a sink of hot and smelly misery. Not far away, other homeless people made their way to the city’s convention centre, which quickly became a second giant shelter. By the weekend, these refugees had been bussed out. Some 20 states have offered to house and school refugees temporarily. But the strain is already starting to show in neighbouring states. In Texas, now home to almost half the refugees from New Orleans, officials say they are struggling to cope.
If the world was saddened by the devastation wrought by Katrina, it was shocked by the breakdown of law and order that followed. Looters roamed the streets, stealing food and water in desperation but also computers, sporting equipment and guns in opportunism. Rapes and car-jackings were reported, and there were angry confrontations between roving thugs and the few shop- and homeowners who stayed. Some saw the social tension as having a racial element, since most of those left behind were poor and black.
Though New Orleans was flooded on Tuesday of last week, it wasn’t until Friday that the relief effort gained real momentum, with the arrival of thousands of national guardsmen. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, gave warning that “they know how to shoot to kill”, and by the weekend they had restored order to most parts of the city. But they and other emergency personnel are under huge pressure, with many of them working round the clock; the New York Times quoted Edwin Compass, New Orleans’s police superintendent, as saying on Saturday that at least 200 of his 1,500 officers had refused to do their job.
Who should have been doing the thinking?
While Katrina was a powerful storm, the extent of the chaos and suffering in her wake has nonetheless been surprising. America has dealt with ferocious hurricanes before, and New Orleans’s vulnerabilities were well known. Thus many are starting to point fingers in relation to both the short-term response and long-term policy failures.Ray Nagin, New Orleans’s mayor, showed increasing frustration throughout last week, especially with the federal government’s response and its press conferences: “They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying…Get off your asses and let’s do something.” An under-pressure President George Bush criticised the relief effort on Friday, calling it “not acceptable”, before flying to the region to see the damage. Later, he suggested that local officials had made some mistakes. This earned him the threat of a punch on the nose from one Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu.
Many of the immediate difficulties are understandable. As Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, pointed out, the disaster has in fact been a double one. The hurricane’s winds flattened homes on the Gulf of Mexico coast, and shortly thereafter the rains burst the levees, the latter creating a “dynamic” situation while authorities responded to the former. Plugging a hundred-metre hole in a levee while waters rush through is a huge challenge for engineers.
Nevertheless, many Americans are blaming the man at the top. Mr Bush should have gone to the region sooner, his critics say. (He was expected to make a second trip on Monday.) Some Bush supporters worry that the botched relief effort could hurt the president at a time when his ratings are already low, thanks to the troubles of Iraq—though a Washington Post/ABC poll, conducted late on Friday, found that the nation was split down the middle, with 46% saying Mr Bush had handled the crisis well and 47% saying he had done badly.
Some blame Mr Bush on the grounds that some of his administration's longer-term policy decisions have made the response to the disaster more difficult. The war in Iraq, it has been noted, has depleted the number of available national guardsmen by a third or more in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama; many of those serving in Iraq are trained emergency personnel. Others allege that the war has squeezed the budget, causing a postponement last year of projects to improve the levees—though it is far from clear that these could have been completed in time to stop the flooding after Katrina.
Even if some failures can be attributed to the Bush administration, the most important reasons for Katrina’s deadliness may lie in decisions that predate the current president, from Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville’s decision to found the city in its precarious location, in 1718, to the more recent “improvements” in the area’s maritime navigability that have damaged south-eastern Louisiana’s wetlands. For much of the 20th century the federal government tampered with the Mississippi, to help shipping and—ironically—prevent floods. In the process it destroyed large swathes of coastal marshland around New Orleans—something which suited property developers, but removed much of the city’s natural protection against flooding. Support may now grow for a multi-billion-dollar plan to restore the wetlands, though a similar project in Florida has proved difficult.
It is an uncomfortable fact that millions of Americans have made the decision to live in areas prone to this kind of disaster. Though Congress has authorised an immediate $10.5 billion relief package, Denny Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has expressed doubt that large dollops of money should be spent on reconstruction in a location as exposed as New Orleans (though he later backpedalled). But there remain important questions to be asked at both the local and national level about the failures that led to Katrina’s destruction and chaos. It has provided yet another reminder that decisions made without due regard for the consequences can prove painful indeed later on.
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Posted by fm on September 06, 2005 at 12:35 AM