Random Musings

Katrina - Tragedy, Accountability, Race

It is a week after Katrina hit the Gulf coast and New Orleans in particular. The recriminations against the lack of preparedness by FEMA, and local disaster and rescue organizations have begun. There will be plenty of blame to go around.

First and foremost blame belongs to whoever was responsible for New Orleans’ planning for hurricanes. It is incomprehensible that there were no credible plans in place to respond to levee breakdown. The existing plans considered the possibility of water rising and spilling over the levees. Massive pumps were in place around the city to capture this water and pump it out of the city. But there were no plans to handle a levee breech, that is when the levee breaks completely and water pours in from Lake Pontchartrain. The water will and indeed kept pouring in, in torrents, until the level of water in New Orleans equaled the height of the water in the lake. It is the incontrovertible law of physics. It is unimaginable, that a city of over one half million people living below sea level, protected by walls of levees does not plan for a levee breakdown.

Water is one of the strongest forces on earth. Complacency, procrastination and sticking the collective head of government in the sand hoping that day of dread will never come is not sufficient to counter its force. What is needed is planning, plan implementation, constant vigilance, constant maintenance and disaster exercises.

Someone has to tell the bean counters that recovery is much more expensive than prevention. An ounce of prevention…

Water damage is monumental and complete. It is even worse than fire. It will quickly cover vast areas flooding all immediate zones of the same height below sea level. Imagine your home flooding with water levels covering the ground floor for an extended period of time. Walls and floors covering are ruined. Wall board crumples like paper. The supporting beams become water logged and will fail if they remain wet for too long. The floors buckle as the wood and the supports become water logged and porous. Everything inside the home is destroyed. The rising water is not clean water. It will be filled with mud, sludge, garbage and sewage. That’s the start if your house does not just wash away.

Worse, of course is the monumental loss of life. In New Orleans people were trapped in their homes as the water rose. There were people who were sick, feeble, old, not mobile, disoriented, mentality incapable of dealing with crisises. Every story, every ability and inability exists in a city of half million people. There are people who need constant attention, medication, medical devices or electricity to survive a day or an hour. The loss of life will prove to be incomprehensible for an advanced society as ours.

And as we watch the TV coverage we are surprised at the face of the tragedy and at the color of the tragedy. Hurricanes are indiscriminant. Where are the white faces? Did they all die? Did they all evacuate before the hurricane hit? Are there any white people in New Orleans?

It appears that the white population predominantly evacuated before Katrina hit. It also appears that populated neighborhoods mostly affected by the rising waters in New Orleans were black.

We are hearing the criticism of the rescue effort. That help was not immediately dispatched. That there were days of delays before massive organized rescue efforts were put into place. And we are hearing criticisms that the rescue effort delays were in part because the faces of the tragedy were black. That the situational gravity would have been recognized earlier had the face of the tragedy been white.

We are hearing criticisms of the media coverage. That black looters of food are called “looters” and white looters of food are called “finders or survivors”. In a city without food, clean water, a dry spot, or a place to shit, raiding a food store for survival is not looting. Stealing a TV is looting.

However it turns out, years from now, with the inevitable congressional hearings and reports, assigned blame and “hero-dom”, there are people who need to be supported and defended. They are the rescue workers and first responders. Whether the larger organization was mobilized in time or not, the rescue workers do their jobs, paid or volunteer, to the best of their ability without regard to the race of the patient or aided.

We, as a society, are to blame that there are ghettos of the poor, that our housing is segregated and that black, Latino and other ethnic under privileged neighborhoods exist. Yet the rescue workers and their effort are not to blame.

It may be true that galvanizing the rescue effort was delayed because Federal Officials saw predominantly black faces. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, for now. I believe that the main cause for the delay is incompetence, complacency, bureaucracy and lack of leadership.

What a marked difference between the immediate visibility of Rudi Giuliani in his city’s crisis of 9/11, marshalling the forces, organizing the agencies and reassuring the peopleof New York, and the country, verses the delayed, stilted, meaningless and scripted reaction from the White House. True to form, our White House seems to go numb in a crisis. The bravado will soon follow.

It is no surprise that the director of FEMA Mike Brown, appointed by this White House, spent the last 10 years preparing for this job of disaster planning and management working as the "Judges and Stewards Commissioner" of the International Arabian Horse Association. Surprised? And he was forced to resign. Need I say more?

posted by David Tyme @ 4:39 PM