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VIEWPOINT: Will Katrina bring winds of change?
08 Sep 2005
 Source: AlertNet
Sunset is seen over a fully evacuated Superdome stadium, where thousands of people stayed while waiting to be evacuated after Hurricane Katrina hit, in New Orleans September 7, 2005. New Orleans police will try to force Hurricane Katrina's survivors to leave the fetid city on Wednesday as the political storm grows over the botched response to the crisis and cost estimates rise to as high as $150 billion.
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Sunset is seen over a fully evacuated Superdome stadium, where thousands of people stayed while waiting to be evacuated after Hurricane Katrina hit, in New Orleans September 7, 2005. New Orleans police will try to force Hurricane Katrina's survivors to leave the fetid city on Wednesday as the political storm grows over the botched response to the crisis and cost estimates rise to as high as $150 billion.
REUTERS/CARLOS BARRIA

Background

•  Climate change

•  Hurricane Katrina

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Ben Wisner, a hazards specialist with the Environmental Studies Programme at Oberlin College, Ohio, says what the United States needs is not higher levees but another civil rights movement.

What are the lessons from the human catastrophe taking place after Hurricane Katrina?

It wasn’t just the winds and floodwaters that put people at risk along the Gulf of Mexico. The human tragedy in New Orleans and many lesser known communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast has deep roots in a neo-liberal ideology that favors lax regulation and a return to massive investment in petro-chemical and other industries with little concern for social and environmental consequences.

About 1,500 square miles (3,885 km sq) of wetland has been lost over the past few decades that would have reduced the height of the storm surge affecting New Orleans. Contamination from the petro-chemical complexes and transfer points concentrated on-shore and offshore has contributed to the death of wetlands.

Meanwhile low-income, black families have been mired in poverty by the “downsizing” of the federal state. That has meant less money for education, for small businesses and for decent, low-cost housing.

Thirty-seven million people live in poverty in the United States - many in the south, where an anti-union ethos and lax environmental and land-use regulations have attracted chemical industries.

The myth of idyllic seaside retirement has also been sold to elderly Americans, and retirement homes have sprung up. More of the black working poor serve as low wage care givers.

Casino gambling has also added non-union, low wage employment – a desperate last resort for communities that are losing their traditional fishing-based economies due to over-fishing and gross pollution of the Gulf of Mexico.

The root causes of the catastrophe triggered by Katrina are deep. In Latin America disasters such as Hurricane Mitch in 1998 were seen as the result of years of failed development and mal-development. The same must be said of Katrina.

Race and class

People have discussed the possible effects of a direct hit by a large hurricane on New Orleans since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969. After Camille, which killed 256 people in Mississippi, evidence of racial discrimination in the allocation of recovery resources was first documented, leading to a U.S. Congressional investigation.

Has the social, political and economic situation changed since then?

There was no plan to use trains or some other form of mass transport to evacuate the indigent and those without private cars or money.

The most recent census showed that in a city 87 percent black and 30 percent poor, there were 112,000 households without private vehicles. This was known, but no provision was made to transport the poor to smaller, well run shelters outside New Orleans such as those in Baton Rouge.

Instead, survivors were herded into the Superdome, whose roof was then ripped open in several places by the wind. I saw images of these refugees, mostly black, being herded by armed national guardsmen who barked and yelled at them.

The scene was humiliating and far removed from the ideal of providing shelter with dignity and respect that is at the heart of the humanitarian ethic.

As the days wore on the air conditioning failed, bathroom facilities became filthy, water and food ran short.

By the time the decision was made to move these people to the Astrodome and other shelters in Texas and other states, conditions failed to meet international standards for the provision of shelter. There were also very limited facilities for people in wheel chairs.

All this would have been avoided if at least a year ago, after the experience of Hurricane Ivan, authorities had taken the needs of the poor and indigent in New Orleans seriously.

Preparedness and prevention

Kent Mathewson, a geographer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, has tried over the past year since Hurricane Ivan to get officials to develop a contingency plan to evacuate the indigent and those without private vehicles on the trains that run through New Orleans. His suggestions have fallen on deaf ears.

A church-based pilot project also began after Ivan in 2004 that partnered church members without access to vehicles with those that do. But this was an independent effort to fill the vacuum in policy at city, state and federal level.

Hurricane Ivan last year should have caused a re-doubling of precautionary planning. The night Ivan approached, 20,000 low-income people without private vehicles sheltered in their homes below sea level. A direct hit would have drowned them.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers computer simulation had calculated that many thousands could die in the city in the event of a direct hit by a slow-moving category 3 hurricane. Fortunately, Ivan veered away from the city at the last moment, but still killed 25 people elsewhere in the U.S. south.

This time, too, things were not as bad as they could have been because of a small westward turn that placed the dangerous northeast edge of the storm over Mississippi.

But will authorities finally get the message and do serious planning for the needs of the poor? Could Katrina be the beginning of demands from below for social justice in the face of the present social and spatial distribution of risk?

Time will tell. But with so many resources at the disposal of the U.S. Federal Emergency Agency (FEMA) – part of the Homeland Security Department – devoted to the “war on terrorism”, I am not optimistic.

FEMA and other federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers, as well as academics and hazard professionals, have for a long time considered a direct hit on New Orleans by a slow moving category 3 hurricane or stronger to be a worst case scenario.

But planning for such an event was insufficient, and money for study, maintenance and the upgrading of New Orleans’ levee system was cut in the years leading up to this disasters.

Similarly, National Guard troops in Mississippi and Louisiana who could have helped with immediate search and rescue were deployed in Iraq, along with their heavy vehicles.

What’s to be done?

This was not an “act of God”. To learn from this disaster and prevent worse to come as global warming makes hurricanes more frequent and intense, policymakers must face up to the dead end that laissez faire Capitalism has let us all into.

Non-governmental organisations, faith communities and activist groups need to mobilise the mass of the population in affected area to see themselves not as victims of nature but victims of a late phase of globalising Capitalism. The affected people will then be in a position to see themselves as agents of their own wellbeing and victims no longer as they demand social change.

In concrete terms, there is one project that seems to me a priority.

Planning for recovery needs to occur in a participatory and inclusive manner. Women, people of colour, people living with disabilities and children and youth need to be part of the process in the post-Katrina situation.

In May 2005, an International Recovery Platform was created in Kobe, Japan, with the purpose of pooling and making available the best of the world’s experience in post-disaster recovery.

We need to tap this rich source of global knowledge and make a digest of this experience available in a useful form to NGOs, faith groups and activists.

The U.S. does not need higher levees. It needs another civil rights movement.

Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Reuters.


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