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Reflections on Hurricane Katrina-3September 12, 2005
[ Katrina 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Rita 1 | 2 ] The AP photo below of school buses lined up needly in 1.5 meters of water has become the bloody shirt for Bush apologists. Defenders of the Bush Administration say the photo above demonstrates Gov. Blanco (a Democrat) and Mayor So far I've struggled to confine my remarks to the technical and historical causes of the Katrina Tragedy. At this late date, estimates of the probable death toll vary wildly, with at least 400 corpses identified and over 30,000 missing. The horror of this calamity is quite simply beyond my comprehension. Initially preparing this post, I read and linked to a large number of other posts on this topic. I realized, however, that I was wasting my readers' time with excessive and needless citations. One of the issues I needed to resolve was, what was a reasonable assessment of what had gone wrong. Not surprisingly, a stupendous amount of outrage has erupted on both sides, with critics of the federal response invariably being characterized as "lefties" by apologists of the administration, and customary administration critics accusing the White House of genocide. I want to stay away from this high octane polemics because I think it's contributed to the refusal of netizens to reject statements entirely on their immediate, transitory ideological implications. However, it's been extremely difficult to avoid being drawn into this polemics because of the debate over FEMA's response to Katrina has encompassed every domestic and foreign policy debate there is is. The story of the buses is an example. One faction of apologists, such as O'Reilly, insists that the New Orleans disaster proves government is doomed to fail at every thing and hence, an argument for the "small-government" (sic) conservatives actually in charge. By failing logistically, the argument goes, they succeeded ideologically. The other faction, as I say, says that the logistical failure was a Democratic one, and therefore proves the innate mental deficiency of all Bush critics—or, at the very least, their mendacity and blame-shifting. Both arguments cancel each other out—neither is sustainable logically, and if one adopts both at the same time, then one is forced to accept that the conservatives can be trusted if they would only renounce their principles. In fact, the story linked (whence I got the photo) mentions that the state had a plan in place to use buses to evacuate the city, but failed to put it in place until 20 hours before Katrina made landfall. At that time, it was only just becoming clear that New Orleans would suffer a direct hit by a category 5 hurricane, not a tropical storm. Experts had declared that the plan to evacuate the city (which involved the buses shown) would require well over 40 hours to implement, presumably because of the need to establish stations to pick up passengers, brief drivers, and eventually park the buses afterwards. Such plans are typically developed by the civil service, not the governor; the governor, of course, has the job of deciding whether to implement the plan for tropical storms (in which the object is to minimize damage) or the plan for C-4/C-5 hurricanes (in which case the object is to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people with assets all over the state). Rather than being criminally incompetent or congenitally imbecilic, it appears Blanco was confronted with a devil's dilemma. Either option had pitfalls. By the time she chose the Hurricane plan, it was too late and communications btween Baton Rouge and state facilities in the affected area had broken down. Others have pointed to the Branco Administration's insistance that state authority not be extinguished (WP). However, please note that the WP article also repeats the curious pseudo-fact strenuously circulated by the White House, viz., that Gov. Blanco had never declared a state of emergency (in fact she had by the 26th, then upgraded that declaration by the 28th-PDF). What this dispute means is unclear, since I've had a difficult time finding a more explicit account of it. This op-ed by angry Blanco critic Barbara Stack is revealing in a way that perhaps she did not intend: she faults Blanco for resisting martial law and contradicts FEMA's own charter. Just as the disasterous erosion of the Delta came about as a result of a bitter clash in water management philosophies, so the disastrous failure to implement the "hurricane plan" came about because of a bitter clash between rival notions of crisis management. One the one hand was the crew of technocrats flanking Michael Brown, many of them of several years service in law enforcement. This group reflected not so much the personal touch of George W. Bush, as the prudential "common sense" of corrections departments everywhere, that of the Hobbesian reality of man as intrinsically at war with his fellow man. This philosophy perceives trust as an unforgivable stupidity; extreme mistrust, even when the result is lethal, is invariably accepted as a reasonable behavior. This assumption of prudential caution against other persons, however, is highly selective (parody/reality). On the other hand was Gov. Blanco and local officials, many of them representing heavily local African American or Latino communities. These communities would, of course, regard martial law as essentially occupation or junta rule, chiefly by scornful white police officers. This, the Governor was reluctant to do. The view of many white residents of the city seems to have been that the Governor's "excessive tenderness" of the needs and rights of African American residents led to a standoff with the federal troops and with the Louisiana National Guard. The accounts of survivors, of which I have heard and read many, enforces my impression that the armed forces generally confirmed Gov. Blanco's worst fears by generally treating huge cohorts of the population ruthlesslessly and with astonishing disregard for welfare, safety, or basic survival prospects (You Want Happy?; Kittens & Kalashnikovs). In my view, the buses are an extremely expensive Rorschach Test; conservatives perceive them as a testimony of the universal need for self-reliance; the right (AKA "movement conservatives") sees them as evidence of a treacherous objective enemy, viz., the secretly socialistic Democratic machine; liberals see them as evidence of FEMA's passive resistance to time-honored civil defense procedures; the left, as evidence of a class elite too pre-occupied with its factional bickering to pay any attention to disenfranchised classes; radicals, as evidence of the grand waste of resources spawned by all imperialist orders. They are, in all accounts, a stupendous waste of human effort: so many tears in the rain. (Part 4)
Another outstanding resource is Kevin Drum (Washington Monthly). He posts on FEMA Director Robert Brown (1, 2, 3, 4); on coercive violence against survivors by the police/NG (1, 2); memorable quotations (1, 2, 3). I don't want to insist that Mr. Drum be all things to all people, and he's done a marvelous job trying to be reliable as a source of analysis, but I was startled by his surprise about the persistance of "emergency racism." Here's one commentor's response: Kevin, apparently you're well insulated for what passes for "thought" on the right. I have an inbox full of amazingly racist screeds from "conservatives" deriding "those people," "those uneducated welfare recipients," and "the dependency people."Via the commentariat there, Boing Boing's Katrina posts. A fanatical defender of the Bush Administration, evidently under the impression that either Bush or the Democratic leadership in Louisiana is to blame, furnished a series of links that fingered the latter. I know that particular person thinks I'm an "idiot" and "stupid," because he said so repeatedly—but thanks for the links (NYT, WP-1, WP-2, Red Cross, Expedited Major Disaster letter-PDF, Houston Chronicle). I don't really feel like linking to the sullen mental patient with the links, but his general point was that every single failure of the evacuation plan and subsequent rescue operations was the result of the mental deficiencies of liberals, i.e., Lousiana Democratic officials. None of his points were well corroborated by the links. The NYT and WP stories both emphasize that all of the errors made by Gov. Blanco's office were duplicated by FEMA, probably because of communications failures. The plans for evacuation were supposed to be put into operation about 40 hours before Katrina made landfall, but in fact were put in practice only 20 hours ahead. That's Knightian uncertainty, not stupidity: if the storm were to have remained a tropical storm, preparations for a category 4-5 storm would have been a costly fiasco. UPDATE: via Josh M Marshall, the report by the Congressional Research Service (PDF) on whether Gov. Kathleen Blanco properly requested federal assistance in a timely manner. It turns out she did: From the above review of the statutory authorities under the Stafford Act, the letters of Governor Blanco to President Bush requesting first a declaration of emergency, and then a major disaster declaration in anticipation of the effects of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the President's responses to those requests in declaring a state of emergency with respect to Louisiana effective August 26, 2005, and continuing, and declaring a major disaster with respect to Louisiana effective August 26, 2005, and continuing, it would appear that the Governor did take the necessary steps to request emergency and major disaster declarations for the State of Louisiana in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina. In response to the Governor's requests, it appears the President did take the steps necessary to trigger the availability of Stafford Act emergency assistance and disaster assistance by declaring first a state of emergency and later a major disaster.... The Green Knight (via "Thoughts That Get Stuck In My Head"), also furnished some memorable quotes, reflecting a range of responses to the tragedy. UPDATE: There were several New Orleans weblogs which I had meant to link, but neglected:
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