Posted on 09/05/2005 5:20:46 AM PDT by Mia T
Katrina-ism
I'm sandwiched between two deadlines right now, but I thought I'd stop in here and freshen up the page. The earlier of the two deadlines was for my Western Standard sports column. I don't suppose I'll catch hell for telling you it's about the use of the Louisiana Superdome as a refuge for the stranded poor in the path of Hurricane Katrina. Will this become a (literal) killer argument in favour of public funding for expensive stadium projects, particularly domed ones?
Meanwhile, the global-warming crowd has, according to Glenn Reynolds, come out on cue to blame climate change for Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, if this premise is accepted, it can easily be turned on its head by the Lomborgians as a powerful demonstration that industrial democracies should be reducing their structural vulnerability to the effects of climate change rather than taking futile symbolic actions to prevent it. Did New Orleans do enough to prepare for a disaster that was more or less inevitable (and acknowledged as such even under formerly existing climatic conditions)? The way the Louisiana highway system was re-engineered on the fly to permit car owners to flee was an extremely impressive display of American genius. However, it is hard to deny that many of the poor were "left to drown" under the emergency arrangements. And yet again, it's equally hard to imagine a more practical way to provide for them than the one New Orleans was forced to adopt in extremis--namely, throwing open the doors of the Superdome and hoping that it wouldn't be totally destroyed by the storm. I speak here as someone too broke to own a car: should there be buses on standby for 30,000 people like me throughout the summer in New Orleans?
However these debates turn out, there is likely to be more attention paid to the wisdom of public policy that persuades people to live in areas that are certain to be flattened or washed away every 20-60 years or so. (See this snide but trenchant 2004 piece by John Stossel.) I admit that New Orleans has a long history, and that this point may be more applicable to Gulfport or Biloxi. There will be overwhelming public sentiment in favour of rebuilding New Orleans exactly as it was before it went completely to hell. But my sense is that the city didn't catch an unlucky break on Tuesday; it caught some ordinary luck after decades of the exceedingly good kind.
Antonia Zerbisias complains that "years of environmental degradation has destroyed the city's natural defences", referring (presumably) to the southeast Lousiana barrier islands. (In the same breath, she seems to regret never having had the chance to groove drunkenly to zydeco on Bourbon Street and collect beads at Mardi Gras. Was it St. Augustine who said "Send me environmental consciousness, O Lord, but not yet"?) But coastal erosion is the natural process here, and what defenders of the barrier islands are proposing is a halt to the natural evolution of the Gulf Coast for the benefit of humans. Perhaps that qualifies as environmentalism if it's a government that does it. And pumping sand into the ocean may be a good idea anyway. But it's worth noting that the barrier islands did, to all appearances, do their best to protect human habitations on Tuesday. The sandbars and the warm water of the delta diverted Katrina eastward towards Mississippi shortly before landfall, much as they did in the case of Hurricane Camille. (Local reporters covering the progress of the storm displayed undisguised jubilation at its last-minute right turn, not even pausing to regret the terrible consequences for Mississippi.) The eyewall of the storm missed the city of New Orleans completely, and Katrina lost power with unusual rapidity, dropping from a 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale to a 4 shortly before landfall, a 3 before the eye was even parallel with New Orleans, and a 2 by mid-afternoon. Katrina was not an extraordinarily bad hurricane in pure physical force, and the natural defences did act on it. They just aren't enough.
And neither, it seems, are artificial defences like levees. There may be excellent reasons for an American to be living in a south-facing semi-tropical oceanfront polder. (I like to think I have good reasons to live near the site of a tottering riparian fur-fort that existed 90 years ago on the edge of the boreal forest.) But whether there are excellent reasons for FEMA to pay people and businesses to return to the same places is another question. The agency really has no choice but to underwrite a blind Andrew-style reconstruction effort here, but in the future, actuaries could consider awarding bonuses to swamped residents willing to relocate inland. It might, at any rate, be cheaper than rebuilding New Orleans in its current configuration all over again a second time.
[UPDATE, 7:39 am: All Zerb, all the time! In today's Star Ms. Zerbisias writes:
Obviously we were watching different channels (though it's not as if that second sentence makes any sense). The hurricane coverage at my house was a resplendent buffet of tilty reporters. Anderson Cooper cut a memorable figure, dodging fallen barge-cranes and generally looking like a Gemini astronaut in a high-G simulator. "This is CNN... and I'm melting! Meltinggg!" NBC's coverage from Jackson, Miss., featured a reporter who braved the outdoors through the worst of the storm, though admittedly he avoided tilting into the wind by dancing around it in a curious, indescribable fashion. Very jeet kune do. The New Orleans CBS affiliate, forced to migrate to Baton Rouge, had live pictures for a while from a reporter in Gulfport; eventually he was reduced to audio-only. His last dispatch of the night, delivered with audible terror from inside a fire station, was cut off after the words "...the wind is tearing the doors off...". I think he might be dead.
Bonus Zerbisiasm:
There's plenty in the column about the Bush administration's contempt for the environment, but I'm damned if I can find anything else about the reforms to the Corps of Engineers that led to the budget cuts. Where did the pressure for the reforms come from? Where else? Environmental groups that have been crusading noisily for years against wasteful and ecologically harmful Corps projects. This could account for the relative silence of a "national media" that lacks Ms. Z's Star talent for spectacular own-goals.]
[UPDATE, 6:46 pm: A greeting to readers of National Review's pioneering Corner.]
There has been considerable media attention to the predicament of Antoine "Fats" Domino, the 77-year old rock-and-roll legend who waited out Katrina in his native New Orleans. Fats was reported alive on Thursday after a day of uncertainty; the Washington Post reports Saturday that he's now in Baton Rouge, staying in an apartment belonging to LSU's starting quarterback.
Is it too early to start compiling a list of other notable Americans whose fates might be of interest? The official website of the Rebirth Brass Band is keeping track of some of the city's resident jazz, soul, and funk musicians.
N.O. songwriting legend Allen Toussaint, originally missing, has turned up alive in New York.
On 9/11, and in the days afterward, the New York police indelibly stamped their nickname--the "Finest"--on the pages of history. It appears that the New Orleans Police Department, in its most difficult hour, has also confirmed the truth of its traditional nickname: "North America's Sleaziest Bastards." Reports of New Orleans cops turning in their badges, and of others participating in pre-emptive looting (not just mere "commandeering" of necessities), have been widespread over the last few days. Blogger Michael Barnett, who has remained in the city, reports that police successfully cleared out looters near the 858-apartment Iberville Housing Development, but came under gunfire from the neighbourhood when they began to "shop" in leisurely fashion for themselves. (After they fled, the tragedy of the commons took over in double-quick time.)
According to Barnett, "Over 30 officers have quit over the last three days" in just one police district: "Out of 160 officers... maybe 55 or 60 are working." Again the comparison with the NYPD comes to the mind unbidden: those who read the recently-released transcripts of 9/11 telephone and radio traffic know how dispatchers phoned off-duty New York officers at home, only to be told again and again by terrified wives and family members that "Lt. So-and-So is already on his way in." The slow reaction of the federal authorities to the disaster can probably be attributed, in part, to a perfectly natural but mistaken assumption that New Orleans itself thought New Orleans was worth saving, and would take initial steps to do so.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that "civilian looters" have been helping people in places authority was unable to reach until today. And does anybody want to tell me all about how this guy should be shot dead on the grounds of "broken windows" theory? (I'm a convinced believer in the "broken windows" idea myself, but not so much that I think it applies underwater.)
...BoingBoing.net, ordinarily one of my favourite websites and one that does a lot of good, too. Within the last 24 hours or so, BoingBoing has posted a number-mangling paragraph on the economic effects of Katrina that confuses the U.S. balance of trade with the U.S. gross domestic product; slandered PayPal and then backtracked; used the occasion to praise Cuban social values Walter Duranty-fashion; and joined in the opportunistic trashing of a four-star charity that Pat Robertson happens to have ties to. Maybe you guys should just stick to posting the latest kewl pixx from Burning Man.
Maybe it's my fault. I mentioned polders in relation to New Orleans a while ago, and now at least one blogger of the left is denouncing the Bush administration for failing to adopt Dutch solutions to the problems of sustaining civilization below sea level. In general, it's almost certainly no mistake to look for Dutch expertise on this subject. (It's no mistake to look for Dutch expertise on any subject, up to and including sex toys and upholstery.) I have no doubt that the Louisiana and federal governments will be doing just that. But in how many different ways is the specific accusation stupid?
Holland is a northwest-facing country in the upper reaches of the temperate zone, and it's on the east side of the Atlantic. New Orleans faces south in an area where Atlantic hurricanes are prone to turn north. There's a difference between living with trouble and looking for trouble.
Lambert Strether makes much of the fact that his interlocutors apparently haven't heard of Holland. Is he aware that Holland has a natural advantage Louisiana doesn't, in the form of a little barrier island called Great Britain?
Despite these factors, Holland has, of course, suffered occasional history-altering storms that changed its coastline and snuffed out staggering numbers of lives. After the most recent, which killed nearly 2,000 people in 1953, it devised a visionary plan to eliminate the storm threat to low-lying parts of the country. It's called the Delta Project. It's a true wonder of the modern world. And it took fifty years to complete. If any American administration should be blamed for failing to implement something similar, perhaps it ought to be Eisenhower's? [Damned Republicans! -ed.] At that, the engineering value of the Delta Project is technically unproven--by nature, unprovable for centuries--and there are bound to be hundreds of reasons it's simply not adaptable willy-nilly to the Gulf of Mexico.
But even assuming that a trillion-dollar megaproject to protect New Orleans (on top of the billions already spent on levee and barrier management) would have been desirable in the past, is it still proper to blame American politicians of the past for not having undertaken it? In monocultural, monoethnic Holland, flood mitigation is a project in the national interest--in fact, it's a non-negotiable condition of the country's existence. This doesn't apply to storm protection for New Orleans--or, if it does, it would have been hard to make the argument before this week, when the strategic importance of southeast Louisiana was underlined in the most terrible way.
And even then, distributing U.S. trade capacity in the Gulf more evenly may still be a cheaper or more appropriate solution than building remote-controlled superlevees of the Dutch sort. Holland has 280 miles of coastline--much less, say, than Texas has by itself. The Dutch don't have any choice but to protect what they've got from the elements. The U.S. does.
When it comes to New Orleans, the hanging judges of the media--including the weblog world--are currently fitting up pretty much everyone in the United States for a noose. Here's something for your bill of indictment, kids! The mayor's mandatory evacuation order for the city was issued on Sunday [emphasis added], and those of us on the outside are now getting belated answers to why so many people failed to follow it. Airline flights out of New Orleans had, of course, already ceased because of high surface winds. Amtrak wasn't running either: its excuse, again, is pretty good--its lines run directly through the levees that were then being frantically shored up. Non-car-owners in the city had pretty much one place left to go--but Greyhound had stopped bus service to and from New Orleans late Saturday, pleading "safety." That's more than 24 hours before the rain even started. You've all seen the photos of drivers leaving the city en masse on Sunday; conditions were clear--but apparently not clear enough for Greyhound.
This leaves FEMA director Michael Brown on pretty shaky ground when he suggests that "those who ignored the city's mandatory evacuation order bore some responsibility." How were non-drivers supposed to comply with the order--yogic flying? One visiting New York couple was almost frogmarched to the Superdome by authorities before deciding to hitchhike on Interstate 10. That's what nerds call a "non-scalable solution," particularly for families, older people, and, yes, blacks, who have enough trouble getting cab drivers to take money for a ride in normal times.
- 1:20 am, September 2 (link)
For once, the apocalyptic hurricane coverage that cable news so often serves up has been borne out by the magnitude of the tragedy in New Orleans. This time viewers were not subjected to ridiculous live shots of reporters tilting into winds that blew over.
In 2001, a hurricane strike on New Orleans was ranked by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as one of "the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters" that could hit the U.S., along with a terrorist hit on New York and an earthquake in San Francisco. Since then, the army engineers' budget has been cut by 44 per cent. Not a sound from the national media.
Katrina-ism 3.0: who got out and how?
Author Poppy Z. Brite is safe inside the city, 12 pounds lighter and worrying about her abandoned cats.
David Duke was out of town, and is now making predictable hay about "white genocide" at the hands of black mobs.
The whereabouts of Big Star's Alex Chilton are apparently unknown, and he was thought to have stayed in the city during the storm.
The members of the Neville family are all safe, as the Marsalises. Marsales? Marsalises.
NPR poet-in-residence Andrei Codrescu is alive and filing dispatches about the demise of his city.
Better Than Ezra--remember them?--were on tour and have started organizing benefits.
The Food Network has officially announced that Emeril Lagasse is alive.
This St. Pete Times page rounds up a few NOLA celebrities. Jazz composer Terence Blanchard evacuated to Atlanta Sunday morning, and Dr. John, perhaps the archetypal New Orleans figure, was on tour in Minneapolis. Rapper Master P is said to have dispatched helicopters to New Orleans to search for some of his relatives. Better late than never, one supposes.
Mr. Bill creator Walter Williams hails from New Orleans. The "Hurricane Sluggo" video on his site may seem tasteless, but Williams was actually trying to call attention to the city's geographic situation years ago.
I'd be interested in news of Humberto Fontova, the Cuban-American paleoconservative author who lives in New Orleans. I haven't seen any so far, and he may be the one living human being least likely to comply with a "mandatory evacuation" order. I'm also a little curious about comics editor and occult expert Cat Yronwode. Mises.org reports that libertarian economist and controversialist Walter Block, who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans, is safe and dry. Feel free to send along additions to this list, relevant links, or (this would be best) the URL of a more comprehensive accounting.
Katrina-ism 2.0: high noon
Katrina-ism 1.3: And the special Web prize for crummy performance in the face of a disaster goes to...
Katrina-ism 1.2: stupid idea of the hour
No exit
ping
lol
Good work as always, Mia T-- I'll pass it on.
The DEMS care more about the company of lawyers then helping their people.
self ping for later.
As in Tim Russert 'Katrinaed' the Bush Administration...
The environmentalists are too blame...for making sure the
Army Corps of Engineers could not undertake needed projects.
- Mia ****
bump
This brings out the "love" side of my love/hate relationship with Gotham. And I, come to think of it, don't really think there's a "hate" side. Frustration maybe, or disappointment at times.
Great find Mia, proving that greatness attracts greatness.
Busses - what're you talking about, man? Limos. With lavatories. </sarcasm>(tractor trailers, actually . . .).
<But whether there are excellent reasons for FEMA to pay people and businesses to return to the same places is another question. The agency really has no choice but to underwrite a blind Andrew-style reconstruction effort here, but in the future, actuaries could consider awarding bonuses to swamped residents willing to relocate inland. It might, at any rate, be cheaper than rebuilding New Orleans in its current configuration all over again a second time.<
Excellent suggestion, here. The whole article, though long, is well worth reading.
Good job, Mia, thanks for posting this!
Well Said!
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