Came Hell And
High Water
By Todd Huffman
09 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
The
drowning of New Orleans looks to become America's worst natural disaster
in living memory. Thousands upon thousands of Americans are dead. Almost
without exception, they are the weak, the sick, the old, the infirm,
and, in most cases, the poor. And most died not during Hurricane Katrina
itself, but while waiting for help to arrive.
How is it that America cannot take care of its own? Plainly, damage
and death resulting from a Category 4 hurricane cannot be entirely prevented.
But Katrina need not have done so much harm.
Last September, when Ivan, a Category 5 hurricane, battered Cuba with
160-mile-per-hour winds, more than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated
to higher ground ahead of the storm. Despite destroying 20,000 homes,
thanks to a strong civil defense system and a national disaster preparedness
mindset the hurricane did not result in a single Cuban fatality. Not
one.
Three days after Katrina, President Bush told Diane Sawyer: "I
don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." Except
that everyone anticipated this. The effects of such a hurricane were
predicted time and time again.
As recently as June of this year, New Orleans officials and the Army
Corps of Engineers requested more money to shore up the levees, a request
that was instead reduced by 60 percent. The New Orleans Times-Picayune
in 2004 reported that "for the first time in 37 years, federal
budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orelans area's
hurricane levees", and that a catastrophe was "a matter of
when, not if." The predictions proved deadly accurate, and ignoring
the predictions proved just plain deadly.
Everyone knew that New Orleans had been living in nature's shadow, and
on borrowed time. Everyone knew that the Big Easy was an uneasy fishbowl.
FEMA itself issued a report in 2001, before 9/11, warning that the three
greatest potential catastrophes faced by our nation were a terrorist
attack on New York, a major West Coast earthquake, and a major hurricane
directly hitting New Orleans. For all FEMA's apparent ineptitude since
Katrina, it sure deserves credit for predicting the two greatest catastrophes
in living memory.
And as for FEMA, led by a man fired from his last job as head of the
International Arabian Horse Federation, its lethal tardiness is inexcusable.
The storm was known about days before it happened. The governor of Louisiana
even issued a state of emergency two days before Katrina struck. Yet
it took five days before relief in the form of food and water began
to arrive.
In that time, a whole lot of people died that had no need to die, in
attics, in the streets, in the hospitals, and even in the stadium meant
as a safe haven. It is simply inexcusable that in a country that anyone
can drive across in three days, the people of one of its major cities
were dying from a lack of food, water, and medicine three and four and
five days after suffering a hurricane. In a country that prides itself
at taking care of business around the world, we clearly cannot take
care of our own.
We are just at the beginning of a very long recovery process. At least
a half a million people are homeless. The dead are just beginning to
be counted. In the meantime, the Bush administration is urging Americans
"not to play the blame game". In this the second week after
Katrina, they tell us that "now is not the time to point fingers".
A better message, I suppose, than their's of the first week: "now
is not the time to lift fingers".
This is indeed the time to point fingers. Four years after 9/11 our
nation was caught off guard once again. As a man rescued six days after
Katrina told reporters: "The first two days were a natural disaster,
and the last four were man-made."
The failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope
with a terrorist attack than we were four years ago. Ironic, given that
last November voters re-elected President Bush primarily on the belief
that he was the better man to protect the "homeland" against
terrorism. It is time that Americans must now look past the cheery and
staged photo-ops and see the ugly reality: for the sake of foreign adventures
we've forsaken our own.
Todd Huffman, M.D.
Eugene, Oregon
[email protected]