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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]


 

 

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