FORESHADOWING DISASTER
One of the folks who left a comment in a previous post pointed me to this 2004 essay by Mike Davis (City of Quartz) which discusses how NOLA dodged a bullet when Hurricane Ivan came through. Not only does Davis foreshadow the exact circumstances that have happened in Katrina's wake but he also puts Mayor Nagin on blast for failing to adequately look after the city's poor and Black communities when Ivan threatened to overwhelm the city. Here's the key section:
- Poor, Black, and Left Behind
by Mike Davis
The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.
New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the "large group…mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.
Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome.
In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness toward poor Black folk endures.
Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.
But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called "the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."
The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor."
I've been trying to make this point all week - that Nagin, while much deserving of props for speaking outside of spin, would have to bear some of the culpability of what's happened. The general attitude I've seen displayed has been to cut him a free pass simply because he's been candid while placing all the blame for Katrina on the federal gov't. In truth, according to my buddy who does policy analysis on natural disasters for his living, things like evacuations are the responsibility of city and state officials, not the feds. I'm, of course, not putting this all on Nagin but before we start asking this guy to run as Obama's VP in '08, I think we need to look at his record just a little bit more.
See Slate's column on "Pointing Fingers" which echoes similar points. Bottomline: putting this all on the feds is as myopic as putting this all on the city. What we've seen here is a MASSIVE failure on all levels of the governmental bureaucracy. Oh, and they really are pointing fingers at one another. Fun times.
By the way, this also raises an obvious thoguth: we try to manage other nations' business on a daily basis but when it comes to mustering the basics of a domestic crisis, America showed itself to be beyond incompetent (and if that's the case, then how bad must Iraq really be going, where media access is far more controlled and limited).
By the way, if folks have other resources on news stories outside of the mainstream media loop, please drop them in the comments box. Thanks.
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