Expressions of shock. Outrage. Seat-of-the-pants emergency measures.
And that’s just on the POLITICAL FRONT of Hurricane Katrina, one of America’s worst natural disasters — a storm that has proven to be a ticking time bomb.
The reason: initial fears were that the storm was one of the worst ever. Then it was downgraded. Then it turned out in the end to be the worst case scenario after all with horrific reports of drownings, whole neighborhoods being wiped out, anarchy in a defective and smelly Superdome, New Orleans largely submerged, and Mississippi only getting less of the focus of publicity due to New Orlean’s destruction.
Similarly, politicos that felt the storm was grave but didn’t realize until later that it now ranks as one of the worst natural disasters in American history now find themselves under fire. The fire comes from victims, agencies and from partisans on the other side — sparking a predictable increasing politicization of the issue…and various levels of government blaming other layers of government.
For instance, note this AP story on a highly symbolic event: an explosion in New Orleans:
Thousands of National Guardsmen with food, water and weapons streamed into Louisiana on Friday to bring relief to New Orleans’ suffering multitudes and put down the looting and violence. “The cavalry is and will continue to arrive,” said one general.
The assurances came amid blistering criticism from the mayor and others who said the federal government had bungled the relief effort and let people die in the streets for lack of food, water or medicine.
In Washington, President Bush admitted “the results are not acceptable” and pledged to bolster the relief efforts with a personal trip to the Gulf Coast on Friday.
“We’ll get on top of this situation,” he said before setting out, “and we’re going to help the people that need help.”
Earlier Friday, an explosion at a chemical depot rocked a wide area of New Orleans and jolted residents awake, lighting up the dark sky and sending a pillar of acrid gray smoke over a ruined city awash in perhaps thousands of corpses, under siege from looters, and seething with anger and resentment.
A second large fire erupted downtown in an old retail building in a dry section of Canal Street.
There were no immediate reports of injuries. But the fires deepened the sense of total collapse in the city since Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore Monday morning.
The blast took place in a section of the city directly across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter. It was about two miles from the Louisiana Superdome and less than a mile from the New Orleans Convention Center, the two spots where tens of thousands of hungry, desperate and hostile refugees awaited buses to deliver them from their misery.
On the political front, some blamed Bush and the GOP for the situation. Some GOPers immediately began to blame the Clinton administration.
You can also see how the news media’s questions for the administration are getting tougher and tougher by watching snippets of videos via Crooks And Liars here, here, and here.
Meanwhile, the AP’s Ron Fournier writes that not only did politicians at all levels and from both parties fail the city of New Orleans but the PUBLIC was negligent, too:
At every turn, political leaders failed Katrina’s victims. They didn’t strengthen the levees. They ceded the streets to marauding looters. They left dead bodies to rot or bloat. Thousands suffered or died for lack of water, food and hope. Who’s at fault?
There’s plenty of blame to go around — the White House, Congress, federal agencies, local governments, police and even residents of the Gulf Coast who refused orders to evacuate. But all the finger-pointing misses the point: Politicians and the people they lead too often ignore danger signs until a crisis hits.
It wasn’t a secret that levees built to keep New Orleans from flooding could not withstand a major hurricane, but government leaders never found the money to fully shore up the network of earthen, steel and concrete barriers.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations proposed budgets that low-balled the needs. Local politicians grabbed whatever money they could and declared victory. And the public didn’t exactly demand tax increases to pay for flood-control and hurricane-protection projects.
And the view from abroad? Here’s part of a piece headlined “Anarchy in the USA: gunfights and looting on streets of New Orleans” in London’s Telegraph:
The New Orleans Convention Centre was meant to be a refuge. Instead, it was another branch of hell.
The street outside, narrowly above the flood waters that have drowned New Orleans, smelt of urine and faeces. It was choked with soiled nappies, old bottles and rubbish.At least seven bodies were scattered along the roadside….
In scenes previously unimaginable in the world’s richest country, hungry and desperate people tired of waiting broke through the steel doors to a food service entrance and began pushing out cartons of water and juice and whatever else they could find.
An old man lay dead on a grassy bank as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered by a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.
“I don’t treat my dog like that,” 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. “I buried my dog.”
He added: “You can do everything for other countries but you can’t do nothing for your own people. You can go overseas with the military but you can’t get them down here.”
Just above the convention centre on Interstate 10, commercial buses were lined up, going nowhere. “They’ve been teasing us with buses for four days,” Mr Edwards said.
Thomas Jessie, 31, a roofer, said thousands were left wandering around the convention centre with no National Guard or Red Cross personnel in sight.
“We got dead bodies sitting next to us for days. I feel like I am going to die. People are going to kill you for water,” he said. “This is America, I don’t understand the lack of communications between the authorities and the people. It is disgusting, we feel we have been forgotten.”
The Christian Science Monitor notes that this is a U.S. disaster with “few rivals” — and that “hurricane Katrina now seems likely to enter US history as an iconic disaster on the level of the Chicago fire of 1871, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, and the Mississippi flood of 1927.”
And that could be bad news for the politicos at various levels: events,
funding and mistakes (including of judgment) leading up to this tragedy will likely not be analyzed this year (and during election year) but for many years to come. The Monitor reports:
“This is the largest disaster the US has perhaps ever seen, in terms of its scope, its breadth,” says Tiziana Dearing, a relief expert and director of Harvard University’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.
As unbelievable as it may seem in a nation with no rival for wealth and military power, the extent of the Katrina disaster remains unclear days after the furious winds had passed. At press time, there were 110 confirmed fatalities in Mississippi, and Louisiana officials said the final death toll there could number in the thousands. If so, Katrina would rank as one of the deadliest US natural disasters.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed perhaps as many as 6,000 people. The 1900 Galveston hurricane resulted in upwards of 12,000 fatalities.
About 2.3 million people remained without power in a swath from Louisiana to Georgia. New Orleans was under martial law, with residents ordered to evacuate. Officials estimate the city will not be habitable for months, raising the eerie prospect of an American metropolis lying empty for a significant amount of time
In an editorial, the Monitor suggests that politicians have been getting a bad rap for the way they’ve handled this crisis:
So far, local, state, and national officials have shown a good measure of competence in handling Katrina before, during, and after it hit….
Because President Bush designated both states as disaster areas in advance of the storm, the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency could mobilize beforehand, setting up shelters and bringing water, ice, and food.
Rightly, the Bush administration recognized the storm’s ripple effect on oil, and temporarily waived key air-quality fuel standards to increase gas supplies after the storm damaged the Gulf’s petroleum infrastructure.
The Pentagon has also sprung into action with an unprecedented domestic joint task force, coordinating National Guard and active-duty forces across four states. Meanwhile, naval vessels and helicopters are on the way.
Indeed, at this writing troops were arriving — and had a “shoot to kill” order if they ran into looters…as Bush’s poll numbers continued to sink:
More troops arrived in New Orleans to stop looting and gunfire as residents went without food, water and medicine for a fourth day after Hurricane Katrina, potentially the most damaging storm in U.S. history.
U.S. President George W. Bush plans to visit the region today after the Senate authorized $10.5 billion in emergency aid last night. There were explosions at an oil-storage facility on the banks of the Mississippi River this morning near downtown New Orleans, where gunshots hampered rescue attempts yesterday.
Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, who has asked for 40,000 federal troops, told Cable News Network that military personnel will be arriving all day to combat lawlessness.
The troops “know how to shoot to kill … and I expect they will,” the governor told a news conference, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper.
The Bush administration’s response to the storm’s destruction has been criticized as slow, and his approval rating dropped to 41 percent, matching the lowest ever recorded, according to a poll today by CBS News.
Political retribution could be particularly intense in the case of New Orleans since not only was the handwriting on the wall, but it was clear the wall was ready to crumble BEFORE the storm.
As evidence of this, just read this amazing article in the Houston Chronicle ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN DEC. 2001 but republished today. Here’s the beginning of it:
New Orleans is sinking.
And its main buffer from a hurricane, the protective Mississippi River delta, is quickly eroding away, leaving the historic city perilously close to disaster.
So vulnerable, in fact, that earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.
The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
The New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all.
In the face of an approaching storm, scientists say, the city’s less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston.
Economically, the toll would be shattering.
Southern Louisiana produces one-third of the country’s seafood, one-fifth of its oil and one-quarter of its natural gas. The city’s tourism, lifeblood of the French Quarter, would cease to exist. The Big Easy might never recover.
And, given New Orleans’ precarious perch, some academics wonder if it should be rebuilt at all.
It’s been 36 years since Hurricane Betsy buried New Orleans 8 feet deep. Since then a deteriorating ecosystem and increased development have left the city in an ever more precarious position. Yet the problem went unaddressed for decades by a laissez-faire government, experts said.
There’s a lot more. Read the whole thing.Meanwhile, the Washington Post has this bittersweet profile of New Orlean’s mayor. Part of it:
His city is under water. There’s no electricity, no water to drink. Broken gas lines cause flames to erupt from filthy floodwaters. Mobs loot stores and exchange shots with police. Hungry people fight over food. Dead bodies float through the streets while the living huddle on rooftops, awaiting rescue.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin stares at the apocalyptic wreckage of his city from a window in his makeshift command post in the Hyatt hotel, which sits across a flooded street from City Hall. His wife and three children have been evacuated. He has sent most of his staff to higher ground in Baton Rouge. But he remains behind, like a captain determined to stay with his sinking ship.
“He’s gonna be there until this thing turns around,” says Don Hutchinson, the mayor’s director of economic development, speaking on a cell phone from Baton Rouge. “He’s showing the leadership a mayor should show.”
He’s not a politician, not really. Nagin, 49, was a cable TV executive at Cox Communications, a man with no previous political experience, when he beat out 14 candidates to win election as mayor in 2002. Back then, he was a fresh face in New Orleans politics, a young guy with a shaved head who promised to clean up a corrupt city.
And, as usual, the tragedy, drama, hope, and outrage is mirrored in local weblog posts, such as this small excerpt from the on-the-scene The Interdictor (which also offers video feeds):
Finally!
This convoy coming down the street is loaded with supplies. I see MREs and water and I assume ice.Ok, so the troops used to restore order went in first and now the supplies are coming for orderly distribution (I hope).
Hope is on the way for the people at the Convention Center. Finally.
12:00 pm
Here Come the Troops
Just saw 2 CH-53E Super Stallion Helicopters pass by overhead, and now on cam you can see what looks like a whole batallion of troops roll toward the Convention Center….I think it finally hit me when I was on our roof 27 floors up looking down at my city. This place will never be the same — and I don’t mean in that “can’t step into the same river twice” philosophical sense. I mean in the “We won’t even recognize the place” sense.
This place is completely coming apart. The hopelessness on the street breaks the heart. The old, the tired, the sick seem resigned to their presumed fate. Death.
I’m pretty much running out of words for my commentary. I’ll try to stick to just the facts.
Thanks so much for the moral support, guys. I only wish we could pass it on to the people who need it more than we do.
Wow
If you’re watching the feed, it’s incredible. Hard to believe the fire department is still viable. God bless them. I’m no expert on conflagrations, but I don’t think they’re gonna win this one. Hopefully they can contain it.It takes a spectacular kind of asshole to set a fire in this environment.
A lot of people are asking about our fuel situation. We have some, but we need more. We have a few days worth. We desperately need more. We’re coordinating now.
By the way, here comes some military on cam.
I tweaked the feed to try to help the people restreaming it.
The building you’re watching appeared to be some small hotel right behind Mother’s…
New Orleans-based People Get Ready, whose blogger managed to escape the storm:
In yesterday’s post, I characterized as “criminal incompetence,” the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers to prepare the levee system for anything more than a fast-moving category 3 hurricane. I am now revising that characterization, because “incompetence” suggests that the accused actually tried to do something to prevent the current disaster from unfolding.
Even worse than a failure of leadership, what is happening in New Orleans now can only be characterized as CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE!
While appreciating the fact that B. and I were able to get out of New Orleans before Katrina struck, the total chaos of armed thugs running the streets of New Orleans, on top of the levee disaster, and the utter failure to grasp the rescue and relief effort is a total fiasco.
Police being shot at? Rescuers being held at gunpoint? Looters breaking into homes up and down St. Charles Avenue?
Where are the troops? Why wasn’t any planning done to have boots on the ground immediately after the hurricane passed. I’m talking about the need for tens of thousands of troops to handle the multiple needs of rescue, relief, and security.
I am in a complete rage over this fiasco. To have survived the hurricane, and to see the situation deteriorate into a total cesspool “soggy version of the wild west” (as one friend called it) after Katrina passed, is putting me into a fit of absolute distress and anger.
I want my leaders to reflect that anger when they get in front of the cameras…..
I can’t continue this post any longer, since I’m now getting kicked out of the only wireless cafe I can find in Pensacola.
Please people – speak up so people can hear our voices. We are taking it day by day, trying to figure out what tomorrow will bring, but nobody making the decisions that are impacting our lives in very serious ways seems to get it.
Yet, amid the near-constant barrage of bad news surrounding Hurricane Katrina there is some TRULY GOOD NEWS HERE about ways Americans are helping (and ways you can help).