Hurricane Katrina

This entry was originally going to be a reply to Mish's thoughts on the whole thing, but it got a bit long, so rather than clog up her blog, I thought I'd come back here and clog up all of your Friends pages instead.

One of the three most likely disasters to hit America, according to a FEMA report in about 2000, was a hurricane ploughing into New Orleans.

(Another of the three was a terrorist attack on New York. No one mentions the third - at a guess, I'd say The Big One dropping California into the Pacific Ocean.)

But for the past few years, funding has been dragged away from the Louisiana/Mississippi anti-flood defences and thrown into, yes, you guessed it, defence, and more specifically, Afghanistan and Iraq. (I'm not getting into a discussion about the rights and wrongs of either war, so don't even try and start. The wars are fact, and the money had to come from somewhere - unfortunately, some of it came from flood defences.)

Now 31% of the US's oil refineries are out of action, all the rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are damaged, and gasoline has hit the $3 per gallon mark (which apparently is pretty high for the US).

And Bush is being criticised for seeming not only out of touch, but uncaring. This isn't just the usual suspects; conservative American media have been criticising him for his handling of the disaster. (Having seen his interview, I'd say, yeah, he seems to think that smiling, saying everything'll turn out alright, and that, yes, lots of people have died, but there's a massive relief effort underway, is a good way of handling the situation. To be honest, I think he's slipping into his 9/11, "Oh god, oh god, they said this job would be easy. Why's it all going so wrong?" state of shock.)

Anyone remember how his dad took a lot of political damage for appearing to care more about the first Gulf war than he did about Hurricane Andrew hitting the US? No, me neither, but I was about ten at the time - although I do remember Andrew - but several commentators are comparing the two events; the problem with being the son of a former president, I suppose.

And, despite this being the biggest humanitarian crisis the US has seen in almost a hundred years (at a guess, I'd say the news were referring to the earthquake of 1906), and apparently the biggest aid effort the US has ever seen, there are American citizens trapped in a submerged American city, starving or dying of dehydration on their rooftops.

The guy on ITV news said he'd seen better relief efforts in Africa, when the US is the wealthiest country in the world.

Others have drawn the Africa parallels as well, and it's not hard to see why. On Channel 4, someone (one of many) has pointed out that the vast majority of those left in New Orleans (and presumably who died) are poor and black, and referred to Katrina bringing to the surface "America's dirtiest open secret", the abject poverty in which its poorest citizens live.

And of course, poor people can't afford cars. I've only just managed to get one for myself - if I weren't receiving a training bursary and student loan, I couldn't have afforded that. And I have a part-time job in a country with a half-decent welfare system.

The mayor waited for 24 hours before ordering an evacuation of the city. There was no mass mobilisation of public transport. The National Guard didn't turn up to evacuate entire streets in the back of camo-painted trucks. Then Katrina hit and killed the poorest people of the city, who didn't have any way of leaving.

The BBC quote Bush as saying, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees," which is either a lie or it shows yet another failure in forward-planning by the Bush administration (or both - there were complaints before the storm about the lack of funding for flood defences in New Orleans). It's one thing to fail to predict how a country is going to react to being freed from a dictator's tyranny by an invading foreign force, but it's another to not anticipate the collapse of a wall in the face of a hurricane, when hundreds of thousands of Americans live on the other side of it.

And don't forget, Katrina veered away from New Orleans. A city has been destroyed, dozens more towns have been flattened, hundreds (or, more likely, thousands) of people have died, and this wasn't even the worst case scenario.

And no one was prepared.