More Katrina

300 'battle-tested' National Guardsmen are being sent into New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders, to deal with lawlessness and looting.

The BBC: I spoke to a man who used our phone and asked him how he was doing for food. He said that those in his apartment are working together to gather supplies.

They had to loot Wal-Mart and take what they could on the first day, he said.

"We hated doing it but we just know that we've got no food, we had to do it," he said.

But this man was clearly not a criminal. It's a very fine line between what people actually need and what people are doing out of the fact that they're poor and they want more.

Unless these shoot-to-kill soldiers (Territorial Army) are distinguishing between people carrying boxes of apples and those carrying television sets, innocent people are going to die.

The situation in the Superdome is abominable. A police officer on duty at the stadium: "People were raped in there. People were killed in there. We had multiple riots."

Yesterday's report that the evacuation of the Superdome was halted because someone inside the stadium shot at the helicopter has been repeated at several hospitals around the city. A National Guardsman was shot and wounded, but not seriously.

Does make you wonder, doesn't it? What insane fucker takes a gun into a fucking refugee camp? (You could say, "The guys on the door should have been searching people," but that would have been impossible, what with the sheer number of people trying to get in there within a limited amount of time.)

BBC: John Graydon, a British man whose son is one of thousands trapped inside the Superdome stadium in New Orleans, said he feared they could come to harm there:

"Their safety, they believe, is in danger, because there's a large element of bullies actually within the dome. One of the officers did actually get shot and it woke my son up, which frightened the life out of him.

"And when you queue up for your water, the biggest get it first and by the time the ordinary people - including the old, as well as my son - get to the front, they get turned away because they haven't got any more left."

The Superdome is short of food and water, and the city's convention centre, another major refuge point, is in a similar situation.

There are gun battles in the street between police and looters, and between rival gangs of looters themselves.

The head of the New Orleans emergency operation has denounced the US relief effort as a 'national disgrace'.

BBC, quoting a woman trying to leave the city: "You got a lot of people that didn't have a quarter to, say, catch a bus to get out of this town. And the government did nothing."

BBC again: Another woman stranded in New Orleans told TV reporters: "People are dying, they're dying. Babies are dying, there's an old lady over there dead in the chair. People are dying. We're starving out here."

A man added: "You got a three-week-old infant out here. How is a three-week-old infant going to survive out here with no milk, no water?"


Bush has described the hurricane as a "temporary disruption".

A BBC analysis of the situation commented that: That was an off-the-cuff remark which his speechwriters, always so careful to try to reach for a phrase which meets the needs of the moment, must have groaned at.

In these situations, language provides leadership and the words "temporary disruption" would not have come from the lips of a Kennedy or a Reagan.

The area affected by the hurricane is approximately the size of the UK.


The same analysis (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4207306.stm) had this to say on whether the devastation could have been prevented:

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, its printing presses under water, and operating online only, said: "No-one can say they didn't see it coming.

"Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

That newspaper had previously written a series of articles about whether federal funding for flood protection was sufficient.

Already, Mr Bush's political enemies have begun to attack him on this issue.

A former official in the Clinton administration, Sydney Blumenthal, has written in Der Spiegel: "In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the US, including a terrorist attack on New York City.

"But by 2003, the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war."

It remains to be seen whether any extra funding would have made any difference. For example, would the money have come through in time, and would it have been spent on those places which gave way?

And now the Clinton administration, too, is also being accused of failing to fund adequate flood defences.


Should New Orleans even be there?

For those of us who live in temperate climates, it is easy to forget the huge efforts needed to protect cities and communities in places where nature is not benign.

The levees or dykes which protected, or were designed to protect, New Orleans were the equivalent to engineers of the Great Wall of China.

There have been innumerable warnings.

Last year, the National Geographic magazine wrote about a disaster simulation which predicted that 50,000 people might die in the city in a Category Five Hurricane, which Katrina was for a time.

"The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing," the article said. "Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk."

"It's not if it will happen," University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland was quoted as saying. "It's when."

And National Public Radio had a very prescient documentary which interviewed Walter Maestri, head of public emergencies in Jefferson County or Parish.

After the simulation exercise, he wrote something in large letters across a map of the affected area: "KYAGB - kiss your ass goodbye," it said.

But the answer to the question of New Orleans' future is that just as San Francisco was rebuilt, so will New Orleans be.

The levees will be made bigger and stronger. American engineers will not give in. They tamed the Mississippi on its run to the sea. They aim to tame it there as well.


Thought for the day: Isn't it retarded to build a city below sea level, close to the coast?

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.