Katrina Ballerina
Not to seem harsh or negative minded but: any narrative of
the whole event has to admit of a comprehensive failure. The
first failure would be to adopt a mind set that would seek to deny
failure in order to avoid blame
White House Backpedals on Flood Control,
or to only look for problems once Katrina swirled into the Gulf of
Mexico and headed north. It was a failure to follow through from
problem identification and planning
The Man-Made Disaster - New York Times.
Reports and warnings were written and issued at all conceivable levels:
University studies, Corp of Engineers studies, City Government Studies,
environmental studies, journals
Scientific American: Drowning New Orleans and the popular press
THE SUNKEN CITY The New Yorker, newspapers
Feds' Disaster Planning Shifts Away From Preparedness,
FEMA knew storm's potential, Mayfield says, and television.
In the face of some of what is now being said, this was not a
"100 year event", a monster storm. Just a cat. 4 hurricane, that was
reduced to a cat. 3 shortly after crossing the gulf coast on the center
of the gulf's northern perimeter. It was down to a tropical storm by the
time it was 160 miles inland. There are formal parameters, I imagine,
on which such prediction is based, but it seems to me it might be wiser
to see this as a 50 or even 25 year event. Even less as New Orleans
situation becomes ever more precarious. This may not seem like much, but it
makes a tremendous difference to the final figure in a
risk/cost-benefit analysis.
All this represents a failure of society's, of our
government's, task of identifying problems and organizing
resources towards solution. It is an indication that some of the
nations fundamental priorities have gone astray. Large scale community
wide projects, particular for the public safety, such as defending
major urban areas inhabitants against disaster - this is why
governments exist. I've read some articles that suggested, that
the inundation of New Orleans was too much, on too large a scale to be
seriously contemplated. Too expensive too entrenched a problem to guard
against, evacuating too complex to organize. The costs of recovering
too immense to be imagined. I've read that there is super-fund
site (a special federal category of toxic waste site) in downtown New
Orleans. It's been soaking in water for a week. Information like this
lends credence to the idea that the disaster that happened, while not
unforeseen, had an ability to defeat practical consideration.
There was a failure to react in the face of immanent
catastrophe. A hesitation, an unpreparedness, a blase attitude
when decisions had to be made on natures timetable, not mans. The speed
at which water flows, a hurricane move; hours not days. Here was
crisis, a threat to human well-being, human life. The human ingenuity
of extreme moments, which can produce extraordinary efforts to create
order in the face of yawning chaos, was not seen for days. Arnold
Toynbee had an idea in his mid century work "a Study of History" that
moderate adversity will prompt a culture to new heights while extreme
adversity will paralyze or break it. With no solid institutional
back-bone no leadership
AlterNet: What's Bush Got To Do With It?, it was difficult for a response to coalesce
The Gulf Between Rhetoric and Reality. The institutional backbone should have been government
Newsview: Politicians Failed Storm Victims - AP.
At the local level it was seen there is a difference between ordering
an evacuation and having one happen. Aside from transportation problems
(studies had identified what portion of New Orleans residents did not
have access to automobiles). No one seems to have asked about the
alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals or the merely ornery, anti-social
and non-cooperative who would not leave. Training exercises which are
where the various levels of first responders (for whom it is practice
not theory) learn their roles, learn who they interact with, and
identify coordination problems. These across the nation have
tended to be focused on terrorism scenarios. Apparently in 2000 and
2004 such exercises that dealt with storms were held but did not include levees failing in
their scripts. The extremity of the situation overwhelmed local police
fire and rescue departments.
At the Federal level as many have commented on bureaucratic
reorganization seems to have hamstrung FEMA by folding it into the
Dept. of Homeland Security
Department of Homeland Screw-Up - What is the Bush administration doing? By Tim Naftali and saddling it with the burden of being a patronage outpost
Destroying FEMA.
Many critical projects were said to be starved of funding to feed the
war in Iraq. This is unlikely to be disproved by facts. On NPRs Weekend
Edition a person being interviewed complained that on FEMA's first list
of authorized emergency organizations new and untested "faith-based"
humanitarian subcontractors seemed to have displaced many regular and
experienced ones (she did say it was quickly expanded, thereafter). As well two thirds of the national guard not just in
Louisiana, but in Texas Mississippi, and Alabama are out of
country. these national guard troops traditionally a Governors
main line of defense in restoring order also represent significant
portions of police and fire departments in many municipalities affected.
What worked: the success of the National Guards and the U S
military when they arrived on the scene in sufficient numbers. These
are remarkably efficient and robust instituions. This underscores the
need that existed for a national response. Our federal system jumps
from national to states, then to county and municipal. Only about half the
states are large enough to qualify as regional entities with multiple
major municipal areas. Katrina's hurricaine force winds spanned over
200 miles wide and spread across the coastlines of three states. The
Multi state assistance compact was created specifically to deal with
such phenomenon, Though in the moment of emergency it being a
cooperative program, there was confusion and hesitation in invoking it.
There was a particular failure of technology in the collapse of the telecommunication grid, which was surprising fragile
Communications Networks Fail Disaster Area Residents.
Microwave telephony was more robust, power for cell phones was its weak
link. Consumer internet dependant on electrical power as well as phone
or DSL lines was not a factor in the affected areas which seemed
starved for information throughout the week, though it did play a role
in disseminating infornmation to and from the periphery (first rule of
hurricanes, buy batteries).
The disaster also revealed to the whole world America's failure to deal with poverty and racism
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | New Orleans crisis shames Americans.
A great deal has been said about the implicit deap and embedded racism,
not only in how the response has organized itself in fits and starts,
but more in the the weight of the impact falling among the social
classes
Anger rises among Mississippi's poor after Katrina and color line
Katrina's Unequal Toll.
One of the least but most telling incidents were the book-end comments
by the President in Mississippi talking in light upbeat tones about he
will sit on the porch of good ol' boy Trent Lotts house - when it gets
rebuilt. And Dennis Hastert (R-IL), Speaker of the house, questioning
why anyone would think that New Orleans was going to be rebuilt
Denny Hastert's Dark Calculus.
In the middle of last week John Edwards wrote a post on Josh
Marshall's still somewhat new community site Talking Points Memo Cafe
(TPM Cafe). It was a reprise of his main campaign theme
Two Americas- John Edwards - TPM Cafe.
In the comments to the post someone noted that salient feature of
wealth in this society is the extent to which at both extremes it is
largely hidden - invisible. To which I would add distant. Beyond the
reach of the middle class of bureaucratic mangers, and law enactors to
change easily. There are those who welcome this who welcome the burden
lifted by invisibility of poverty, the clock of vast wealth, and the
ease with which both can be forgotten.
There is a failure that can be seen in our fundamental
approach to nature. To always attempt to subdue or defeat nature to
treat it as the an-ethical to our progress. Entropy is the dissapation
of order and energy. It is the philosophical point against which
mankinds energy is directed. Nature is seen as, at best, the rival of
mankind against entropy, and at worst the face of chaos itself. Nature
has never been regarded by the American charactor as an ally, but as a
challenge, an affront.
There is hope through the failure. The media lately the
laughable shadow of a free press, seems to have rediscovered its
mandate and purpose
The Rebellion of the Talking Heads.
The political culture will not be able soon to pretend it does not know
the extent of the United States enduring problems
OUR OPINIONS An open letter to the President. A key difference
between this and 11 Sep.t 2001. Is the lack of a role for
manichaean good and evil, and subsequant political use in removing the
problem from the constructive realm of human affairs. It will
lead to a deeper more honest understanding of ourselves. We may
rediscover the Organizing priniciple of a true community. One of the
last things I read on this before starting to write this was David
Brooks second column on this (first was
The Storm After the Storm) NYT column on Sunday
The Bursting Point - New York Times:
"The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you
protect the vulnerable - was trampled[.]" I agree David, but why wait
til there is a crisis?
10:19:33 PM  ;;
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