Dawn Ritch, Contributor
AMERICANS ARE from Mars, the rest of us are from Venus. Quoting them directly, The Sunday Times reported that, the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana, deliberately withheld essential hurricane supplies from the poor of New Orleans, prior to Hurricane Katrina.
The officials knew that the city would flood disastrously, and wanted to clean it as quickly as possible as soon afterwards. It was therefore decided at the local and state level not to make them too comfortable, so that they would be forced to evacuate.
When the hurricane was about to hit, and as I watched the CNN live coverage, I wondered 'Evacuate where, and who picks up the tab?' One of those who decided to tough it out in his own house, like 15,000 others in New Orleans, asked a CNN reporter "What happens when my money runs out?" All perfectly reasonable questions under the circumstances.
SERIOUS PUBLIC ORDER
Evacuation is the second most serious public order, after the declaration of a state of war. New Orleans is below sea level; the levees were built to withstand a category 3 and Katrina was a category 5. This was public knowledge, yet even President Bush said he was surprised by the scale of the devastation. And this while graves in that city were put on stilts a hundred years ago.
Only when Hurricane Rita strengthened to a Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico, just 24 days after Katrina struck, were U.S. public officials telling evacuees to pack water and food. Not strongly enough however, because evacuees ran out of both, over the 18 hours spent in their cars crawling out of Houston and Galveston. Plenty of them didn't even have a full tank of gas. So they ran out and helped to ease along a gridlock of monumental proportions.
BETTER JOB
The Most Honourable P. J. Patterson Prime Minister of Jamaica could have done a better job. He would have told the New Orleans poor that they are going to flood like rats streaming up to the attic. His government would try to come and get them when they could. In the meantime, they were to practice standard hurricane procedures. Store lots of drinking water, fill every available container, cut trees, get lanterns, flashlights, tin food, keep matches dry, and listen to battery-operated radio. There'll be no T.V. tonight, and there's nobody to sue about it. It's a hurricane.
Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas, got a hurricane a hundred years ago. But nobody could have reasonably expected that a Category 5 would drive up the ass of the United States right through the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Hurricanes are primarily a Caribbean phenomenon. They certainly don't threaten New York because it's too far north, yet one almost did this year. The Weather Channel said last week we only have four letters of the alphabet left to name them. The reporter didn't say that we'll just start at "A" all over again, if needs be. I guess the channel was trying to sugar-coat the pill.
There was no rush to pick up the dead bodies in New Orleans. That was part of the local strategy to make the city uncomfortable for those hold-outs from evacuation. They had a line of ambulances lined up on a highway outside the super dome, accessible by dry land, but nobody told the occupants inside. When federal help came in the form of national troops and U.S. Marines they still didn't pick up the dead bodies. They were taking their own sweet time about that. When asked about this by the BBC World TV, their reply was they weren't "tasked" with the job. Another soldier told the same network that they had been instructed not to give any more water to those (stubbornly) remaining in the city.
Of course the Rev. Jesse Jackson couldn't resist an opportunity to cloud the issue. He said that the people leaving the city were evacuees and not refugees. He said it was race prejudice to call them the latter, because one couldn't be a refugee in one's own country.
This is rubbish, both because the people were going out-of-state and because their homes may never again be habitable, and their jobs may have disappeared forever. Most will have to start all over again.
FRIGHTENING SIGHT
Frightened by the sight of so much American poverty on their own monitors, CNN last week decided to report on what had happened to the evacuees from a hurricane last year elsewhere on the Gulf Coast. They found them in a 500 strong federal trailer park with not a tree in sight, put down in neat rows with military precision. The nearest convenience store was 7 miles away. There was a lot of tension and fights in the park, and the police were constantly having to go out there.
These "evacuees" get their trailers rent-free for 18 months, with four months remaining. Very few have found jobs, the commute is expensive, and nobody has any money saved over a year later. They were all mainly white. One of them said it's not like she's not grateful, but ...
It seems to me that Americans need to get back some of their pioneering spirit. The U.S. federal government can't just do everything or foot every bill any president or huckstering politician cares to dream up.
Either historical New Orleans will have to be abandoned, or the levees rebuilt to withstand a Category 5 hurricane. Were the latter to take place it is difficult to see how the poor would be able to move back there. Only gentrification could pay for the clean-up and repair. Only businesses and the well-off could afford the taxes to live in New Orleans. Prior to the hurricane it was 70 per cent black, and 40 per cent dirt poor. So there are rocky days ahead, and Jesse Jackson will want to dust off his mitre.
Nobody is going to want to tell any of these people, black or white, to get some backbone, and start building with reinforced steel. In a place as over-regulated as the United States, it's amazing that they seem to have no building code.
