Who Will Pay for New Orleans?
by James Norton
After every disaster, there comes an urge to blame someone — anyone — for the carnage and chaos.
It's civilized, and thoughtful, and counterintuitive and decent to say: "Let's not point fingers, let's not fire anybody — let's just work to fix the problem."
In the case of Hurricane Katrina and the drowning of New Orleans, it's also daft as hell.
Not only is it important to blame people for the continuing human carnage and social collapse in Louisiana and Mississippi, it is important to blame them immediately. Right now. As the bodies rot in the street. As houses lay sprawled out, collapsed from the pressure of flood water. As babies go without formula and thugs roam unsecured sections of New Orleans.
As Americans are viscerally aware of the consequences of sloppy, irresponsible, careless, selfish planning.
It's important because there are people who are responsible — people at the federal level who were warned that a catastrophic hurricane strike on New Orleans was a real and present danger, yet starved the city of money and National Guard troops in order to authorize a massive tax cut for the super-rich — and persecute a disastrous and unnecessary war in Iraq.
Via Daily Kos and the Houston Chronicle:
[In early 2001] the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) ranked the potential [hurricane] damage to New Orleans as among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.
And yet, President Bush said we couldn't have predicted that the levees would fail.
MSNBC has an article that lays it out clearly:
In comments on Thursday, President George W. Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees."
But Louisiana State University engineer Joseph Suhayda and others have warned for years that defenses could fail. In 2002, the New Orleans Times Picayune published a five-part series on "The Big One" examining what might happen if they did.
It predicted that 200,000 people or more would be unwilling or unable to heed evacuation orders and thousands would die, that people would be housed in the Superdome, that aid workers would find it difficult to gain access to the city as roads became impassable, as well as many other of the consequences that actually unfolded after Katrina hit this week.
The Republicans controlling government knew that the levees of New Orleans were built for a hurricane of Category 3. And they also knew that hurricanes go all the way up to Category 5. (Katrina clocked in at a flagging Category 4 when it came down upon the Big Easy.) And they cut funding anyway.
And what about "Homeland Security?"
At the moment, this country is supposed to be braced for a catastrophic terrorist attack on a major urban area — an attack for which no warning can be expected. If terrorists mount such an attack, FEMA and the federal government will have to rush in and bail us out.
In New Orleans, not only did the government have years of general warning ("Hey, morons! This city is a coastal bowl, and will fill right up if a bad hurricane hits it!"), we had two days of very specific and urgent warning.
Two days to stock food and address sanitation concerns at the Superdome. Two days to secure landing positions with National Guard troops and/or police officers so that helicopters could land safely without being attacked by mobs. Two days to position troops in vulnerable neighborhoods. Two days to end a lazy, silly presidential vacation studded with Medicare-promoting events that went on right through the hurricane itself. It wasn't until Wednesday that the president deigned to grapple with the carnage in New Orleans — by flying leisurely over it in his personal jet.
On a similar, PR-friendly note: The Washington Monthly writes about Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu melting down over a concerted effort to repair a levee that was nothing more than an elaborate backdrop for a staged Bush press event. It also notes a report from a German TV news team about an equally ersatz "food distribution point." FEMA's ability to react to a disaster? Not so hot. The White House's ability to create faux "news events" to cover its ass? Far better.
The New York Times wrote this week about the elaborate PR strategy rolled out by Karl Rove and his communications director, Dan Bartlett — a strategy that has nothing to do with actually helping people, and everything to do with being "visible" and blaming Louisiana state officials for the slow response.
Someone should pay for this.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Dennis Hastert took the opportunity to suggest that we not rebuild New Orleans at all. Hundreds of thousands of people displaced, a culture on the ropes and a Republican leader suggests that we should just compound what the hurricane has done — turn New Orleanians into permanent refugees, extinguish their homeland, wipe Crescent City from the face of the Earth.
The US is one of the richest countries in the world, and we have billions of dollars for lots of projects — nuclear weapons, "missile defense" that doesn't work, invasions of Middle East countries. We also, therefore, have billions of dollars to give the people of New Orleans another chance to make the city work. To build up levees that can stand up to a Category 5 storm. To offer citizens a fresh start.
The GOP is a party that likes to talk a lot about Christian compassion — how about compassion for an American city that needs help to get back onto its feet? Granted — New Orleans is a dangerous place to have a city. The same could be said for earthquake targets such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, or terrorism targets such as New York and Washington. We don't abandon those cities because they're vulnerable, or consign them to oblivion if we have the resources to rebuild them. We help them to their feet, and protect them from future harm.
In fact, the Bush administration and Republican Congress owe a debt to the people of New Orleans for failing to protect them. For somewhere between $2.5 and $14 billion (estimates vary), the levees of New Orleans could have been reinforced to protect against a Category 5 hurricane. At the moment, we're looking at up to $100 billion worth of damage.
That would've been a good investment.
According to an article from the June 8, 2004 edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune:
For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade.
[....]
"I needed $11 million this year, and I got $5.5 million," [Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al] Naomi said. "I need $22.5 million next year to do everything that needs doing, and the first $4.5 million of that will go to pay four contractors who couldn't get paid this year."
Editor and Publisher lays it out even more clearly:
Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA [Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project] dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.
People — and a great, dignified, culturally significant city — are dying. The time to affix blame is right now, when people care, when the damage is raw, when action — taken via Congress, or public opinion — is still possible, and the spin hasn't set in.
People have died all up and down the Gulf Coast, and most specifically and crucially in New Orleans. It's simplistic to blame the federal government for everything; policies going back for years, and local officials — the mayor of New Orleans, the governor and senators of Louisiana — must be evaluated and held accountable. But as the floodwaters begin to recede, one thing appears clear: Heads should roll in Washington.
E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.
