By Ben Wisner,
August 30, 2005
There are some very disturbing things coming out of New Orleans and
small towns to the East along the Gulf Coast into the state of
Mississippi. People over time have been put at risk because of
economic disparities and the priority given to the petro-chemical
and gambling/ casino development as well as the retirement home
industry. Destruction of the wetlands, greed driven land use and
location decisions in a laissez faire environment, disregard for the
poor all are evident as Katrina made land fall.
People have discussed the effects of a direct hit by a large
hurricane on New Orleans since hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Camille
in 1969. In the aftermath of Camille, during which some 400 people
died in Mississippi, documentation of racial discrimination in the
allocation of recovery resources was first documented, leading to a
U.S. Congressional investigation.
Has the social, political, and economic situation changed since
then?
There was no plan to use the trains or some other form of mass
transport to evacuate the indigent and those without private cars or
money. They were herded like displaced persons (which they were)
into the Superdome, whose roof was then ripped off in the wind. I
saw images of these refugees, mostly black, being herded by armed
national guardsmen who yelled at them about not allowing guns and
drugs inside: very humiliating, not at all shelter with dignity and
respect as the Red Cross tries to provide.
One Louisiana based geographer has tried over the past year since
hurricane Ivan to get officials to develop a contingency plan to
evacuate the indigent and those without private vehicles on the
trains that run through New Orleans.
His
suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. A church based pilot project
also began after Ivan in 2004 that partnered church members without
access to vehicles with those that do. This, however, was an
independent effort to fill the vacuum in policy at City, State, and
Federal level.
Hurricane Ivan last year should have caused a re-doubling of
precautionary planning. The night Ivan approached, 20,000 low-income
people without private vehicles sheltered in their homes below sea
level. A direct hit would have drowned them. A US Army Corps of
Engineers computer simulation has calculated that 65,000 could die
in the city, in the event of a direct hit by a slow-moving category
3 hurricane. Fortunately, Ivan veered away from the city at the last
moment, but still killed 25 people elsewhere in the US south. At
present there is no plan for the public evacuation of low-income
residents who do not own cars other than the questionable shelter
and assured stress and humiliation provided by the "shelter of last
resort," the Superdome.
This time, too, things were not as bad as they could have been
because of a small westward turn that placed the dangerous Northeast
edge of the storm over Mississippi. Will authorities finally get the
message and do serious planning for the needs of the poor? Could
Katrina be the beginning of demands from below for social justice in
the face of the present social and spatial distribution of risk?
Time will tell, but with so much of the U.S. Federal Emergency
Management Agencies resources devoted to planning for terrorism and
with cities like New Orleans struggling with financial burdens that
neo-liberal ideology leaves them to sort out on their own, I am not
optimistic.
Ben Wisner is a political scientist
specializing in the study of disaster response.
