This page has information and links related
specifically to Hurricane Katrina which hit the US Gulf Coast in August
2005.
Amazing Grace by Anne Lowe (the story of a volunteer for Common Ground in New Orleans in January 2006) (pdf)
Isolated Native American Communities Struggle in the Aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Isolated and marginalized in normal times, the plight of Native Americans in the deep bayous of Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is extreme. Click here to stream a video documentary by Mexico based community video maker, Greg Berger and to read a transcript of an interview with him: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/24/0740237
Findings from the School of American Research
Advanced Seminar on Rethinking Frameworks, Methodologies, and the Role of
Anthropology in Development Induced Displacement and Resettlement. (Oct 1,
2005) (download
Word file 32.5kb)
TED STEINBERG "Opinion: A Natural Disaster, a
Man-Made Catastrophe, and a Human Tragedy" Friday, September 9, 2005. The
Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/free/2005/09/2005090906n.htm
Go
here for:
"Noticing
gender (or not) in disasters" by Joni Seager (A version of this essay
is forthcoming in Geoforum and appeared on September 14 2005 in the
Chicago Tribune.)
Go
here for:"Katrina Rebuilding -- Hire locally & Pay
living wage" submitted by Kris Petersen to the
Gender and Disaster Network (Download
Word file here 48kb)
Go
here for: New Orleans and Looting. Some thoughts from Terry Cannon (download
Word file 36.5 kb)
Go
here for: "Power to
the victims of New Orleans. With the poor gone, developers are planning to
gentrify the city" by Naomi Klein. Friday September 9, 2005, The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1566200,00.html
Go
here for: "Displaced
New Orleans Community Demands Action, Accountability and Initiates A
Peoples Hurricane Fund" Community Labor United, September 6th, 2005. U.S.
Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=9094
Go
here for: Special Report from the The Times-Picayune
"It's only a matter of time before South Louisiana takes a direct hit from
a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow
more vulnerable every day."
Five part series published June 23-27, 2002, You can see the complete
report at:
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/?/washingaway/ forwarded by
Alberto Delgado
Go
here for: "Left to sink or swim" by Gary Younge. Monday
September 5, 2005, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1562737,00.html
Go
here for:
"What if Hurricane Ivan Had Not Missed New Orleans?" by Shirley Laska
Natural Hazards Observer
Vol. XXIX No. 2 November 2004
Disasters Waiting to Happen . . . Sixth in a Series
http://www.colorado.edu/hazards/o/nov04/nov04c.html
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina,
author Shirley Laska can be reached at
2005RSS@louisiana.edu
Go
here for: Kevin Murray UUSC
weblog 05 September 2005
"NOLA's Free Market Evacuation"
http://www.uusc.org/blog/hotwire.html
Go
here for: The People's
Hurricane Fund
http://www.qecr.org/Public_QECR.nsf/PublicLinkIDs/Public2AA857E1647E8AE185257074003D5B82?OpenDocument&justframe&style¬itle
Go
here for: NEW ORLEANS'S
HURRICANE EVACUATION PLAN: "YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN" By Bruce Nolan, Staff
writer New Orleans Times-Picayne, July 24, 2005
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/new_orleanss_hu.html
Go
here for: "Intelligence Failure" by Pielke Jr., R. |
Environment September 04, 2005
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/environment/000555intelligence_failure.html
Go
here for: "In the News: Katrina and People with
Disabilities" Compiled by ADA Watch/NCDR
http://www.adawatch.org/
Thanks to Todd Reynolds for sending this compilation to RADIX (download
Word file 37kb)
Go
here for "A Hurricane of Consequences" by Stephen Zunes [from Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/story/25041/4 September 2005
Go
here for ReliefWeb's Hurricane
Katrina page: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/dbc.nsf/doc108?OpenForm&emid=TC-2005-000144-USA&rc=2
Go here
for: Destroying FEMA by Eric
Holdeman (25kb), Tuesday, August 30, 2005. washingtonpost.com
Go here
for: Selected comments on Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) from email lists
Compiled and updated by Ilan Kelman (dated 7 September 2005)
Download
Word file !!Very large file - 898kb
Hurricane Katrina: Winds of Change?
(download
Word file 46 kb)
“The U.S. does not need higher levees; it needs another civil rights
movement.”
Dr. Ben Wisner, Oberlin College, Ohio
bwisner@igc.org
Revised & expanded 5 September 2005
What are the lessons we can draw from the human catastrophe taking place
in New Orleans and small towns to the East along the Gulf Coast into the
state of Mississippi into Alabama?
Scale and International Solidarity
The scale of the disaster and its knock on effects is enormous. However,
we should not forget that at this precise time 1.6 million people have
been displaced in China by a typhoon and flooding, while only a short
while ago the megacity of Mumbai was engulfed by monsoon rains that its
drainage system could not handle. Global sympathy for the U.S. following
the Trade Tower disaster turned to ill ease and puzzlement when after one,
two, even three years the U.S. government projected the image of a
uniquely wounded polity, and it was this very monomania concerning
terrorism that so weakened the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
that preparedness for and response to hurricane Katrina was weakened.
That said, now refugees from Katrina’s impacts are spread over 20 U.S.
states, where emergency declarations allow flow of special funds to the
host communities from the federal government. Texas alone has received
over 200,000.
60 countries have offered the U.S. assistance. It took 5 days for U.S.
leaders even to acknowledge this outpouring of compassion. Even then the
offers of 1,100 doctors from Cuba and a million of barrels of oil from
Venezuela were arrogantly spurned. Bangladesh offered $1 million in
assistance and Afghanistan $100,000. (See “Disaster Diplomacy”
http://www.disasterdiplomacy.org/index.html).
Cause and Effect
Along the Gulf of Mexico people 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.
The human tragedy taking place in New Orleans and in many other, less
known and unknown communities along the Gulf Coast has deep roots in
neo-liberal ideology that favors lax regulations and return to investment
with little concern for the social and environmental consequences. Some
1,500 square miles (3,885 km sq) of wetland has been lost over the past
few decades that would have reduced the height of the storm surge
affecting New Orleans. Contamination from the petro-chemical complexes and
transfer points concentrated on shore and off shore has contributed to the
death of wetlands. Meanwhile, low income, Black families have been trapped
in poverty by the “downsizing” of the federal state. That has meant less
money for education, for small businesses, and for decent, low cost
housing. 37 million people live in poverty in the U.S. – up for the four
year in a row. Many of these live in the U.S. South, where the anti-union
environment and less stringent environmental and land use regulation have
attracted chemical industries. The myth of idyllic seaside retirement has
been sold to the elderly in the U.S., and retirement homes have sprouted
where more of the Black working poor serve as low wage care givers. Casino
gambling has also added non-union, low wage employment – a desperate last
resort for communities that are losing their traditional fishing based
economies due to over fishing and gross pollution of the Gulf of Mexico.
The root causes of the catastrophe triggered by Katrina are deep. An
excellent history of Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural
Disaster in America was published by Case Western Reserve historian, Ted
Steinberg in 2000. In Latin America disasters such as hurricane Mitch in
1998 are seen as the result of the accumulation over years of failed
development and mal-development. The same must be said of Katrina’s
effects.
Race and Class in America
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 256 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. The most
recent census showed that in a city 87% Black and 30% poor, there were
112,000 households without private vehicles. This was known, but no
provision was made for transport for them out of the city to smaller, well
run shelters such as those in Baton Rouge. They were herded like displaced
persons (which they were) into the Superdome, whose roof was then ripped
open in several place by the wind. I saw images of these refugees, mostly
black, being herded by armed national guardsmen who barked and yelled at
them. The scene was very humiliating, not at all shelter with dignity and
respect as the Red Cross tries to provide. As the days wore on the air
conditioning failed, bathroom facilities became filthy, water and food ran
short. By the time the decision was made to move these people to the
Astrodome and other shelters in Texas and other states, conditions failed
to meet international standards for shelter (SPHERE standards:
www.sphereproject.org). There
were also very limited facilities for people in wheel chairs.
All of this would have been avoided if at least a year ago, after the
experience with hurricane Ivan, authorities had taken the needs of the
poor and indigent in New Orleans seriously.
(See
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KATRINA_SUPERDOME?SITE=KING&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&SECTION=HOME
on conditions in the Superdome and also
http://www.polythane.com/library/superd.htm on the history of problems
with the Superdome roof -- something else that officials in New Orleans
seem to have overlooked).
Preparedness and Prevention
Professor Kent Mathewson, a geographer based at Louisiana State University
in Baton Rouge 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. (On the
destruction of FEMA by terrorism monomania of the Bush administration see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901445.html).
FEMA and other federal agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers as
well as academics and professionals have for a long time considered a
direct hit on New Orleans by a slow moving category 3 hurricane or
stronger hurricane to be a worst case scenario (see, among other sources,
Ben Wisner et al., At Risk. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, p. 248 and the
World Disaster Report 2005 to be launched in October, 2005 by the
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies).
Nevertheless, planning for such an event was insufficient, and money for
study, maintenance, and upgrading of New Orleans’ levee system was cut in
the years leading up to this disasters. Similarly, National Guard troops
in Mississippi and Louisiana and their heavy vehicles that could have
helped with immediate search and rescue and relief were deployed in Iraq.
What is to be Done?
This is in no way an “act of God.” In order to learn from this event and
prevent even worse ones in a future likely to have even more frequent and
more intense hurricanes (due to global warming), policy makers must admit
the dead end laissez faire capitalism has let us all into.
Non-governmental organizations, faith communities, and activist groups
need to mobilize the mass of the population in the affected area to see
themselves not as victims of Nature, but victims of a late phase of
globalizing capitalism. The affected people will then be in a position to
see themselves as agents of their own well being and history and victims
no longer as they demand social change.
In concrete terms, there is one project that seems to me a priority.
Many researchers and practitioners all over the world have experience
efforts to get recovery planning to occur in a participatory and inclusive
manner. Women and people
of color and people living with disabilities need to be part of the
process in the post-Katrina situation. There was a civil society led
struggle over recovery planning in Nicaragua following Mitch. Famously the
people in the Peruvian town where anthropologist Tony Oliver-Smith lived
refused to move after the 1970s catastrophe there (see his book, The
Martyred City). Betty Morrow and Walt Peacock know about the struggle by
women to get a place at the planning table in Miami in 1992 (described in
their book, Hurricane Andrew). In May 2005, an International Recovery
Platform was created in Kobe, Japan, with the purpose of pooling and
making available the best of the world’s recovery experience.
We need to tap this rich global and U.S. and make a digest of this
experience available in a useful form for NGOs, faith groups like the
Louisiana Interfaith Council, advocates like Robert Bullard's network to
expose and fight environmental racism (http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/ ).
The U.S. does not need higher levees; it needs another civil rights
movement.
*** END ***
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