After the Criticism of His Disastrous Handling the Katrina
CATASTROPHIC ECONOMICS
The predators of New Orleans
After the criticism of his disastrous handling the Katrina
disaster, President George Bush promises a reconstruction
programme of $200bn for areas destroyed by the hurricane.
But the first and biggest beneficiaries will be businesses
that specialise in profiting from disaster, and have already
had lucrative contracts in Iraq; they will gentrify New
Orleans at the expense of its poor, black citizens.
By MIKE DAVIS
THE tempest that destroyed New Orleans was conjured out of
tropical seas and an angry atmosphere 250km offshore of the
Bahamas. Labelled initially as "tropical depression 12" on
23 August, it quickly intensified into "tropical storm
Katrina", the eleventh named storm in one of the busiest
hurricane seasons in history. Making landfall near Miami on
24 August, Katrina had grown into a small hurricane,
category one on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with 125
km/h winds that killed nine people and knocked out power to
one million residents.
Crossing over Florida to the Gulf of Mexico where it
wandered for four days, Katrina underwent a monstrous and
largely unexpected transformation. Siphoning vast quantities
of energy from the Gulf's abnormally warm waters, 3°C above
their usual August temperature, Katrina mushroomed into an
awesome, top-of-the-scale, class five hurricane with 290
km/h winds that propelled tsunami-like storm surges nearly
10m in height. The journal Nature later reported that
Katrina absorbed so much heat from the Gulf that "water
temperatures dropped dramatically after it had passed, in
some regions from 30°C to 26°C" (1). Horrified
meteorologists had rarely seen a Caribbean hurricane
replenish its power so dramatically, and researchers debated
whether or not Katrina's explosive growth was a portent of
global warming's impact on hurricane intensity.
Although Katrina had dropped to category four, with 210-249
km/h winds, by the time it careened ashore in Plaquemines
Parish, Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi river
on early 29 August, it was small consolation to the doomed
oil ports, fishing camps and Cajun villages in its direct
path. In Plaquemines, and again on the Gulf Coast of
Mississippi and Alabama, it churned the bayous with
relentless wrath, leaving behind a devastated landscape that
looked like a watery Hiroshima.
Metropolitan New Orleans, with 1.3 million inhabitants, was
originally dead centre in Katrina's way, but the storm
veered to the right after landfall and its eye passed 55km
to the east of the metropolis. The Big Easy, largely under
sea-level and bordered by the salt-water embayments known as
Lake Pontchartrain (on the north) and Lake Borgne (on the
east), was spared the worst of Katrina's winds but not its
waters.
Hurricane-driven storm surges from both lakes broke through
the notoriously inadequate levees, not as high as in more
affluent areas, which guard black-majority eastern New
Orleans as well as adjacent white blue-collar suburbs in St
Bernard Parish. There was no warning and the rapidly rising
waters trapped and killed hundreds of unevacuated people in
their bedrooms, including 34 elderly residents of a nursing
home. Later, probably around midday, a more formidable
floodwall gave way at the 17th Street Canal, allowing Lake
Pontchartrain to pour into low-lying central districts.
Although New Orleans's most famous tourist assets, including
the French Quarter and the Garden District, and its most
patrician neighbourhoods, such as Audubon Park, are built on
high ground and survived the inundation, the rest of the
city was flooded to its rooftops or higher, damaging or
destroying more than 150,000 housing units. Locals promptly
called it "Lake George" after the president who failed to
build new levees or come to their aid after the old ones had
burst.
Inequalities of class and race
Bush initially said that "the storm didn't discriminate", a
claim he was later forced to retract: every aspect of the
catastrophe was shaped by inequalities of class and race.
Besides unmasking the fraudulent claims of the Department of
Homeland Security to make Americans safer, the shock and awe
of Katrina also exposed the devastating consequences of
federal neglect of majority black and Latino big cities and
their vital infrastructures. The incompetence of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (Fema) demonstrated the folly of
entrusting life-and-death public mandates to clueless
political appointees and ideological foes of "big
government". The speed with which Washington suspended the
prevailing wage standards of the Davis-Bacon Act (2) and
swung open the doors of New Orleans to corporate looters
such as Halliburton, the Shaw Group and Blackwater Security,
already fat from the spoils of the Tigris, contrasted
obscenely with Fema's deadly procrastination over sending
water, food and buses to the multitudes trapped in the
stinking hell of the Louisiana Superdome.
But if New Orleans, as many bitter exiles now believe, was
allowed to die as a result of governmental incompetence and
neglect, blame also squarely falls on the Governor's Mansion
in Baton Rouge, and especially on City Hall on Perdido
Street. Mayor C Ray Nagin is a wealthy African-American
cable television executive and a Democrat, who was elected
in 2002 with 87% of the white vote (3).
He was ultimately responsible for the safety of the
estimated quarter of the population that was too poor or
infirm to own a car. His stunning failure to mobilise
resources to evacuate car-less residents and hospital
patients, despite warning signals from the city's botched
response to the threat of Hurricane Ivan in September 2004,
reflected more than personal ineptitude: it was also a
symbol of the callous attitude among the city's elites, both
white and black, toward their poor neighbours in backswamp
districts and rundown housing projects. Indeed, the ultimate
revelation of Katrina was how comprehensively the promise of
equal rights for poor African-Americans has been dishonoured
and betrayed by every level of government.
A death foretold
The death of New Orleans had been forewarned; indeed no
disaster in American history had been so accurately
predicted in advance. Although the Homeland Security
Secretary, Michael Chertoff, would later claim that "the
size of the storm was beyond anything his department could
have anticipated," this was flatly untrue. If scientists
were surprised by Katrina's sudden burgeoning to super-storm
dimensions, they had grim confidence in exactly what New
Orleans could expect from the landfall of a great hurricane.
Since the nasty experience of Hurricane Betsy in September
1965 (a category three storm that inundated many eastern
parts of Orleans Parish that were drowned by Katrina), the
vulnerability of the city to wind-driven storm surges has
been intensively studied and widely publicised. In 1998,
after a close call with Hurricane Georges, research
increased and a sophisticated computer study by Louisiana
State University warned of the "virtual destruction" of the
city by a category four storm approaching from the
southwest (4).
The city's levees and stormwalls are only designed to
withstand a category three hurricane, but even that
threshold of protection was revealed as illusory in computer
simulations last year by the Army Corps of Engineers. The
continuous erosion of southern Louisiana's barrier islands
and bayou wetlands (an estimated annual shoreline loss of
60-100 sq km) increases the height of surges as they arrive
at New Orleans, while the city, along with its levees, is
slowly sinking. As a result even a category three, if slow
moving, would flood most of it (5). Global warming and
sea-level rise will only make the "Big One", as folks in New
Orleans, like their counterparts in Los Angeles, call the
local apocalypse, even bigger.
Lest politicians have difficulty understanding the
implications of such predictions, other studies modelled the
exact extent of flooding as well as the expected casualties
of a direct hit. Supercomputers repeatedly cranked out the
same horrifying numbers: 160 sq km or more of the city under
water with 80-100,000 dead, the worst disaster in United
States history. In the light of these studies, Fema warned
in 2001 that a hurricane flood in New Orleans was one of the
three mega-catastrophes most likely to strike the US in the
near future, along with a California earthquake and a
terrorist attack on Manhattan.
Shortly afterwards, the magazine Scientific American
published an account of the flood danger ("Drowning New
Orleans", October 2001) which, like an award-winning series
("The Big One') in the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune,
in 2002, was chillingly accurate in its warnings. Last year,
after meteorologists predicted a strong upsurge in hurricane
activity, federal officials carried out an elaborate
disaster drill ("Hurricane Pam") that re-confirmed that
casualties would be likely to be in the tens of thousands.
The Bush administration's response to these frightening
forecasts was to rebuff Louisiana's urgent requests for more
flood protection: the crucial Coast 2050 project to revive
protective wetlands, the culmination of a decade of research
and negotiation, was shelved and levee appropriations,
including the completion of defences around Lake
Pontchartrain, were repeatedly slashed.
Washington at work
In part, this was a consequence of new priorities in
Washington that squeezed the budget of the Army Corps: a
huge tax cut for the rich, the financing of the war in Iraq,
and the costs of "Homeland Security". Yet there was
undoubtedly a brazen political motive as well: New Orleans
is a black-majority, solidly Democratic city whose voters
frequently wield the balance of power in state elections.
Why would an administration so relentlessly focused on
partisan warfare seek to reward this thorn in Karl Rove's
side by authorising the $2.5bn that senior Corps officials
estimated would be required to build a category five
protection system around the city? (6).
Indeed when the head of the Corps, a former Republican
congressman, protested in 2002 against the way that
flood-control projects were being short-changed, Bush
removed him from office. Last year the administration also
pressured Congress to cut $71m from the budget of the
Corps's New Orleans district despite warnings of epic
hurricane seasons close at hand.
To be fair, Washington has spent a lot of money on
Louisiana, but it has been largely on non-hurricane-related
public works that benefit shipping interests and hardcore
Republican districts (7). Besides underfunding coastline
restoration and levee construction, the White House
mindlessly vandalised Fema. Under director James Lee Witt
(who enjoyed Cabinet rank), Fema had been the showpiece of
the Clinton administration, winning bipartisan praise for
its efficient dispatch of search and rescue teams and prompt
provision of federal aid after the 1993 Mississippi River
floods and the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake.
When Republicans took over the agency in 2001, it was
treated as enemy terrain: the new director, former Bush
campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, decried disaster assistance
as "an oversized entitlement programme" and urged Americans
to rely more upon the Salvation Army and other faith-based
groups. Allbaugh cut back many key flood and storm
mitigation programmes, before resigning in 2003 to become a
highly-paid consultant to firms seeking contracts in Iraq.
(An inveterate ambulance-chaser, he recently reappeared in
Louisiana as an insider broker for firms looking for
lucrative reconstruction work in the wake of Katrina.)
Since its absorption into the new Department of Homeland
Security in 2003 (with the loss of its representation in the
cabinet), Fema has been repeatedly downsized, and also
ensnared in new layers of bureaucracy and patronage. Last
year Fema employees wrote to Congress: "Emergency managers
at Fema have been supplanted on the job by politically
connected contractors and by novice employees with little
background or knowledge" (8).
A new Maginot Line
A prime example was Allbaugh's successor and protégé,
Michael Brown, a Republican lawyer with no emergency
management experience, whose previous job was representing
the wealthy owners of Arabian horses. Under Brown, Fema
continued its metamorphosis from an "all hazards" approach
to a monomaniacal emphasis on terrorism. Three-quarters of
the federal disaster preparedness grants that Fema formerly
used to support local earthquake, storm and flood prevention
has been diverted to counter-terrorism scenarios. The Bush
administration has built a Maginot Line against al-Qaida
while neglecting levees, storm walls and pumps.
There was every reason for anxiety, if not panic, when the
director of the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, Max
Mayfield, warned Bush (still vacationing in Texas) and
Homeland Security officials in a video-conference on 28
August that Katrina was poised to devastate New Orleans. Yet
Brown, faced with the possible death of 100,000
locals,-exuded breathless, arrogant bravado: "We were so
ready for this. We planned for this kind of disaster for
many years because we've always known about New Orleans."
For months Brown, and his boss Chertoff, had trumpeted the
new National Response Plan that would ensure unprecedented
coordination amongst government agencies during a major
disaster.
But as floodwaters swallowed New Orleans and its suburbs, it
was difficult to find anyone to answer a phone, much less
take charge of the relief operation. "A mayor in my
district," an angry Republican congressman told the Wall
Street Journal, "tried to get supplies for his constituents,
who were hit directly by the hurricane. He called for help
and was put on hold for 45 minutes. Eventually, a bureaucrat
promised to write a memo to his supervisor" (9).
Although state-of-the-art communications were supposedly the
backbone of the new plan, frantic rescue workers and city
officials were plagued by the breakdown of phone systems and
the lack of a common bandwidth.
At the same time they faced immediate shortages of the
critical food rations, potable water, sandbags, generator
fuel, satellite phones, portable toilets, buses, boats, and
helicopters, Fema should have pre-positioned in New Orleans.
Most fatefully, Chertoff inexplicably waited 24 hours after
the city had been flooded to upgrade the disaster to an
"incident of national significance", the legal precondition
for moving federal response into high gear.
Far more than the reluctance of the president to return to
work, or the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, to interrupt a
mansion-hunting trip, or the Secretary of State, Condoleezza
Rice, to end a shoe-buying expedition in Manhattan, it was
the dinosaur-like slowness of the brain of Homeland Security
to register the magnitude of the disaster that doomed so
many to die clinging to their roofs or hospital beds.
Lathered in premature, embarrassing praise from Bush for
their heroic exertions, Chertoff and Brown were more like
sleepwalkers.
As late as 2 September, Chertoff astonished an interviewer
on National Public Radio by claiming that the scenes of
death and desperation inside the Superdome, which the world
was watching on television, were just "rumours and
anecdotes". Brown blamed the victims, claiming that most
deaths were the fault of "people who did not heed evacuation
warnings", although he knew that "heeding" had nothing to do
with the lack of an automobile or confinement in a
wheelchair.
Despite claims by the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld,
that the tragedy had nothing to do with Iraq, the absence of
more than a third of the Louisiana National Guard and much
of its heavy equipment crippled rescue and relief operations
from the outset. Fema often obstructed rather than
facilitated relief: preventing civilian aircraft from
evacuating hospital patients and delaying authorisations for
out-of-state National Guard and rescue teams to enter the
area. As an embittered representative from devastated St
Bernard Parish told the Times-Picayune: "Canadian help
arrived before the US Army did" (10).
A conservative New Jerusalem
New Orleans City Hall could have used Canadian help: the
emergency command centre on its ninth floor was put out of
operation early in the emergency by a shortage of diesel to
run its backup generator. For two days Nagin and his aides
were cut off from the outside world by the failure of both
their landlines and cellular phones. This collapse of the
city's command-and-control apparatus is puzzling in view of
the $18m in federal grants that the city had spent since
2002 in training exercises to deal with such contingencies.
Even more mysterious was the relationship between Nagin and
his state and federal counterparts. As the mayor later
summarised it, the city's disaster plan was: "Get people to
higher ground and have the feds and the state -airlift
supplies to them." Yet Nagin's Director of Homeland
Security, Colonel Terry Ebbert, astonished journalists with
the admission that "he never spoke with Fema about the state
disaster blueprint" (11).
Nagin later ranted with justification about Fema's failure
to pre-position supplies or to rush buses and medical
supplies promptly to the Superdome. But evacuation planning
was, above all, a city responsibility; and earlier planning
exercises and surveys had shown that at least a fifth of the
population would be unable to leave without
assistance (12). In September 2004 Nagin had been
roundly criticised for making no effort to evacuate poor
residents as their better-off neighbours drove off before
category-three Hurricane Ivan (which fortunately veered away
from the city at the last moment).