In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina swept across the city of New Orleans, bringing with it unprecedented damage and destruction. However, as we have recently discussed in my ASTU class, Hurricane Katrina was not as much a natural disaster as a ‘policy’ disaster. Many of the preconditions in New Orleans, especially the geographic concentration of poverty-struck African Americans and other minorities near the weakest levees, set a vulnerable precedent for the hurricane to easily take advantage of. However this was not the only reason for the horrors that ensued after the hurricane came and went.

We also discussed in class what role the inadequacy of bureaucratic institutions had in the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Lots of red tape and bureaucratic restrictions not only impeded the immediate help being brought to New Orleans, but also left lasting impacts on the city for future years, resulting in many evacuees not returning to the city following immediate evacuation. A Pittsburgh Post Gazette article posted in September of 2005 noted how immediately following the hurricane, Homeland Security and the US National Guard restricted the Red Cross and other emergency relief organizations from delivering food as it contradicted the required evacuation policies in place in the city. This delayed aid process left huge amounts of death and damage, as can be seen by many statistics, including the fact that 11% of the deaths from Hurricane Katrina came from heart conditions (most likely due to a lack of access to medication). These bureaucratic faults are also very prevalent in the book Zeitoun, telling the narrative of a Syrian-American man who stays in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and provides help immediately following the storm.

Immediately following the storm, the character Zeitoun experiences a horrific arrest by the national guard, and is led to a makeshift prison in a bus station, complete with wired fencing and portable toilets. Author Dave Eggers uses this example to show the prioritization of allocating resources to a prison as opposed to the suffering people in the downtown area. Together the facts of bureaucratic faults as well as the traumatic narrative in Eggers’s novel enlighten an image of chaos that ensues when bureaucracy and red tape meet with emergencies in need of immediate response. Following the outcomes of Hurricane Katrina, from literary accounts to statistics, it is obvious that there is a need for innovation to create new bureaucratic practices that can act productively when faced with emergencies, not in the ways that the National Guard dealt with Hurricane Katrina.

Sources:

Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2009. Print.

“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/23/us/hurricane-katrina-statistics-fast-facts/

“Homeland Security won’t led Red Cross Deliver Food”

http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/05246/565143.stm