In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Canadians have been donating money and providing help on the ground in NOLA.
An urban search and rescue team from Vancouver rescued 30 people in St. Bernard Parish on Saturday. The Vancouver team has been designated to the lead the rescue effort in St. Bernard Parish, where 30,000 homes have been flooded.
In a story in today’s edition of The Province Tim Armstrong, the team leader, reported that there was no rescue effort in the parrish prior to their arrival on Friday.
But some Canadians have also been critical of the Bush administration’s response to the disaster in NOLA, particularly in relation to Bush’s imperial war in Iraq. For example, The Province ran two letters today, including one from Sheila Louise of New Westminster, BC, which expressed sympath for the victims of Katrina, but asked,
“…why do U.S. politicians seem able to get food and water to other countries in need but not to their own? Now would be a good time to bring home every military person overseas so they can serve their country in their country. The people of Iraq do not want them, so ship them home now and rescue your own people. Charity begins at home. There is more need at home for these military people and that is where they belong.”
In a second Province letter, Brian Lander of Surrey, BC said Canadians should do what they can to help in terms of providing expertise, but said
“If the United States needs money then maybe it can start by not sending millions to tin-pot dictators who squander it on themselves…Or it can hold off building hugely expensive killing machines…There is always money around. What is more important, killing or saving lives?”
Letters to the weekend edition of The Globe and Mail pointed out that the collapse of civil society in post-Katrina NOLA is at least partly a function of the neo-conservative social policies that stripped way the social safety net. “What we see today is what happens in ghettos when the armed police force that replaced these programs [welfare, unemployment insurance] loses control” (Judy Rebick, Toronto).
In reference to Doug Saunders’ G&M article on Friday (“Nasty, Brutish — Society’s Net Snaps”), Hall C. Hartmann of Vancouver wrote that despite the rhetoric of egalitarianism in the US it is
“probably the least egalitarian of all established industrial democracies. This is due to a failure to recognize adequately that humans are fundamentally social animals and that the nation’s insitutions and policies should be structured with a stronger bias for a common good.”
Hartmann continues,
“there is a misplaced frear, much fostered by the privileged minority who stand to gain in the historical short run, that [to] do so would curtail freedom and individualism. As a result, the net has meshes so wide as to render it ineffective both in terms of helping unfortunate individuals and holding toether society. Add to this a president whose lack of enlightenment and leadership is reflected throughtout his government and you get what you see now, with more to come.”
Barry Devonald of Vancouver but it this way, “Would we see dead and dying white folks on our TV screens pleading for help?”
Neil Hrab of Toronto, compared the US response to Katrina to the USSR’s response to Chernobyl, noting that the latter was a key event in the delegitimazation of the Soviet elite and hastened the fall of the Soviet Union.
In addition to Saunders’ column for the The Globe and Mail, I thought Margaret Wente’s piece on how “America’s Third World Hell Hole” came into being worth reading too.
Wente closes the column thusly,
This isn’t the way an American storyline is supposed to go. You get the sense almost everyone — the media, the public and certainly the President — was gearing up for just an average storm. A little hardship; a little tragedy; a lot of happy stories about the triumph of the human spirit. But the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has shown the world America at its very worst. It has embarrassed and shamed the entire nation. And it has shattered America’s own image of its plucky, caring, can-do self.
The real storm has just begun.
[Keep reading for Wente’s full column.]The real storm has just begun
How did a piece of America become a Third World hellhole?
By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, September 3, 2005 Page A23
E-mail Margaret Wente
The devastation of New Orleans was perfectly predictable. Everyone in authority knew the city was a bull’s-eye, and everyone knew what the consequences of a major hurricane would be.
After hurricane Betsy in 1965, when the floodwaters reached the eaves in some neighbourhoods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a system of levees around the city. In 1998, when hurricane Georges grazed the city, the waves reached to within a foot of the top of the levees. Hurricane Georges was only a Category 2 storm.
For years, everyone has known that a slightly stronger storm on a slightly different course would wreck the city. There were elaborate computer models that showed exactly how. Three years ago, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a series of investigative reports about the threat. “Hundreds of thousands would be left homeless, and it would take months to dry out the area and begin to make it livable,” it said. “But there wouldn’t be much for residents to come home to. The local economy would be in ruins.” The Red Cross predicted the death toll could reach 100,000. The picture painted of the devastation was eerily prescient. “Some people will be housed in the Superdome. . . . But many will simply be on their own. . . . Survivors will end up trapped on roofs, in buildings or on high ground surrounded by water, with no means of escape.”
At the time, experts put the economic devastation at $50-billion. There was a way to protect the city: a massive, decades-long engineering project to raise the levees, at a cost of $10-billion to $15-billion. Another proposal was to restore the coastal wetlands that protect against storm surges. The price tag on that was $14-billion. Nobody was prepared to foot the bill — not a succession of federal administrations, not the dirt-poor state of Louisiana, and certainly not the citizens of New Orleans.
So people focused on evacuation and rescue operations. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency conducted an elaborate disaster-relief simulation. Afterward, it declared that the exercise had been very useful. Nobody came clean with the people of New Orleans about how vulnerable they really were.
A month ago, William Gray, perhaps the foremost hurricane forecaster in the world, issued a revised forecast. He predicted this would be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record — perhaps the worst since the 1930s, when coastal regions of the U.S. were battered by storm after devastating storm. Dr. Gray warned that, this time, the toll in lives and damages would be far worse.
The scene was set for the perfect storm.
Yet, nobody predicted what came next. The social collapse. The anarchy. The armed gangs of looters, the scenes of predators and prey, the tales of rape and murder. The stories of snipers firing on doctors trying to move their sickest patients. Dead babies floating in the water. And, most of all, the stark correlation of class and race and survival. The white people got out. The poor blacks did not.
“They’re drowning in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned,” said an angry Anderson Cooper on CNN. “And there are corpses in the street being eaten by rats, and this is the United States of America.”
The President kept promising that help was on the way. Meantime, a piece of the United States of America had become a Third World hellhole. That is what nobody will forget or forgive.
Of all the places in the United States, Louisiana is about as close to the Third World as you can get. One of the poorest states, it is notorious for its history of corruption and rule by kleptocracy. (Several state officials were recently indicted as a result of an investigation into the theft of last year’s hurricane funds.) It remains a class-ridden, deeply segregated society.
With a murder rate 10 times the national average, New Orleans is among the most violent cities in the United States. Its police force is trying to overcome a reputation for corruption and brutality. (When its members were finally deployed to restore law and order, 20 per cent of them did not show up.) Its economy has been stagnant for decades, and a third of its people live below the poverty line. Many of those who refused to leave the city had no place to go, no way to get out, and no money. It was the end of the month, and they were afraid of missing their next welfare cheque.
These were the people the disaster planners forgot. Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state’s evacuation plan, told The New York Times that little attention was paid to moving out the city’s “low-mobility” population — the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars. How would they be moved? At disaster planning meetings, he said, “the answer was often silence.”
And now the finger-pointing and scapegoating have begun. No doubt much of it is well deserved. The Bush administration is being blamed for gutting FEMA for the sake of homeland security; for sending national guards to Iraq instead of keeping them at home; for cutting funds to fix the levees. Some environmentalists, including Robert Kennedy Jr., are blaming the hurricane on George Bush and global warming (even though Dr. Gray, the hurricane expert, says global warming isn’t a factor). FEMA is being blamed for incompetence. Black leaders are blaming the media for broadcasting inflammatory scenes of looting.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. And yet, you could have learned what was likely to happen in The Times-Picayune. Three years ago, it predicted that rescue teams would have trouble reaching the flooded city because so many roads and bridges would be damaged. It predicted how hard it would be to pump out the water. It predicted that many of the homes that people had abandoned would be destroyed or uninhabitable.
This isn’t the way an American storyline is supposed to go. You get the sense almost everyone — the media, the public and certainly the President — was gearing up for just an average storm. A little hardship; a little tragedy; a lot of happy stories about the triumph of the human spirit. But the aftermath of hurricane Katrina has shown the world America at its very worst. It has embarrassed and shamed the entire nation. And it has shattered America’s own image of its plucky, caring, can-do self.
The real storm has just begun.
mwente@globeandmail.ca
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