Selected comments on Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) from email lists Compiled by Ilan Kelman
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| It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States. Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States. Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem. It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there. New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to. Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place. © Copyright 2005 Strategic Forecasting Inc. All rights reserved. Suzanne L. Frew, Consultant The Frew Group Communication Strategies for Disaster & Risk Reduction
cell 510-289-1448 suzanne@thefrewgroup.com From : CACH Info Ctr Reply-To : Natural hazards and disasters Sent : September 4, 2005 5:54:18 PM To : NATURAL-HAZARDS-DISASTERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject : Re: Some larger issues raised by Hurricane Katrina The superdome is more than 30 years old. One breach in an otherwise well-constructed building can be enough for pressure to develop that will blow out windows and interior walls (never meant for contact with such forces). Did someone leave a window open?
built. That is, the first and second floor walls collapsed allowing water to pass through rather than push against the entire structure. Much as a house on stilts (many of which also survived) this construction technique is relatively new.
CT C. S. Thomas Managing Director CACH International Ltd Co "Planning to Keep You in Business"sm From : ian davis Reply-To : Natural hazards and disasters Sent : September 5, 2005 8:33:59 AM To : NATURAL-HAZARDS-DISASTERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject : Re: Day by day graphics, chrono of Katrina & New Orleans To the Editor, The Washington Post Dear Editor Almost thirty years ago, in the aftermath of the Guatemala earthquake that killed over 22,000 people, Professor Nick Ambraseys of Imperial College London suggested that "Today's act of God, will be regarded as tomorrow's act of criminal negligence". He was referring to all the unnatural aspects of the disaster that contributed to the scale of deaths and damage. His words now ring true in relation to the chaos and acute suffering following Katrina. Therefore, when the US Congress initiates some form of Congressional Commission to investigate this tragedy, to decide on who was responsible for the 'unnatural' aspects of Katrina as well as to report on any essential policy changes, they will have an extensive agenda before them. It could include the following questions: 1.. Why were the levees built and maintained without regard to the impact of a storm surge of this scale, and specifically, why was the 2004 model that predicted 10-15 feet of water in New Orleans, as a result of hurricane flooding, ignored? 2.. Why was the pre-event evacuation of the region so incomplete, without attention being given to citizens of the city without means of transportation? 3.. Why was the Louisiana Superdome opened to provide 'safety' to between 10- 20,000 persons without even minimal provision being made for such basic needs as sanitation, food, shelter, water, medical needs and human security? 4.. Why in the current search and rescue operation is minimal reliance being given for the use of rescue boats to supplement helicopter rescue operations? 5.. Why are the extensive resources of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) not being used? 6.. Why did it take six days before international assistance was requested? And finally, 7.. Why did any disaster plans that might have been available for fully predictable severe hurricane winds accompanied by fully predictable severe flooding fail so miserably? While working in forty five disaster situations within developing countries in over thirty five years, I have never seen anything approaching this level of governmental failure in any country, however poor and undeveloped. While Mercy demands any action to reduce further human suffering, Justice demands that responsibility for failures be assigned and policies be reviewed to avoid further "acts of criminal negligence" Yours sincerely
Resilience Centre Cranfield University, UK
97 Kingston Road Oxford
OX2 6RL UK
From : Terry Cannon Reply-To : Natural hazards and disasters Sent : September 5, 2005 8:49:07 AM To : NATURAL-HAZARDS-DISASTERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject : More on morality, looting & need to understand New Orleans and Looting I am coming back to this issue, despite/because of the posting last week from James Cohen, who raised the interesting issue of the relationship between poverty and acceptable behaviour. (Interesting within this is the position of the people and institutions who define what is acceptable – more on that below. Who has the power and the right to decide what is acceptable?). I think my headline here is that in Katrina – as with most/all disasters anywhere in the world – you can only understand what is going on in the disaster event by having a very good understanding of ‘normal’ everyday life and how people existed before the trigger hazard strikes. What I would say first off is that the key issue is not to EXCUSE violent behaviour, but to EXPLAIN it and UNDERSTAND it. This same confusion is apparent in policies on what creates terrorism, and a position that simply says it is not acceptable ends up with a policy correlate that attempts to deal with the problem through reciprocal (and much increased) violence which fails to deal with the causes (and as in the case of the UK bombings makes it worse…) I really hope that some of the NSF funding for research on Katrina goes on the “looting” problem. This is because it is likely to be an issue in any major (even some minor?) urban disaster in the USA, e.g. earthquakes in California. Lessons must be learned, and of course may also be helpful in other countries. So some thoughts on New Orleans, based on very crude data gleaned from the UK media. 1. There are different kinds of looting. It is meaningless to discuss it under one heading. Some is benevolent – “looters” were taking orders from people in the convention centre and then coming back with e.g. diapers and baby milk. Others were apparently seeking guns – we need to understand what for. Others for small comforts like the cigarette guy I mentioned last week. Still others were stranded people who took food and water and otherwise would have starved and dehydrated. 2. Some of the violent behaviour and looting may have been carried out by drug addicts and alcoholics desperate for their fixes. I have seen scant mention of this in the media in the UK. Given that the left-behind population of poor blacks would have included thousands of people addicted to drugs and alcohol, we have little idea what the impact on them is of a sudden inability to score their hits. This is another – perhaps crucial – type of looting: aimless? Random? Angry at the world, authority and anyone who gets in the way? 3. Those who have apparently fired on rescuers or US Corp of Engineers may not be the same as ‘looters’. Again we need a better understanding of what is going on here. In the UK there have been cases of Fire fighters being attacked when attending events in run down poor white areas. There is a POLITICS to this – it is perhaps a symptom of something that is going on in pre-disaster New Orleans that must be understood. (We also need to have a more subtle understanding of the moral hierarchy that the government discourse is pursuing here: firefighters in the USA and other countries in Europe have been known to start forest fires because they then get paid to put them out. As regards the police, I suspect that in New Orleans the people’s normal everyday experience of policing is less than positive, and this has been reinforced by the arrival of National Guard and deputies who are predominantly white to control people who are almost entirely black. 4. The city was already divided between gangs, and we have of course little idea what the impact of the disaster has been on their behaviour, including looting and violence. It would be interesting to know if there was any incipient use of these gang structures to organise relief in any parts of the city. I am not saying this to support gangs or advocate this as a policy area, but simply we need to understand in order to devise the best policies for future crises. 5. Lastly back to the moral issue. Ten years ago, poor people in northeast Brazil in the midst of a famine famously looted supermarkets in their midst in order to survive. Were they right? Was this appropriate? Longer ago in 1943, Amartya Sen (Nobel economist) as a child witnessed people dying on his doorstep in Calcutta as a famine (driven mainly by British war policy in the face of Japanese invasion). He could not understand this because in his neighbourhood there were also stores of food that were full. Should those people have looted the warehouses rather than starved to death on the street outside? Last week Bush said that people in the Katrina zone would have to rely on themselves in their plight. (Does anyone have the exact quote – this should be recorded for posterity!). That is exactly what some of the ‘looters’ did in order to survive… Terry Cannon University of Greenwich From : Peiser, Benny Reply-To : Natural hazards and disasters Sent : September 5, 2005 11:48:23 AM To : NATURAL-HAZARDS-DISASTERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject : Re: Some larger issues raised by Hurricane Katrina
disaster management failures. If we really want to learn the key lessons from the Katrina tragedy, which seems crucial in light of incessant hurricane activity, it will be vital to grasp the underlying problems of disaster mitigation and management.
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/ ---------- INTELLIGENCE FAILURE Science Policy, 4 September 2005 http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/environment/000555intelligence_failure.html Roger Pielke Jr. The Bush Administration's complete lack of preparedness for responding to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is one of the most significant intelligence failures in history, ranking right up there with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. It will be important in the coming months for Congress to investigate this policy failure with every bit of effort that it did after 9/11. Let me say that I have every expectation that the government professionals now fully engaged in the rescue and recovery operations will do an outstanding job. The question that needs to be asked, and it is not too soon to begin asking, is why was the federal government so unprepared for the disaster in the face of robust scientific knowledge about the disaster at all time scales? This is especially in light of the fact that the government completely reorganized itself after 9/11 to improve the nation's preparedness and response to catastrophes. Like many people, I too was buoyed by the reports in the immediate aftermath of Katrina that New Orleans had dodged another bullet. It is understandable that government officials not involved with disaster preparedness and response (including the President) might have seen these reports and felt the same way. But to learn that the federal government agencies responsible for disaster preparation and management had taken very little action in the days and hours before Katrina's landfall to prepare for the possibility of flooding of New Orleans is simply amazing. I study disasters and find this incredible. Statements by Bush Administration officials reveal the depth of this intelligence failure. Consider the following comments from Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and FEMA's Michael Brown:
"That 'perfect storm' of a combination of catastrophes exceeded the foresight of the planners, and maybe anybody's foresight." He called the disaster "breathtaking in its surprise." ... Chertoff argued that authorities actually had assumed that "there would be overflow from the levee, maybe a small break in the levee. The collapse of a significant portion of the levee leading to the very fast flooding of the city was not envisioned."" Wrong. It is now well established that what has occurred was foreseeable and foreseen. Of the time available to prepare, "Chertoff also argued that authorities did not have much notice that the storm would be so powerful and could make a direct hit on New Orleans." Wrong this storm was forecast perfectly and there were days of notice that an extremely powerful storm would hit along the gulf coast. Forecasts cannot get any better. And again, the disaster has been predicted for 30 years. Chertoff explains on Wednesday that the government was betting on the come: "... in terms of this storm, particularly because it seemed to move to the east at the last minute, and I remember seeing newspaper headlines that said, you know, New Orleans dodged the bullet, on Tuesday morning, and even as everybody thought New Orleans had dodged the bullet Tuesday morning, the levee was not only being flooded, which is, I think, what most people always assumed would happen, but it actually broke."
approach to disaster policy. One wobble in a hurricane's path can make a big difference. And second, the Secretary of DHS was getting his information about the storm's impact on Tuesday from newspaper headlines? Are you kidding me? Then there is the bizarre episode last Thursday of Chertoff arguing with NPR's Jeremy Siegel about whether or not there were in fact people stranded at the New Orleans Convention Center, and calling the news reports "rumor." Do these folks not watch cable news? Is it possible that I had better intelligence at the foot of the Rockies thousands of miles away than the Secretary of Homeland Security?
only learned of people at the convention center on that day, presumably via the questions put to Chertoff:
Convention Center didn't have food and water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off?
Center people until today." Chertoff explains the intelligence failure on Sunday by placing blame on state and local officials: "Well, I mean, this is clearly something that was disturbing. It was disturbing to me when I learned about it, which came as a surprise. You know, the very day that this emerged in the press, I was on a video conference with all the officials, including state and local officials. And nobody -- none of the state and local officials or anybody else was talking about a Convention Center. The original plan, as I understand it, was to have the Superdome be the place of refuge, of last resort. Apparently, sometime on Wednesday, people started to go to the Convention Center spontaneously. Why it is that there was a breakdown in communication, again, I'm sure will be studied when we get to look at this afterwards. FEMA, of course, did not have large -- is not equipped to put large masses of people into an area. FEMA basically plugs into the existing state and local infrastructure. What happened here was essentially the demolishment of that state and local infrastructure. And I think that really caused a cascading series of breakdowns. I mean, let's be honest. This stressed the system beyond, I think, any prior experience anybody's had in this country."
respective heads of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and within DHS, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). These are the federal agencies with lead responsibility for being prepared for and responding to disasters. Understanding and mitigating risk is their jobs.
did have the bad luck of being in office when Katrina stuck, but they are nonetheless accountable for government performance in such situations. And there has been a significant policy failure on their watch. Furthermore, in the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush Administration completely reorganized itself to improve the nation's ability to secure itself. Under this new reorganization, DHS has comprehensively failed its first test. Congress needs to find out why, and fix it. We will have more disasters, that is for sure. The time to start asking hard questions is right now.
BUREAUCRATIC FAILURE: TO UNDERSTAND KATRINA'S PROBLEMS, READ THE 9/11 REPORT The Wall Street Journal, 2 September 2005 http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110007201 BY DANIEL HENNINGER Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies. --The 9/11 Commission Report The response to Hurricane Katrina suggests we are not very good at it. The stark images of bereft people in New Orleans and Mississippi are said to reveal inadequate preparation by the agents of government--from elected officials to bureaucracies--whose duties include commanding the vast resources and authority of government to provide help when it is most needed.
of a rationally organized response. The grim fact remains that disasters are relatively commonplace in the world. Swiss Re, the big reinsurance group, annually publishes a compendium called "Natural catastrophes and man-made disasters" listing the human and economic toll. In 2004, it recorded 116 natural catastrophes, with the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami leaving more than 280,000 dead or missing. Less well-remembered, often the case with Third World disaster, a June monsoon killed 1,845 in Bangladesh and Hurricane Jeanne in September left some 3,000 dead in Haiti, whose flooded city of Gonaives looked like New Orleans.
their imminence and aftermath. Science magazine just dedicated its cover to "Dealing with Disasters." We know quite a lot.
In January in Japan, the U.N. held the five-day World Conference on Disaster Reduction, with numerous representatives from member states. A week earlier in Mauritius, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for "a global warning system" for tsunamis and "all other threats." Specialized disaster Web sites exist, such as the Pan American Health Organization's site on Disasters and Humanitarian Assistance." The U.S. oceanographic administration has created the Center for Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts, a sophisticated modeling program to help vulnerable nations in the Pacific. So if we're so smart, why are Louisiana and Mississippi sinking beneath water and red tape? It has been reported in past days how the relief agencies, such as the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA are struggling; basics such as food distribution are in disarray. On paper anyway, many of these problems had already been addressed. By law, FEMA requires all states, if they are to receive grant money, to file both pre- and post-catastrophe mitigation plans. Experts in Louisiana, and indeed New Orleans, have been drafting one for several years.
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