Redwood Reader

C-SPAN last night ran a rerun of a June 29 airing of the Subcommittee for Natural Disaster Preparedness hearing on readiness. New Orleans was widely discussed as unprepared, people not willing or able to evacuate were estimated at 125,000, the levees and flood walls were only built to category three standards and the city was below sea level. It was not if, but when. One Emergency Services director said Mother Nature fit the legal definition of a terrorist. (We can argue about intent.) He wanted to make sure the weather service got its funding so maybe it could get some Homeland Security dollars.
As a society, defense against nature is first and foremost. We act collectively to protect collective interests, health and safety among the priorities. It takes political will to spend money on prevention and readiness, yet like insurance it is necessary or the losses will be staggering. It is possible to engineer and build a safer structure, but how much can be spent to accomplish the task? What about not financing the recommended precautions called for as they are being implemented? Spending at the national and state levels should protect citizens and the productivity of the nation. Tax cuts that imperil large numbers of people should be criminal.
Growing up in the Cold War and within society’s clear recall of WWII, massive destruction and collective effort were a reality in peoples minds. Sure enough the nukes would fly one day and it would look like the London blitz or Berlin in ’45 or one of those Japanese cities we laid waste to. People built and stocked fallout shelters, something that would actually work in a tornado. And if the military sealed an area off and ordered everyone out, they made sure it was so.
One episode of Malcolm in the Middle had the grandmother, a European war survivor, telling Malcolm his education would be worth nothing when they came for him “with the trucks in the middle of the night.” As much as that rings of civil liberties lost, the trucks never came after an order of mandatory evacuation and forty-eight hours of lead time to remove 125,000 people without transportation. Where were the trucks for the frail, disabled, poor and otherwise recalcitrant? Americans have been led to believe the government would be there in a disaster.
After the horror of a weeks worth of television images amazingly free of public officials, the heroes that emerge, to me, are the care providers stuck in this mess and not willing to put their responsibility aside for their own interests, at the Superdome, the Convention center and probably in many of those submerged homes. Saturday there was a picture online of a dead woman in a wheelchair outside one of the complexes; it says unknown dead woman symbolizes the forgotten. But Thursday her grandson was beside himself in front of cameras saying they had wheeled her there as directed, only to go three days with no water. One fellow on the runway had flown with a large number of premature babies out of the pediatric unit. He was there by himself; no helicopter had gone back for the mothers and nurses.
It is incredibly unfortunate shoot to kill orders for looting were not issued with the mandatory evacuation before the hurricane. It is easily modified or unimplemented in dire needs, acts as a deterrent, points up the severity of the crises and the need to be mindful of mandatory duties. By the time it was called for rescuers had already paused whenever fired on, an unacceptable condition, and people were starving and dehydrating and should not be considered looters at that point. Then the troops arrive carrying their rifles as though they were in a combat zone. Their hands aren’t free to work, and they have no enemies in continental North America. They didn’t look friendly. Small groups of well armed law enforcement hunter teams are all that are needed to quell opportunists and provide security. This belittled the people- that the rescuers felt they were not safe from the people asking for help.
In many ways this administration echoes Germany of the thirties. One thing my dad said he fought for in Europe was not to need to show ID in order to travel. “Let me see your papers, please.” was an evil statement impinging on the right to travel freely and privately. The government was far above all else, especially the law. Informing on your neighbors was encouraged and rewarded. Ignoring or attacking lower classes was rampant. They invented modern propaganda methods using psychology as a basis. They attacked the churches to undermine the people’s stalwarts. However, we have not established the authority to make people act and have not acted in a way that creates trust among the neediest people. It is caring for the neediest that separates us from them, our disabled and infirm their “useless feeders.”
Katrina the natural event was not preventable. Katrina as an engineering disaster of underspending on a known problem will echo through time. Katrina as a tipping point in consideration of the fabric of our social safety net is a watershed event. No region in America is free of natural disaster threat. Preparedness for natural disasters prepares us for other scenarios like terrorist attacks, but screening luggage does not prepare us in any way for natural disasters. Any regional hub in America will eventually attract the sick, those in need of medical or social service, the frail, the poor. Disaster planning must account for the last person out of every neighborhood.