THE CURRENT DISASTER
By Luckey Haskins
Time and again in Katrina's wake, we saw government officials thwart the relief
initiatives of everyday people. "Bureaucracy has committed murder here," is how the
president of Jefferson Parish, Aaron Broussard explained it, accusing the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of blocking deliveries of water and diesel fuel
into the parish.
The clearly incompetent (and now deposed) FEMA chief, Michael Brown,
embodied these failures of centralized state bureaucracy. Instead of pushing resources
down to affected areas, Brown insisted upon remaining in control of every boat, fireman,
and bottle of water under FEMA's auspices. This meant that people who knew what was
happening on the ground could not get what they needed without explaining the situation
to Brown. Even in the best conditions, that would greatly slow the response. With phones
and power lines down, it was impossible.
Beyond structural inefficiencies, the government intentionally withheld aid from
the people of New Orleans and other affected areas. There are clear cases of this at a
micro-level, where food deliveries or the serving of lunch were delayed so George or
Laura Bush could fly in for a photo op. But the number of times that FEMA officials
actively prevented aid from arriving—accepting only one truck of a large offer from
Chicago, tying up in red tape New Mexico's offer of National Guard troops, turning away
500 local boatsmen ready to search for survivors—would make anyone wonder if they
were even trying to help.
The only resource the state and city could offer the poor residents of New Orleans was a
DVD telling them to leave in the event of a hurricane. "The primary message [of the DVD] is
that each person is primarily responsible for themselves, for their own family and friends,"
community activist Rev. Marshall Truehill said. The title of the DVD was "Preparing for the Big
One." It was still on the shelves waiting to be distributed when Katrina struck.
"You're responsible for your safety, and you should be responsible for the person next to
you," local Red Cross executive director Kay Wilkins told The New Orleans Times-Picayune in a
pre-Katrina report on the DVD. Given the colossal failure of the state to respond to Katrina and
defend communities in crisis, those are words we should now take very seriously.
Intentional or Not?
One could imagine the government's handling of Katrina as a twenty-first century
Tuskegee experiment in disaster response: a chance to study an American city under the
kind of stress that war and nature have in store for us. Local residents claim to have heard
explosions when the levees ruptured, hearkening back to the intentional flooding of poor,
rural areas to save the city of New Orleans during a 1927 flood. But questions about the
levees being intentionally dynamited to flood poor neighborhoods and save the French
Quarter go past the point.
Questioning whether this disaster was caused by incompetence or conspiracy or
some combination thereof is an exercise in hair-splitting. We know what we have seen
and that is enough. The government has been withholding aid from poor people in the
Gulf Coast region since Reconstruction. People were starving, living in inadequate
shelter, and not receiving healthcare before the storm struck. Why would we think they
would receive anything afterwards?
We have to be clear that there are not good authorities and bad authorities among
those that were supposed to do something about this disaster. They are all part of a single
system that caused the death or suffering of thousands of people. Our only hope of
demanding accountability from this system is through organized community
mobilization.
They All Must Go
The media is working to portray the battle over blame for Katrina as a choice
between Democrats and Republicans. The New York Times followed the hurricane with
stories such as "Democrats Step Up Criticism of White House" and "Katrina Divides
Rather Than Unifies U.S." They're right about the divide, but wrong that it's between
Republicans and Democrats.
If we allow the response to Katrina to become a partisan battle playing out in
Washington DC, we will ensure another catastrophe just like it in the near future and the
continued suffering of our nation's poor in the meantime.
If we're going to have a federal government, disaster mitigation and response is
definitely one of the responsibilities they should have. But no matter what FEMA does,
civilian response will always be the most immediate and significant component of
disaster relief. The home page for the 2004 World Disasters Report from the International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies tells it plainly: "In the hours after
sudden disaster strikes, most lives are saved by the courage and resourcefulness of friends
and neighbours." That's why every disaster will reveal the extent of impoverishment and
incapacitation at the local level. Watching a disaster offers a window onto the stark
imbalances in different communities' health and wealth.
George Bush may be the worst of the characters in the story of Hurricane Katrina.
But put any of the other public officials—Chertoff, Brown, Bianco, or Nagin—in his
place and local police departments would still care more about property than people,
devastating climate change would proceed, and millions of people in the United States
and billions around the world would remain in poverty with their situations getting worse.
Fire who you want, fire them all, but we need to address these fundamental problems.
We are ready to argue that our choice is between centralized government and selfgovernment. Having witnessed the clear and utter failure of their government at all levels,
millions of people are now ready to hear this. Rather than taking the side of this or that
politician, we should adopt the slogan of the popular uprising in Argentina: They all must
go.
Demands and Actions
Katrina reveals the need for a two-pronged strategy: 1. Seizing this moment to
make some critical demands of the existing power structure and 2. Building popular
power and autonomy as a response to state failure, seeing what actions we can take
without waiting for the approval of any outside authority.
Whether we like it or not, we are in line for more Katrina-like cataclysms. If New
Orleans is the city in North America most vulnerable to climate change, which city is
number two? We must demand that the government take responsibility for remediation
of the wrongs that have been done and take action to prevent more Katrina-like disasters.
Our country has the resources to clean up the mess and rebuild the city in any
fashion we choose. We need to proceed with a cleanup of the stricken region; thousands
of people are still in the area and plan to live their lives there. We could easily pay for it
with the money we are currently using to fight the war in Iraq.
Billions of dollars are already starting to flow into the region with little oversight.
Community involvement in the allocation of those funds is critical, even when they're not
directed towards residential areas. It's the only check on the massive graft and patronage
that characterize government spending, especially in Louisiana and Mississippi, two of
the most corrupt states in the nation. War profiteers like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor
have already secured rebuilding contracts. Without a doubt, displaced residents need to
organize to respond with coordinated power to their current situation.
However, if we take a long, hard look at our situation we see that we will have a
hard enough time just holding the line of devastation where it is without trying to push it
back to where it was before Katrina. At its heart, rebuilding New Orleans is a
conservative response, even if it's also an emotional one. These are radical times. The
deep challenges of global climate change, peak oil, massive poverty, fragile health, and
continuing racism require our focused attention. While any rebuilding of the Gulf Coast
must be community-directed and ecologically-sound, our primary focus must be on
mitigating future natural and human-made disasters.
To be ready for the coming disasters, we need massive resources deployed at the
most local level throughout the country and, of course, the world. If the government will
provide them, great. If not, we need to work to secure them ourselves.
To start, we must put an immediate end to hunger and homelessness in the United
States. After Katrina, we can no longer pretend that poverty does not exist within our
borders. We have no excuse. Poverty in the United States is like the levees in New
Orleans. The warning signs are there and people will die if we do not heed them.
After surveying 27 cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors recently announced that
hunger and homelessness are on the rise in major cities. Nearly half of the cities surveyed
reported that emergency food assistance facilities may have to turn away people in need
due to lack of resources. "These are not simply statistics," Nashville Mayor Bill Purcell,
who co-chairs the Conference's Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness, said. "These
are real people, many are families with children, who are hungry and homeless in our
cities."
Our country has enough resources to feed, clothe, and house every person in it.
Once every person displaced by Katrina has been provided this security, the airdrops of
water and MREs should begin in Detroit, Anacostia, Appalachia, and every Native
American reservation. Everyday that this doesn't occur is another Katrina in slow motion.
We must confront the healthcare crisis in the United States, which
disproportionately impacts African Americans. More than 50 evacuees have already died
in Texas. Officials suggested that many of them, like Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown who
died in Orange, Texas, after being evacuated from New Orleans, had pre-existing health
conditions. In the United States, being Black is a pre-existing health condition. “When it
comes to your risk of stroke, you get a penalty for being African American, you get a
penalty for living in the South, and you get an ‘extra’ penalty for being an African
American living in the South,” Dr. George Howard said after analyzing stroke death data
from 1997 through 2001.
The American Heart Association will tell you that African Americans are at
increased risk for hypertension and heart disease. The countless stories of stranded New
Orleans residents needing insulin exposed what the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention's statistics had already proven: that Blacks are 30 percent more likely to have
diabetes than whites. While the rates of diagnosis for diabetes is declining for both
groups, it is declining twice as fast for whites as for Blacks. In short, the poor overall
health of New Orleans' African Americans put them at greater risk during the hurricane,
flood, and evacuation, just as it puts them at greater risk in everyday life.
Even beyond this systemic level, it is clear that racism directly caused some of the
death and suffering in Katrina's wake—again, just as it causes death and suffering
everyday. Whether in the Gretna Sheriffs' refusal to allow evacuations on foot or in the
media's portrayal of "looters" that helped justify the decision to order police and National
Guard to "shoot to kill," American white supremacy brought violence and repression to
African Americans in their most desperate moments before it brought them food and
water. This, too, happens everyday. Racism is so ingrained in the fabric of the US that it
is hard to imagine that we could overcome it as a country. Increased community control
over resources, decisions, and media would help considerably.
Since catastrophes strike the disenfranchised the hardest, disaster preparedness is
a form of redistribution of wealth. The only way to mitigate the effects of a catastrophe is
to make sure that everyone has food, clothing, shelter, good health and strong
communication networks before it hits. The public awareness following Katrina provides
this opportunity for us to make demands of our government officials and to take our own
actions to prepare our communities.
Urban centers must immediately publish their full evacuation plans. If they can't
do so, they should admit to being unprepared and then they should start getting prepared.
The New Orleans plan of "you're on your own" is not acceptable. Security at this level is
a primary function of government. Anyone who's in the government should fulfill this
part of their job or quit. Every city and region in the country must publish immediately its
plan for evacuating every resident in case of a catastrophic emergency.
"A plan should not be some requirement," Florida's emergency management
chief, Craig Fugate, told the Palm Beach Post in an article about Louisiana and
Mississippi's failed or non-existent hurricane response plans. "It should truly reflect what
your real needs are, and what your real resources are."
After seeing the government's response to Katrina, few people trust that it will
keep them safe. They want proof, not some bullshit excuse that you won't share the
information with the public because then the terrorists will have it. People will no longer
accept that. Government incompetence is a bigger danger than any terrorist.
Start investing seriously in public transportation, including light-rail systems that
would be capable of handling mass evacuations. At other times, these light rails can
replace fuel-inefficient long-haul trucking.
And sign the Kyoto treaty already. And then start figuring out how to cut
emissions even further. The state-level pact recently completed in the northeast is a fine
strategy, but the world needs to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the
air.
Get together with other countries to reduce disasters. The UN World Conference
on Disaster Reduction is a good place to start. So is Cuba, where they were able to
evacuate 1.5 million people ahead of last year's Hurricane Ivan—a category 5—with
nearly zero lives lost and no looting or curfews. Marjorie Cohn, in an article for
Truthout.org, explains Cuba's success with a quote from Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology
professor at the University of New Mexico and a specialist in Latin America: "The whole
civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time
where they are to go... Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They
have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already
know, for example, who needs insulin."
Emergency stores of food and water should not be held in FEMA bunkers or
National Guard armories. They should be available in every area of 10,000 people as an
emergency food and water depot whose location is well-publicized.
Creating Our Own
The weeks following Katrina have shown that we need more than food and water
to survive. We need basic survival skills like first aid, emergency medicine, and fire
safety. We have also seen that we need to be able to organize ourselves in times of crisis.
In short, we need to be able to survive without government.
This includes setting up communication networks. A major problem in the Gulf
Coast was the lack of access to correct information. As with water, food, clothes and
shelter, communication is a human right. We need methods for speaking with each other
and the ability to adapt those methods to even the worst of circumstances.
We need participatory communications networks, especially in the hands of
people that are shut out of traditional broadcast outlets. This might include low-power
radio and shortwave radio, text messaging and other phone-based tools. It can also mean
websites or newspapers, especially when connected to community organizing efforts,
since otherwise those can exclude people who don't read or get online. Sometimes a
gathering point or a bulletin board can suffice. Whatever the method, they're available to
us right now and we should be implementing them more and more.
So let's make our own DVD, one with real information on how to help your
family and neighbors. The possible content of such a DVD is vast, including suturing,
morse code, generator maintenance, and water purification. We should translate the
content of our DVD into print and audio and video, and in multiple languages too. Let's
teach each other what to do in a natural disaster. Let’s build community power that can
survive the current disaster and prepare us for the days ahead.
Luckey Haskins is a media activist who occasionally writes about what he sees and does.