Hurricane Katrina Catastrophe
by Alan Shapiro
To the Teacher:
The full scope of the Gulf coast disaster will take time to assess. The reading that follows
describes what happened after the hurricane struck and explores whether any of its catastrophic
results might have been preventable. Questions for discussion and citizenship activities follow.
Student Reading:
Hurricane Katrina: "A disaster waiting to happen"
The U.S.S. Bataan with its six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds, and 100,000 gallons
of fresh water daily was without patients just off the Gulf Coast for days after the massive
Hurricane Katrina blasted into Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on August 29, 2005.
Meanwhile, thousands of patients, staff members and their families waited and waited to be
evacuated from New Orleans hospitals that were without power. Some died because their
ventilators didn't work. While flood waters rose in lower floors, people died in their beds, in
hallways and stairwells.
Countless numbers of other people waited, without food or water, to be rescued from rooftops,
attics, and isolated patches of ground. Hundreds, if not thousands, had almost certainly drowned.
Many of their bodies would probably not be found until the flood waters receded.
Although officials announced a "mandatory evacuation" of New Orleans, they did not provide the
means for evacuating. So while most middle-class people fled in their cars to hotels or to stay
with friends and family, many low-income people had no such options. They didn't have cars,
credit cards, or anywhere to stay. Buses were unavailable. So thousands of people, mostly poor,
mostly African American, clung to their homes as the waters rose.
Over 20,000 of these stranded residents eventually landed in New Orleans' semi-dark, powerless
Superdome. Another 25,000 waited in the convention center for buses that would take them away
from the heat, the stench of overflowing toilets and sudden violence to someplace, anyplace,
where there would be water, food, safety.
"Are you telling me we can coordinate a relief effort on the other side of the world and we can't do
it here?" I.V. Hilliard, pastor of the New Light Christian Center Church in Houston, said. "I can't
help but think that race has something to do with it." Bruce Gordon, president of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said federal aid for victims should
be similar to what was given to those who lost relatives on 9/11. (New York Times, 9/5/05)
Michael Chertoff, the U.S. homeland security chief, said on National Public Radio (9/1/05) that he
had "not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and
water"—although anyone with a TV or a radio had heard about it for at least a day.
That night, the fourth night after the storm hit, Michael Brown, the head of FEMA (the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, which is charged with coordinating U.S. disaster response),
was interviewed by CNN's Paula Zahn. He said he had only just learned of the thousands of
desperate people waiting in the convention center. She was astounded. "Sir," she said, "you
aren't just telling me you just learned that the folks at the convention center didn't have food and
water until today, are you? You had no idea they were completely cut off?" No, he responded,
"the federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today."
Two days later President Bush nevertheless praised Brown's work.
On the NBC program, "Meet the Press," Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near
New Orleans, sobbed as he told about an emergency management official whose mother was
trapped in a nursing home. Day after day, she called her son, begging to be rescued. Her son
was told repeatedly by other officials that help would be on the way.
"Every day she called him and said, 'Are you coming, son? Is someone coming?' And he said,
'Yeah, Mama, somebody's coming to get you.' Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday.
Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday
night."
"This is a national emergency. This is a national disgrace," Terry Ebbert, the head of homeland
security in New Orleans, bitterly complained. "FEMA has been here three days, yet there is no
command and control. We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail
out the city of New Orleans." (New York Times, 9/2/05)
Five days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast, "the chaotic scene at Louis Armstrong New
Orleans International Airport evoked the mix of hope and despair that has gripped this city.
Disorder prevailed, as thousands of survivors with glazed looks and nothing more than garbage
bags of possession waited in interminable lines for a chance to get out. Patrolmen yelled out the
number of available seats on each flight, and passengers boarded planes not knowing where
they would land, and not caring." (New York Times, 9/3/05)
There were New Orleans police and other public employees who performed heroically, saving
lives, helping people get out of flooded houses, working hard to stop widespread looting and keep
order. But they needed backup that was not there.
President Bush began the fifth day after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast by saying on
the South Lawn of the White House that the results of federal effort were "not acceptable."
The National Guard is charged with providing help and bringing order in such disasters. But it
took days for the Guard to show up in force. Why? Answers varied. The force of the storm slowed
the response, some said. The lines of authority were not clear: No one seemed to know whether
civilian officials or the military was in charge. Furthermore, almost one-third of Louisiana's
National Guard and about 40 percent of Mississippi's were in Iraq—along with the high-water
vehicles, humvees, and generators that were desperately needed at home.
There was plenty of blame to pass around—and it will take time to sort out exactly why so many
people suffered so badly or died. However, it seems clear that local, state, and federal systems
all failed at a moment when tens of thousands of Americans needed their help.
Although conditions on the Gulf Coast have long been ripe for this kind of disaster, our nation was
not prepared when the disaster struck. New Orleans was flooded after levees holding back the
waters of Lake Pontchartrain broke. On September 1, President Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC,
"I don't think anyone anticipated the breech in the levees."
But in fact, many people had anticipated that the levees would give way—and had urged action to
prevent this catastrophe from happening.
For many years scientists, engineers, newspaper reporters, planners, and public officials have
warned repeatedly that New Orleans and the Gulf coast was "a disaster waiting to happen," as
Mark Fischetti wrote in Scientific American magazine in October 2001.
Not only does the city lie "below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake
Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west," Fischetti explained,
but "because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing
flood risk even after minor storms."
Even worse, "the low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly
disappearing. A year from now, another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh—an area the size of
Manhattan—will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes."
The shrinking of the marsh, Fischetti said, is caused by "natural processes that have been
artificially accelerated by human tinkering"—including building levees along river backs, draining
wetlands, dredging channels so ships can pass, and cutting canals through marshes. Some of
these changes were made to prevent flooding. Others were made to accommodate the oil
industry, which dominates this part of the country.
One effect of all this human tinkering is to keep the Mississippi River from depositing silt that
would keep the low-lying areas like New Orleans from sinking. Furthermore, said Fischetti, every
lost acre of marshland "gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into
the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities…."
These conditions are only made worse by global warming, which is causing ocean levels to rise.
In addition, higher ocean and air temperatures fuel more powerful storms. A recent article in the
British science magazine Nature reports that tropical storms have become one-half again as long,
their winds 50 percent more powerful than in the past. Bill McKibben, who has written extensively
about global warming, attacks "the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even
beginning to address climate change and the sad fact that global warming means the future will
be full of just this kind of horror in the Gulf Coast." (www.tompaine.com)
A year after Fischetti's article appeared, New Orleans' leading local newspaper, the TimesPicayune, published a five-part series whose first article began, "It's only a matter of time before
south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane." The second article declared,
"Evacuation is the most certain route to safety, but it may be a nightmare. And 100,000 without
transportation will be left behind….Some will be housed at the Superdome….Thousands will
drown."
Most of the problems contributing to the likelihood of a Gulf coast catastrophe have been known
for decades. Not enough was done about them under various federal administrations. Most
recently, the Bush administration made a number of decisions that almost certainly contributed to
the loss of lives and homes in hurricane Katrina.
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The Bush administration nixed a plan, proposed a year ago by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, to protect New Orleans from a disastrous hurricane.
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The administration cut federal funding for flood control in southeast Louisiana in half,
arguing that the money was needed for the war in Iraq.
The administration allowed wetlands to be turned over to developers rather than restoring
funds to maintain wetlands.
The administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers for holding back Lake Pontchartrain's waters.
The administration made FEMA, once an independent agency, part of its new
Department of Homeland Security, and shifted the agency's focus from natural disaster to
terrorism.
In addition, the Bush administration has opposed taking steps to lessen the threat of global
warming. The U.S., under President Bush, is one of the few industrialized nations in the world
that has failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty requiring cuts in the greenhouse
gases that cause global warming—even though the U.S. is responsible for one-quarter of the
world's total emissions. One hundred and thirty-two U.S. mayors who disagree with President
Bush and support the Kyoto Protocol have created a bipartisan coalition to act on global warming
locally. Long before hurricane Katrina, the mayor of New Orleans joined the coalition because, he
said, the projected rise in sea levels "threatens the very existence of New Orleans."
For discussion
1. What questions do students have? How might they be answered?
2. What major tentative conclusions about the disastrous results of Hurricane Katrina seem
reasonable?
3. What issues seem to call for thorough investigation? Why?
For citizenship
1. Students may be interested in conducting inquiries into issues associated with the catastrophic
hurricane. For example:
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Why did it take so long for National Guard units to arrive in New Orleans and establish
order?
Who was supposed to be in charge of the Superdome and the convention center? Where
were they?
Why wasn't the Bataan immediately used for hospital patients?
Could a breech in the levees have been reasonably anticipated, and if so, could anything
have been done to prevent it?
Why weren't more federal actions taken before the hurricane to prepare for the likely
occurrence of one?
Students might then:
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Publish a newspaper or magazine about their research for distribution within the school
Send copies of their publication and/or detailed letters with questions to public officials,
including Congressional representatives, the directors of FEMA and Homeland Security,
and the president
2. Students might also be interested in organizing a fundraising campaign for the Hurricane
Katrina victims. See www.fema.gov for a list of organizations collecting money for their aid.
This lesson was written for TeachableMoment.Org, a project of Educators for Social
Responsibility Metropolitan Area. We welcome your comments. Please email author Alan Shapiro
at ashapiro7@comcast.net.
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