Deeply difficult times for the Big Easy

Sep 2nd 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

The people of New Orleans are finally getting the help they need after several days of chaos in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Angry questions are being asked about the stuttering relief effort, and about past decisions that made the disaster more painful than it had to be

NEW ORLEANS’S nickname, the Big Easy, was well earned. Residents and visitors have long loved the place for its don’t-think-about-tomorrow attitude. Though everyone knew that the low-lying city was vulnerable to tempests and flooding, many who had lived there for years had experienced hurricane scares and smaller floods, and had come to view the risk of disaster with a sort of cheery aplomb. In the physical devastation and appalling lawlessness that has followed Hurricane Katrina, many are now wondering whether someone, at the local, state or national level, should have thought about tomorrow a little harder.

Since the breaching of the city’s levees—which protect it from the Mississippi River to the south and Lake Ponchartrain to the north—on the morning of Tuesday August 30th, things have gone from bad to worse to nightmarish. Water levels have stopped rising, but most of the city remains under water. Perhaps 100,000 people either could not or would not leave the city on Sunday, when the mayor announced that they must. Tens of thousands ended up at the city’s official shelter at the Superdome stadium for days, turning it into a sink of hot and smelly misery. When thousands of these unfortunates were evacuated on buses to Houston, others quickly took their place. Not far away, other homeless people made their way to the city’s convention centre, which quickly became a second giant shelter. Conditions there were said to be worse than at the Superdome—until Friday, when hefty supplies of food, water and medicines finally arrived.

Meanwhile, looters have been roaming the streets, stealing food and water in desperation but also computers and sporting equipment in opportunism. Looters cleaned out the guns at a giant Wal-Mart, and one of them gloated that policemen had helped themselves to the shelves’ contents as well. Rapes and car-jackings have been reported, and there have been angry confrontations between roving thugs and the few shop- and homeowners who have stayed, both sides often brandishing guns. To add to the city’s woes, gas leaks have bubbled through the surface of the water, sometimes catching fire, and a number of fires and explosions have sent huge plumes of smoke across town.

While Katrina was a powerful storm—which also devastated the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama—the extent of the chaos and suffering in New Orleans in her wake has nonetheless been surprising. America has dealt with ferocious hurricanes before. And New Orleans’s vulnerabilities were well known. Thus many are starting to point fingers in relation to both the short-term response and long-term policy failures.

Ray Nagin, the city’s mayor, has shown increasing frustration throughout the week, especially with the federal government’s response and its press conferences: “They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying…Get off your asses and let’s do something.” The police superintendent has also complained, bemoaning the lack of national guardsmen who might have established order earlier. (Under American law, regular soldiers may not take part in law enforcement.) On Friday a large contingent of guardsmen finally arrived, and Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, gave warning that “they know how to shoot to kill.”

Many of the immediate difficulties are understandable. As Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, pointed out, the disaster has in fact been a double one. The hurricane’s winds flattened homes on the Gulf coast, and shortly thereafter the rains burst the levees, the latter creating a “dynamic” situation while authorities responded to the former. Plugging a hundred-metre hole in a levee while waters rush through is a huge challenge for engineers. Impassable roads have made delivery of supplies difficult. Still, an under-pressure President George Bush criticised the relief effort on Friday morning, calling it “not acceptable”, before flying to the region to see the damage.

Some are pointing the finger at Mr Bush himself, on the grounds that some of his administration's longer-term policy decisions have made the response to the disaster more difficult. The war in Iraq, it has been noted, has depleted the number of available national guardsmen by a third or more in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama; many of those serving in Iraq are trained emergency personnel. Others allege that the war has squeezed the budget, causing a postponement last year of projects to improve the levees. But it is far from clear that these could have been completed in time to stop the flooding after Katrina.

Other criticisms might have more political bite. America is already feeling the pain of high oil prices, though these have yet to dent economic growth significantly. Katrina sent prices higher still, at least for a time. Mr Bush’s decision to lend nearly 1m barrels of oil a day from America’s strategic reserve to its oil companies has eased temporary supply fears. But neither the war in Iraq nor Mr Bush’s energy policy has done much to make the country less vulnerable to oil shocks.

Some critics put the blame for the disaster on the president’s policy on climate change. Here they are on shakier ground. Temperature increases may have some effect on the intensity of hurricanes, but there is no obvious reason to believe that if Mr Bush had signed the Kyoto Protocol on becoming president in 2001 Katrina would not have breached New Orleans’s levees. Nonetheless, any natural disaster with a possible connection to environmental policy, however tenuous, could hurt Mr Bush politically—especially as opinion polls show that voters see the environment as being one of his weakest points.

Even if some failures can be attributed to the Bush administration, the most important reasons for Katrina’s deadliness may lie in decisions that predate the current president, from Jean Baptiste le Moyne de Bienville’s decision to found the city in its precarious location, in 1718, to the more recent “improvements” in the area’s maritime navigability that have damaged south-eastern Louisiana’s wetlands. For much of the 20th century the federal government tampered with the Mississippi, to help shipping and—ironically—prevent floods. In the process it destroyed large swathes of coastal marshland around New Orleans—something which suited property developers, but removed much of the city’s natural protection against flooding. Support may now grow for a multi-billion-dollar plan to restore the wetlands, though a similar project in Florida has proved difficult.

It is an uncomfortable fact that millions of Americans have made the decision to live in areas prone to this kind of disaster. Though Congress has authorised an immediate $10.5 billion relief package, Denny Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has expressed doubt that large dollops of money should be spent on reconstruction in a location as exposed as New Orleans (though he later backpeddled). But there remain important questions to be asked at both the local and national level about the failures that led to Katrina’s destruction and chaos. It has provided yet another reminder that decisions made without due regard for the consequences can prove painful indeed later on.

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