The blame game

Sep 7th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Most of those in need of food, water and medical help after Hurricane Katrina have now been reached, engineers have started to pump water out of New Orleans, and the authorities have begun forcibly evacuating residents who refuse to leave. Who is to blame for the botched relief effort: George Bush, local officials, or no one in particular?

THE evacuation of New Orleans was finally nearing completion on Wednesday September 7th, more than a week after the breaching of the low-lying city’s levees in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. National Guardsmen, regular troops and federal marshals—many of whom had been brought in late last week following criticism of the sluggish relief effort—had moved into the worst-affected districts and were making house-to-house searches for the remaining survivors. However, an estimated 5,000-10,000 residents were still refusing to leave. As a result, the authorities began on Tuesday to enforce a compulsory evacuation order. “We'll do everything it takes to make this city safe,” said Edwin Compass, New Orleans's police superintendent. “These people don't understand they're putting themselves in harm's way.”

With most of the survivors now taken care of, the focus is shifting to those who perished in the storm and subsequent flood. The official death toll in the three worst-hit states—Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—is still in the low hundreds. But the final toll could be as high as 10,000. Many corpses have sunk in the water that still covers around three-fifths of New Orleans. On Monday, the US Army Corps of Engineers said it had plugged a big gap in the levees and started to pump water out of the city. But it could be two to three months before the task is completed, and up to a year before those who have left can return. The economic costs of this, and of the damage done to the region's oil and gas facilities, are still being counted.

Perhaps 100,000 people either could not or would not leave New Orleans when warned to do so before Katrina struck. Tens of thousands ended up at either the city’s Superdome stadium or its convention centre for days, turning them into sinks of hot and smelly misery. By the weekend, these refugees had been bussed out. Some 20 states have offered to house and school refugees temporarily. But the strain is already starting to show in neighbouring states. In Texas, home to almost half of those who fled New Orleans, officials say they are struggling to cope and have asked that any further refugees be airlifted to other states. On Tuesday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it would fly evacuees at New Orleans's airport to five air bases around the country, where beds have become available because of soldiers going to Iraq.

If the world was saddened by the devastation wrought by Katrina, it was shocked by the breakdown of law and order that followed. Looters roamed the streets, stealing food and water in desperation but also computers, sporting equipment and guns in opportunism. Rapes and car-jackings were reported, and there were angry confrontations between roving thugs and the few shop- and homeowners who stayed. Some saw the social tension as having a racial element, since most of those left behind were poor and black.

Though New Orleans was flooded on Tuesday of last week, it wasn’t until Friday that the relief effort gained real momentum, with the arrival of thousands of national guardsmen. Kathleen Blanco, the governor of Louisiana, gave warning that “they know how to shoot to kill”, and by the weekend they had restored order to most parts of the city. But they and other emergency personnel are under huge pressure, with many of them working round the clock; the New York Times quoted Mr Compass as saying that at least 200 of his 1,500 police officers had refused to do their job.

Let down, but by whom?

While Katrina was a powerful storm, the extent of the chaos and suffering 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, New Orleans’s mayor, showed increasing frustration throughout last 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.” An under-pressure President George Bush criticised the relief effort on Friday, calling it “not acceptable”, before flying to the region to see the damage. Later, he suggested that local officials had made some mistakes. This earned him the threat of a punch from one Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu.

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 of Mexico coast, and shortly thereafter the rains burst the levees, the latter creating a “dynamic” situation while authorities responded to the former.
Nevertheless, many Americans are blaming the man at the top. Mr Bush should have gone to the region sooner, his critics say. (He made a second trip on Monday.) Some Bush supporters worry that the botched relief effort could hurt the president at a time when his ratings are already low, thanks to the troubles of Iraq.

A Washington Post/ABC poll, conducted on Friday, found that the nation was split down the middle, with 46% saying Mr Bush had handled the crisis well and 47% saying he had done badly. By Tuesday, support for the president appeared to have slipped: in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 42% of respondents rated his response to the disaster as “bad” or “terrible”, while 35% said it was “good” or “great”. Only 35% described the response of state and local officials as bad or terrible, with slightly more, 37%, saying it was good or great. But when asked who was responsible for the problems in New Orleans after Katrina struck, fewer blamed Mr Bush (13%) than federal agencies (18%) or state and local officials (25%); 38% blamed no one.

In an effort to head off criticism, the president has said that he will lead an investigation into his administration's response to the disaster. The House of Representatives and the Senate will hold their own probes. Politicians on both sides are angry. On Tuesday Susan Collins, a Republican senator who will lead an investigation by the chamber's Homeland Security Committee, said: “If our system did such a poor job when there was no enemy, how would the federal, state and local governments have coped with a terrorist attack that provided no advance warning and that was intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible?”

Mr Bush's critics argue 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—though it is far from clear that these could have been completed in time to stop the flooding after Katrina.

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 and Mr Bush has said he will seek another $40 billion for the first phase of rebuilding, Denny Hastert, the speaker of the House, has questioned whether huge amounts of money should be spent on reconstruction in a location as exposed as New Orleans (though he later backpedalled). 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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