Katrina was NOT a "natural disaster"?

[Edbert]

At least according to this author...

by Robert Tracinski

Sep 02, 2005

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

[Xargos]

Well said.

[Nilsen]

Slightly off topic but still..

Saw someting on CNN a few nights ago about the need to not just rebuild the levies but also to restore the wetlands. Apartently the wetlands works as a natural barrier or some such thing in these events and prevents the flooding and damage inland.

Any thoughts on that? Seems like a good idea to me, or is that just tree-hugger talk?

[Wolf14]

Wow.........

[Whisky58]

The impression we are getting in the UK from our media is that the underpriviledged & underclasses of NO failed to evacuate because :-  1. Little or no personal transport.
                 
                   2. A desire to stay close to their homes & posessions.

Obviously at odds with what Tracinski is saying.

Best wishes & sympathies to those who have suffered.

[Edbert]

Originally posted by Nilsen
Any thoughts on that? Seems like a good idea to me, or is that just tree-hugger talk?

I don't claim to be an expert (on much of anything really) but from what I understand there were naturally occuring floods on the Mississippi River (largest in N. America) that deposit vast amounts of silt into the entire region (hundreds of square miles). But since mankind has "tamed" mother nature by controlling these floods with dams and levies the silt is not getting deposited. Thus the river gets shallower and wider while at the same time the delta region (that protrusion of land you can see on any map) gets smaller and smaller and New Orleans sinks further and further since the land it was built on is very fine "silt" to begin with.

Is that pretty accurate?

[Nilsen]

Originally posted by Edbert
I don't claim to be an expert (on much of anything really) but from what I understand there were naturally occuring floods on the Mississippi River (largest in N. America) that deposit vast amounts of silt into the entire region (hundreds of square miles). But since mankind has "tamed" mother nature by controlling these floods with dams and levies the silt is not getting deposited. Thus the river gets shallower and wider while at the same time the delta region (that protrusion of land you can see on any map) gets smaller and smaller and New Orleans sinks further and further since the land it was built on is very fine "silt" to begin with.

Is that pretty accurate?

Yup, they mentioned the Mississipi too. They also talked about that maybe Florida has some of the same issues because the wetlands there has become smaller... maybe they mean the Everglades?

The story/report was not a long one but it sparked my interest. I remember seeing some National Geographic videos of these places that my dad had when i was a kid. Beautiful place, and i would imagine that these areas are very important to the ecosystems. I never thought of them as having an effect on protecting the inland from hurricanes tho, but the way it was told made sense.

[Larry]

That is so true.

[lazs2]

I think that Tracinski is saying what a lot of us have been thinking from the start...

When you feel that the government is your only hope.... you lash out when things go bad.   Like the LA riot people all standing outside the welfare offices in south central after they had burned and looted...

It doesn't put the welfare state in a good light but then.... what does?  

lazs

[Edbert]

Originally posted by lazs2
When you feel that the government is your only hope....

Interesting, I wonder how many feel this way. I feel our government is our biggest threat, including OBL.

[Xargos]

I think the biggest reason for the disaster is that many people have no respect for mothernature.  In the end mothernature will show you who's the boss.

[Nilsen]

Originally posted by Xargos
In the end mothernature will show you who's the boss.

And it aint Bruce Springsteen!

[T0J0]

Well put... From a relatively obscure journalist...

[lazs2]

ed... unfortunately a lot of people feel that way.  It is governments sole purpose to make us feel that way... in that respect.. big government seems to be winning..   The individual is scorned in this country more and more.

lazs

[Toad]

Originally posted by Whisky58
The impression we are getting in the UK from our media is that the underpriviledged & underclasses of NO failed to evacuate because :-  1. Little or no personal transport.

[/b]

True. More importantly, NO PLAN TO EVACUATE THEM by the Nagin administration running N. O.

From the Houston Chronicle:

The city of New Orleans Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan suggested people develop their own way to get out. "The potential exists that New Orleans could be without sufficient supplies to meet the needs of persons with special considerations, and there is significant risk being taken by those individuals who decide to remain in these refuges of last resort," it says....

.....Florida, by contrast, for two decades has required counties to establish and maintain permanent databases of "special needs citizens," and arrange rides for people with no transportation. The state also has shelters established for myriad medical conditions.

Florida emergency officials agree that last-minute planning simply doesn't work.

"Unless you planned in advance, it would be a catastrophe," said Guy Daines, a retired Florida emergency manager who is considered an expert in specialized evacuations.

                 
                   2. A desire to stay close to their homes & posessions.

I have a very good friend, a veterinarian, that is advising Georgia and Atlanta on it's  Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan. He has been trying to point out to them that people, particularly the older folks, will NOT leave their pets and that some sort of provision has to be made for sheltering the pets and reuniting them after the emergency. Otherwise, these folks won't leave.

I think he's right. We saw stories on this on the major news broadcasters from the beginning. We're seeing it now as they try to finish evacuating.

He commented that when the waters go down, he won't be suprised to find dead folks clutching their pets.