There are some very disturbing things coming out of New Orleans and small towns to the East along the Gulf Coast into the state of Mississippi.  People over time have been put at risk because of economic disparities and the priority given to the petro-chemical and gambling/ casino development as well as the retirement home industry.  Destruction of the wetlands, greed driven land use and location decisions in a laissez faire environment, disregard for the poor all are evident as Katrina made land fall.

People have discussed the effects of a direct hit by a large hurricane on New Orleans since hurricane Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969.  In the aftermath of Camille, during which 256 people died in Mississippi, documentation of racial discrimination in the allocation of recovery resources was first documented, leading to a U.S. Congressional investigation.

Has the social, political, and economic situation changed since then?  

There was no plan to use the trains or some other form of mass transport to evacuate the indigent and those without private cars or money.  They were herded like displaced persons (which they were) into the Superdome, whose roof was then ripped open in the wind.  I saw images of these refugees, mostly black, being herded by armed national guardsmen who yelled at them about not allowing guns and drugs inside: very humiliating, not at all shelter with dignity and respect as the Red Cross tries to provide.  Conditions in this large structure (arena seating for 70,000) are atrocioius with no air conditioning, hygiene standards below those mandated by SPHERE standards, and very limited facilities for people in wheel chairs.  The city is now scrambling to come up with a plan to evacuate the evacuatees.  All of this is unnecessary if at least a year ago, after the experience with hurricane Ivan, authorities had taken the needs of the poor and indigent in New Orleans seriously.

(See http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KATRINA_SUPERDOME?SITE=KING&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&SECTION=HOME on conditions in the Superdome and also http://www.polythane.com/library/superd.htm on the history of problems with the Superdome roof -- something else that officials in New Orleans seem to have overlooked).

Professor Kent Mattewson, a geographer based at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge has tried over the past year since hurricane Ivan to get officials to develop a contingency plan to evacuate the indigent and those without private vehicles on the trains that run through New Orleans.  His suggestions have fallen on deaf ears.  A church based pilot project also began after Ivan in 2004 that partnered church members without access to vehicles with those that do.  This, however, was an independent effort to fill the vacuum in policy at City, State, and Federal level.

Hurricane Ivan last year should have caused a re-doubling of precautionary planning.  The night Ivan approached, 20,000 low-income people without private vehicles sheltered in their homes below sea level. A direct hit would have drowned them. A US Army Corps of Engineers computer simulation has calculated that 65,000 could die in the city, in the event of a direct hit by a slow-moving category 3 hurricane.  Fortunately, Ivan veered away from the city at the last moment, but still killed 25 people elsewhere in the US south. At present there is no plan for the public evacuation of low-income residents who do not own cars other than the questionable shelter and assured stress and humiliation provided by the “shelter of last resort,” the Superdome.

This time, too, things were not as bad as they could have been because of a small westward turn that placed the dangerous Northeast edge of the storm over Mississippi.  Will authorities finally get the message and do serious planning for the needs of the poor?  Could Katrina be the beginning of demands from below for social justice in the face of the present social and spatial distribution of risk?

Time will tell, but with so much of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agencies resources devoted to planning for terrorism and with cities like New Orleans struggling with financial burdens that neo-liberal ideology leaves them to sort out on their own, I am not optimistic.  (On the destruction of FEMA by terrorism monomania of the Bush administration see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901445.html ).

Ben Wisner [log in to unmask]