Hurricane Katrina, which hit the US port
city of New Orleans and surrounding areas in the last week of August,
was a major natural disaster, which would have qualified as an emergency
in most countries. But what has been even more devastating is the abysmal
lack of preparedness and appalling state of disaster relief in the richest
country of the world, the imperial superpower.
Not just days, but now nearly two weeks after the hurricane struck, tens
of thousands of people in distress have still not been evacuated. For
around a week, hospitals with severely ill patients were left without
power, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and corpses rotting
in the corridors and stairwells. Death and the stink of decay are still
all over the city. Corpses have been simply left where they were, or allowed
to decompose on the streets. The water that continued to submerge the
city was full of human excreta.
Pregnant women, children and the old were deprived of any access to food
and even water, for days on end. A week after the hurricane had moved
on, gangs of armed miscreants roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers,
beating and robbing the already devastated residents, raping women and
girls. Two weeks after the disaster, basic public order in the city has
still not been established, and the US government has still no estimate
of the number of dead or dying, which may be in the tens of thousands.
What is amazing is that both the extent of the disaster and the subsequent
even worse calamities in New Orleans could have been prevented by relatively
modest spending. It was well known that the canals and levees of the city
(which is mostly below sea level) need to be reinforced or rebuilt. But
the Bush government has steadfastly refused to make available even the
small amounts required, and has even repeatedly cut funding for the maintenance
and upgrading of the levee system, despite pleas by local and state officials.
Thus, only $2 billion would have provided for immediate reinforcement
and upgrading of the levees and canals in and around the city. Longer-term
protection against the impact of hurricanes by restoring the ecosystem
of the Mississippi delta would have cost only around $14 billion. But
Washington has been obsessed by tax cuts and any additional spending has
been diverted to the war in Iraq (which has already cost more than $200
billion and is creating similar, but man-made, devastation for the Iraqi
people). So even the spending of these tiny amounts proved to be politically
impossible.
In fact, it is a symptom of the problem that even as the levees in New
Orleans collapsed, the US Congress was returning from its August break
to take up, as its first order of business, a bill to make permanent the
virtual elimination of the estate tax, a measure which would gift hundreds
of billions of dollars to only a few thousand families, the richest of
the rich.
But it is not just the Bush administration’s attitude to public policy
which has been exposed. The immediate management of the disaster has been
so bad that it has shocked the world. For example, it was reported that
the US warship, the U.S.S. Bataan, which is equipped with six operating
rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons
of fresh water a day, has been sitting idle off the Gulf Coast since last
Monday - without patients.
While the world knew for at least three days about the impending hurricane,
there was no attempt at large-scale public evacuation, only calls for
people to move on their own. Those who did not have their own transport
or had other constraints were not assisted. Instead of quick action to
deal with the calamity, there are reports of a "strange paralysis"
that had set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines
of authority while thousands died. While the local and state governments
were certainly found lacking, the lack of response from the federal government
was truly remarkable.
When George Bush finally visited the ravaged area several days later,
he reminisced about the wild parties of his youth in New Orleans, and
cutely said: “"The good news is that out of this chaos is going to
come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of
(former Congressman) Trent Lott's house - he's lost his entire house -
there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting
on the porch."
This is partly reflective of the dynamics of social and political power
in the US. The victims of Hurricane Katrina were largely black and almost
always poor – the ones who simply did not have the resources to leave
the city on their own. These are not the US citizens with voice and political
clout – just as this category provides the cannon fodder for the Iraq
war, it also has less chance of demanding basic rights of citizens in
the wake of a natural disaster.
But the incompetence of the US administration was such that it even ignored
the strategic importance of New Orleans. This is not just because of the
oil production around the area. One of New Orleans’ two ports is the largest
in the United States by tonnage. A large proportion of US agricultural
production flows out of the port, huge amounts come in - including not
only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilisers, coal, concrete and basic
raw materials for industry. Destruction of this port is likely to have
huge impact on the US economy.
Compare this experience to another American natural disaster, in a very
different but neighbouring country. A year ago, in September 2004, a Category
5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds.
More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of
the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
The civil defence system in Cuba is embedded in the community, so everyone
knew what to do and where to go. And Cuban government leaders were visibly
leading from the front in organising the relief.
In Cuba it would have been unthinkable just to push people into a stadium
and leave them there for days, as was done in New Orleans. There are neighbourhood-based
shelters, all with medical personnel. The evacuation also involves moving
animals, TV sets and refrigerators, so that people are not reluctant to
leave their homes.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for
Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation, saying
that "the Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with
similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources
that do not manage to protect their citizens form natural disaster.” The
Cubans have now offered help in the form of doctors and volunteers, to
the stricken coastline of the United States.
What a pity for the people of the US, that George Bush would not even
consider it.