Hurricane Katrina And The Fall Of The Big Easy
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In the days and nights following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, America lost a city of enormous cultural and economic value, and the impact will be felt for years to come. New Orleans was a cultural epicenter for our country. It was the birthplace of jazz music as its nickname “The Big Easy” implies how easy it was for musicians to find work in the city during the jazz era. New Orleans was also a major battleground in the fight to integrate the public school system and to rid our nation of segregated schools. With such a rich history it is easy to place the entire city of New Orleans under the category of a national landmark. Yet as hurricane Katrina fell upon the city suddenly it was all lost, in one swift blow the city was left in shambles. Was this some inevitable act of god or is there a deeper story that has yet to be told? When we examine the facts and statistics it becomes more and more evident that the loss of life and the hardship that was felt by so many Americans could have been greatly reduced if not entirely avoided. The truth is that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen, the response to the Hurricane was grossly inadequate and an examination of the citys demographics shows the real value of an impoverished life to the officials that run our government.
The geographic location of the city of New Orleans has always been precarious and historically it has been prone to damage resulting from flooding. In an interview given to CBS News Dr. Walter Maestri who is the director of emergency management for Jefferson Parish, LA. gave this synopsis to describe the geographical danger zone in which the city of New Orleans is located, “New Orleans exists below sea level, basically in a bowl,” he said. “It resembles a soup bowl, surrounded on all sides by levees, the entire metro area. If the levees are topped by the tidal surge flooding, the water comes into the bowl and remains, because every drop of water that falls here has to be pumped out”. The levy system of New Orleans was the only thing standing between it and certain destruction. Therefore, logic would dictate that the utmost care and concern be placed in the maintenance and condition of the levy system for the city of New Orleans. Unfortunately for the people who lived there, politics and logic were at odds when it came to those levees and the people which they protected from certain doom.
The levy system in place to protect the city of new Orleans was nothing close to being able to withstand a hurricane with the force that Katrina had. The following quote from a June 2003 article in Civil Engineering Magazine the writers J.J. Westerink and R.A. Luettich illustrate this inadequacy:
The design of the original levees, which dates to the 1960s, was based on rudimentary storm modeling that, it is now realized, might underestimate the threat of a potential hurricane. Even if the modeling was adequate, however, the levees were designed to withstand only forces associated with a fast-moving hurricane that, according to the National Weather Services Saffir-Simpson scale,
would be placed in category 3. If a lingering category 3 storm–or a stronger storm, say, category 4 or 5–were to hit the city, much of New Orleans could find itself under more than 20 ft (6 m) of water.
Hurricane Katrina was at its peak a category 5 hurricane and the city of New Orleans was only prepared to handle a category 3. A city which during the 2000 census boasted a population of over 480,000 people (3) has been left unprotected and vulnerable for over 45 years. The aforementioned article and many like it were written prior to 2003, obviously there has been plenty of time to update and modernize the levy system since this information was been made public. It is a shame and an embarrassment that this type of situation could exist in our country. Unfortunately it seems like in our government, people need to die in order for things to get done. If even a minor revamping was done of the levy system how many hundreds of lives could have been saved? That question will no doubt be on the minds of American citizens for generations to come. It is needless to say that the type and the extent of the neglect to the people of New Orleans is appalling but whats worse was the governments failure to properly act and to save lives in the days and nights that proceeded that disaster.
The first string of failures came from the state and local governments of Louisiana. Local authorities did not establish a proper chain of command and blunders and miscommunications plagued the relief effort from the very beginning. One such example was illustrated in a Washington post timeline article dubbed “The Steady Buildup to a Citys Chaos” in this article an Amtrak representative spoke about an Amtrak train that was leaving the New Orleans area on the eve of the hurricane which
was carrying equipment out and was heading to an adjacent city out of the danger zone. The train had room for several hundred passengers, and Amtrak offered these spaces to the city, but the city declined them, so the train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m. without a single civilian on board (4). Now this is not meant to imply that the local government willingly denied people a way out of the city. The likely reason they declined the offer is because the officials in charge were unable to co-ordinate the evacuation effort and get people to the train in time. One would expect that infrastructure would be in place which could allow local officials to direct and serve people in times of need such as the hurricane but the fact remains that it just wasnt there. Local police and emergency officials couldnt even get people into a train which would have for free, shuttled hundreds out to higher ground and a chance for survival. Where was the emergency broadcast system? Where were the local police, why werent they radioing this information to the people? The police likely never knew about the train and those who did know likely had no clue as to how to get the word out. Seeing that such a lack of coordination existed during the emergency situation goes to show how terribly ineffective the local response was and that those who administer the local forces should be held accountable.
The federal response to the disaster was tragically no better. Seemingly inexplicable courses of action were taken by FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency) that needlessly put lives in jeopardy. Quoted from the transcript of the September 4th airing of NBCs Meet the Press, Aaron Broussard the president of
Jefferson Parish, Louisiana gave a shocking account of his first hand experience with FEMA actually being a detriment to efforts to aid hurricane victims:
We had Wal-Mart deliver three