Now, I'm well aware that early reports of what's going on can turn out to be wrong, so consider these observations regarding Hurricane Katrina accordingly.
On historical precedent, this comparison should be required reading. How did President Clinton respond to Hurricane Floyd in 1999? How did the first President Bush respond to Hurricane Andrew in 1992? How did President Nixon respond to Hurricane Camille in 1969? The federal government is capable of heroic and effective efforts when disaster strikes. Someone dropped the ball with Hurricane Katrina.
On the "leaving versus staying" issue, no reasonable person can argue on the one hand that the residents of New Orleans should have anticipated the devastation that was coming their way but that the federal government had no way of knowing what to expect or how to prepare.
It is true that some people who were able to leave refused to leave the area as the hurricane approached. As a longtime (though on-again/off-again) resident of the South, I can report that this always happens with hurricanes, yet we've never seen chaos to the extent that we've seen after Hurrican Katrina. This leads me to two conclusions. One, it was not entirely unreasonable for some people to stay behind. Two, to say that the scale of the problem is caused by people who chose to stay behind is obviously wrong.
It is also true that a large number of people were simply unable to leave. According to the New York Times:
Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans lives below the poverty line, compared with 9 percent nationwide, according to census figures. Twenty-four percent of its adults are disabled, compared with 19 percent nationwide. An estimated 50,000 households in New Orleans do not have cars.
And if everyone had left New Orleans, where would they all have gone and what would they have done once they got there? Nearby cities--including Houston and Baton Rouge--are reporting that they are approaching capacity right now in dealing with refugees. Baton Rouge, for example, has apparently doubled in size.
If you had inadequate property insurance, would you find it easy to leave behind everything you own? If you are able-bodied, but someone you love is not and is not easily moved, would you leave them? If your friends or family decided to stay behind, would you leave them? If you had lived through previous hurricanes with no serious problems, would you leave?
On the looting issue, there are those who want to draw a moral distinction between people who took necessities like food and medical supplies and people who took things like clothing and electronic equipment. I would like those people to consider this scenario: Imagine living with no money to buy food or other essentials in a city that has essentially been destroyed. Because no assistance has made its way into the city from the outside, you assume there will be people who do have food and other essentials who might want you to pay for it. Would you hesitate to take things of value in order to trade them for what you needed? It's not like aid is rushing into the city the day after the hurricane, or the day after that. Or the day after that.
Here's what MSNBC's Joe Scarborough had to say:
You got to understand that these are people who have young babies who haven't had water in four days, in some cases, haven't had formula, haven't had basic necessities. I just wonder what you would do, what I would do if we were in a situation where our 15-month-old child or our 2-year-old baby needed something to stay alive. I don't know what you would do. I know I would do anything it took to get what they needed.
Now, I should be getting it from the federal government if I am in New Orleans, from the state government. But I will tell you what. It is amateur hour, and it has been amateur hour over the past four or five days. This is completely different, friends, from the way the crises were handled in Florida last year, four hurricanes, two of them major, it was handled with ruthless efficiency. I know. I was there. That is not happening tonight in New Orleans.
technorati tags: hurricane katrina, katrina
The economic health of a region will affect the people's ability to recover from disasters like this. One of the most important exports from Central America is coffee. Now is as good a time as any for you to read up on Fair Trade Coffee (something my sister got me interested in last week), which ensures a fair price and fair working conditions for coffee farmers and harvesters. Fair Trade Coffee is not hard to find in America or England, but you do have to pay attention when shopping.