By most accounts Hurricane Gustav was not nearly as bad as it could have been, and New Orleans appears to have been spared—though it was only after the winds and rains of Katrina had died down and we were celebrating the avoidance of a direct hit in 2005 that the levees sprung leaks and the city filled up like a bathtub.
Houma, Louisiana, a small city of around 195,000 people, 78% of them white, seems to have taken the most direct hit, and it says something about what we expected after Katrina that the man in the shelter in Shreveport, complaining of the lack of running water and cramped conditions, sounds like he’s whining. After all, he’s got a cot and bottled water, and that’s far more than anyone had in the Superdome or the Convention Center, right?
After Katrina, everyone who’d never lived in New Orleans wondered why more people didn’t evacuate. Not me. I was there in 1998 when Hurricane Georges loomed in the Gulf. I was a freshman at Tulane University, where for thirty-odd thousand a year, I got the privilege of being evacuated to the hallway in my fifth-floor dorm along with the other middle-class (and up) college kids whose parents didn’t buy them plane tickets home.
My ridiculously expensive, internationally-renowned research university thought that the best it could do for its students was to lock them out of its dorm rooms and into the halls, as if the doors were proof against water coming in.
Unlike 2005, this time the city was prepared for an evacuation and provided buses to shelters like the one in Shreveport without running water. People got out. Yet the city was spared a direct hit and the levees appear to have held. And now people are trapped in shelters with no say in when they get to go home, and they are angrily wondering if they’d been better off staying in the city. What will they do next time, if they are told to get on another bus to another miserable shelter?
Evacuation costs money. People who don’t have cars are stuck going wherever they’re bused to, and even people who do have cars often don’t have anywhere to stay. If your entire family lives in New Orleans, who are you going to crash with?
The word “Hurrication” has been tossed around by people who survived Katrina, but most of them are people who can afford a couple days’ vacation without problem. And according to reports, people without ID were being denied entry to the buses evacuating people.
Meanwhile, since New Orleans is not underwater, the news coverage has been saturated instead with the debate over Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin’s daughter, and her pregnancy. Though the Republican National Convention scaled back its events out of “respect” for those in the path of Gustav, CNN is more interested in stories about Cindy McCain’s business dealings than the people who are suffering. The people still left in New Orleans without power, and those stuck in shelters, are missing out on the work that they only get paid to do if they are there, and the restaurants and hotels are open.
New Orleans has been spared a major tragedy this time, but Gustav could’ve been an opening to talk once again about the need to fix the levees—they held, yes, but does that mean everyone will assume they will hold if another Category 4 storm hits the city? What about the people still trying to rebuild from Katrina? As of July 19, NPR reported that as many as 3000 FEMA trailers still dotted New Orleans.
How sad is it that a major hurricane hitting Louisiana is simply another news story, that one teenage pregnancy out of about 750,000 yearly is more important to us than people who have been living in possibly toxic trailers for three years trying to rebuild their homes, only to have their repairs put on hold due to yet another storm?
Before Gustav hit, I feared the worst—the levees failing, the city flooding, people dying and even less sympathy now for those who didn’t evacuate. I feared the diaspora once again of the people who made the city I loved.
Now I just fear that America will forget even more quickly what happened, that Gustav will be touted as a success story, and the next time a storm bears down on the city, we’ll have slid back towards pre-Katrina complacency.
It certainly puts things in perspective. The fact that the RNC was self-promoting and lauding its decision to scale back the convention says it all. It’s common sense, not some altruistic selfless act on their part.
It’s strange that the Bush administration is willing to keep the entire nation in a state of panic for fear of getting back to the “pre-9-11” mentality but cares little about pre-Katrina complacency, as you put it, which is certainly reason for alarm. I would have thought it would be a major factor in this election but it’s been hardly mentioned.
Yep. Considering that two days before it looked like Gustav was going to be a category 5 *and* possibly hit New Orleans, we’re extremely lucky it ended up how it did. But instead of looking at the levees – or the wetland areas (which everyone agrees are necessary to help protect against a 4 or 5) – we get this shit.
And it’s worth stating that, while this wasn’t Katrina, Louisiana got hit and hit badly. So any assertions that this was Katrina “done right” miss the point. We got lucky this time.
And considering the latest forecasts for Hurricane Ike, New Orleans (and the rest of Louisiana) shouldn’t be celebrating too soon about the levees holding.
I live in Opelousas in South Central Louisiana (what the locals refer to as “Acadiana” due to its French/”Cajun” heritage…and we got the eye right over us preceded by 70+ mph winds. Also, I experienced my own issues with FEMA over evacuation shelters, though unlike those in Shreveport, the locals in St. Landry Parish actually got things right after the initial screw-up and got us a decent shelter. Obviously, the “Heck of a job, Brownie” mentality still reigns supreme.
And of course, the media would ignore the plight of average people (especially if they happen to be majority Black) in favor of the fawning of Sarah Quayle Patin….they wouldn’t be the “liberal media” without such nonsense.
Anthony