Four years after Katrina: Are there always rainbows within the clouds?

WRITTEN IN SEPTEMBER 2009 FOR THE SYRIAN ENGLISH NEWSPAPER BALADNA

It was predicted with detail what was going to happen: a great storm, failures of the levees and floodwalls protecting the city, floods, disorganization in the response, chaos, violence, massive displacement… However, four years after Katrina Hurricane, many residents of New Orleans still ask themselves and to the authorities…what if this would happen again?

In the morning of Monday 29th August, 2005 a decreasing hurricane from category 5 to 3 hit the coast of Louisiana causing severe damages to the cities infrastructure and with enough force to breached the levees that protected the city of New Orleans.

The storm happened in the developed world, in the first world power. However, the reaction by the authorities and the media covering reflected the unfair bases of the social, political an economical system and revealed the hidden and deep reality of the poor and black populations of the South of the United States. Katrina’s did not create the disadvantages that everybody had the chance to watch in TV, but it peeled away the society surface, amplified these inequalities and bring them up to the light in a city where these factors were already deep-rooted, both historically and institutionally.

The Government Response

Focused in military spending and the Iraq war campaign, Bush administration cut budgets and influence in many other public services areas, such as disasters management including research and maintenance of New Orleans dawns. This affected specially to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which lost autonomy and capacity, shifted from natural disasters to counterterrorism, being also considered a political resting place for favors that were owed, filling top positions with inexperienced political appointments.

FEMA deterioration and the extraordinary characteristics of Katrina overwhelmed any chance of coordinate response, and once the storm challenged beyond their capacities, failures were sudden and widespread. This also supposed a change in the initial response to the disaster, which was more characteristic of civil defense than of civil protection. Thus, a widespread feeling reached all the American society that considered that the State itself was unconcerned or unable to protect its own population. So, when the National Guard arrived, it was apparent that they were working under orders to control the city military and protect property rather than to bring aid to the desperate.

American society got shocked, while media showed a devastated New Orleans with crows of black criminals looting, shooting and destroying the remains of the city. But there were many realities inside the same chaos: evacuation strategies oriented to middle-high income citizens were confronted with thousands of low income citizens unable to leave the city or to find a safe shelter by their own means; images of people looting stores and overcrowded shelters with women, elderly and children as the main victims were confronted with an “unconscionable ineptitude” of the Government in their efforts to help their citizens; or, recovery actions that should be aimed to provide housing, healthcare or education to the whole population were confronted with governmental policies oriented to create profits in spite of people, supported migration to other cities of low-incomers and were focused in military spending more than health, education, labour and other recovery activities.

The Reconstruction

New Orleans two weeks after Katrina already looked like a developers’ gold rush. A new-New Orleans have to be rebuilt in the straight way: “People who lack middle-class skills should not be allowed to resettle the city: If we just put up new buildings and allow the same people to move back into their old neighborhoods, then urban New Orleans will become just as run down as before” neo-conservative New York Times editorialist David Brooks considered thinking about reconstruction, or as Congressional Representative Richard Baker of Baton Rouge said: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans, we couldn’t do it, but God did”.

And the true looters started to work on it, while disaster reconstruction cut deeper the ruts and grooves of social oppression and exploitation. Abolishing competition by giving no-bid contracts to some of the same companies that operate in Iraq (Bechtel, Fluor Corp., Haliburton) the Bush administration mandated cutthroat competition among desperate workers by suspending federal laws that required federal contractors to pay at least the prevailing local wage. Insurance companies that started to plan how to avoid the massive payments arguing about the stupidity of people who lived below sea-level. And by contrast, those displaced, without property, facing low wages, unable to pay the escalating costs for scarce housing, got deepen into the same dynamics which governed their lives for decades.

 Anything, in spite of the State

In spite of this, New Orleans is reshaping itself into a more resilient and equitable city. President´s Obama new administration “sustained commitment” has freed hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing, moving assistance and the rebuilding of schools, fire departments and police stations. But these public spending, generous or limited, would be nothing without the incredible volunteer effort that has been developed during the last four years. With an evident lack of public support, the city has see how a big army of idealist of any age volunteered to rebuild the city, creating a new social conscious, solidarity, activism and an astonishing degree of community participation.

However, the pace of recovery is slowing as the city approaches the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The population of New Orleans is still about 175,000 (28%) people fewer than it was before the storm. Louisiana is one of only five states to show an increase in home prices, with rents across New Orleans 46% higher today than pre-Katrina, while many homeowners are still paying mortgages on destroyed houses or played roulette with minimal insurance on homes they owned outright. There are also 65,000 blighted properties or empty lots throughout the city’s area, although New Orleans was the country's fastest growing city in 2008.

New Orleans is still alive although there is a pessimistic feeling cover it’s reborn. Different studies estimate that the metropolitan area will remain at risk of flooding from future hurricanes, even after the construction of a new line of levees, pumps and floodgates expected by 2011; that by 2040, at current rates of wetlands increase, New Orleans will be a coastal city; and that the Mississippi Delta, including much of the Louisiana coastline, will be underwater by 2100.

So, while people in New Orleans see work being done on the levees and in the low-lying areas in order to rebuilt their old houses, the street wisdom fights the uncertainty of the future, with the love of the place where they were born and want to stay. 

TO LEARN MORE:
www.504ward.com
www.teachingthelevees.org
www.disasterwatch.net
www.understandingkatrina.ssrc.org
www.katrinaresearchhub.ssrc.org