There has been a lot of focus on New Orleans -- with 80 percent of the city under water, running chaos as the city descends into the third world, complete with armed gangs and looting (although I have to wonder whether it can be considered looting when food and supplies run out, you have no clothes, shoes or blankets, let alone food for your children, and you take it from a store that's sitting, idle and open. What alternative is there in that case? Where can you purchase these things from? No stores are open -- civilization is essentially suspended... to the extent that there has been criminal looting and raw gang violence, it is deplorable, but I think the media ought to try and differentiate between that kind of behavior and bare survival. I know what I would do if I found myself cut off from aid, and my children were hungry or without shoes or clothes to wear for days on end...). The nightmare is unfathomable for most Americans, and it is hitting hardest for those who were already poor, and who couldn't have evacuated before the storm if they'd tried, since they generally got around by bus, not by car.
New Orleans is by no means alone in this tragedy. Much of southern Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana have been devastated by the monster hurricane Katrina. But the tragedy of New Orleans has been multiplied by the flood, which has already claimed much of the city, and wiped out critical infrastructure that is a lifeline to the whole U.S. Ironically, the entire country is now focused on three of its poorest states -- the "deep south" that has long lagged behind in terms of wealth, and apparently, infrastructure spending.
To understand the tragedy for New Orleans, you have to understand that it is a city that was built against the odds, sitting below sea level and protected from nature's wrath only by a system of levees. Many are now questioning whether those levees, and the people responsible for maintaining them, ever gave the city a fighting chance.
AFP graphic describing the city's levees and altitude. Below, is a satellite image of New Orleans taken March 12: 
And now a satellite photo of New Orleans after the flooding: 
At some point, when the half million displaced people have somehow been resettled, the dead counted, the devastation calculated and some sense of normal civilization has been restored to the American Gulf region, serious people will have to start asking the qustion of whether this tragedy had to happen. Nothing could have stopped the hurricane, but I don't think it's wild speculation to wonder whether neglect, or misplaced priorities, or something else, is to blame for the breached levee, which brought the flood. But that's not a question for today, I suppose. Today, the question is how to help those in need. |
