Katrina Roundup

A slew of good reading is out there on Katrina, some of which touches on some issues I've brought up here over the last few days.

Cassandras Ignored from the Start

The Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger has a very interesting article on the long history of concern over the geographical predicament of New Orleans.

From the start, an engineer's concerns were ignored.

Officials have known for three centuries New Orleans couldn't be protected from floodwaters from the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, [consultant Michael Tritico] said. "It's a city sandwiched between one disaster or another. It was going to happen. This time, it's the nightmare hurricane."

When the French began to build New Orleans in 1717, they did it over the objections of the engineer de Latour, who said floodwaters easily would overcome such a settlement.

One plan hatched long before the disaster sounds like an excellent idea now, given that so much of the city will need rebuilding from the ground up.

For the past 30 years, Tritico has been telling anyone who will listen that New Orleans is a deathtrap.

"There is no way to permanently protect this place," said Tritico, who wrote in 1975 about the problem as a student at Louisiana State University.

In a report he passed on then to state planning officials, he suggested rebuilding New Orleans north of Lake Pontchartrain and providing rail service into the French Quarter, the business district and the area surrounding Tulane University, which sit on much higher ground than the rest of the city.

Cost for the move? $10 billion to $15 billion at the time -- something he said could have been paid for by 10 years of the money spent by the corps on flood control.

That sounds expensive until one compares it to what the cost of rebuilding New Orleans (a big chunk of the $150 billion total damage estimate for the Gulf coast) where it currently sits is going to be.

And then, on the matter of why the poor neighborhoods took it worst....

New Orleans expanded, and people began to build on lower and lower land, sometimes draining the swamps, Tritico said. "They put poor people out on the other side of the levees."

And he said that is why it is the poorest people -- three centuries later -- make up many of Katrina's victims.

This accident of history is hardly the entire picture, but it's something the ha(r)d left might consider when blaming Bush for this disaster. (Although if they do, the farthest they're likely to get is to conclude that he's capable of time travel....)

Barges Bouncing Back

Also in the Clarion-Ledger is a report that the barge traffic vital to our national economy is returning to normal along the Father of Waters.

A Halfway Good Column

I mean that. This column starts out with a bang and then goes nowhere! My wife printed it out for me to read. I finished it and asked, "Where's the rest of it?" before looking down and seeing that I had indeed completed it. Read it anyway as the first half is damning. He does an excellent job of examining mayor Ray Nagin's assistance to Katrina.

Having been prodded on Saturday into ordering an evacuation by President Bush and the head of the Hurricane Center and then delaying it for seventeen crucial hours until well into Sunday, Mayor Nagin is directly responsible for the AP picture [link added] of over 200 unused New Orleans buses marooned in four feet of water that might have evacuated more than 15,000 in one trip alone. Those were the buses that in the Mayor's own plan were to be used to evacuate 100,000 poor the city has long understood had no other means of transportation.

Nagin is also responsible for failing to pre-position generators, food and water, a medical presence and portable toilets for the two sites at the Superdome and Convention Center that he had proclaimed "emergency centers" for tens of thousands of the more than 30% of New Orleanians that lived below the poverty line. And then the Mayor failed to police them.

The rapes, murders, and needless deaths that took place in those "black holes" of New Orleans are his responsibility as well. Eighty armed policemen were too cowardly to enter the Convention Center after reports of the savagery inside as late as Sunday. Troops finally searching the Convention Center on Monday found an elderly man and a young girl, battered to death, among the corpses. New Orleans's would-be reformers thought they had elected a responsible leader in former cable executive Nagin and instead they got a classic "cable guy" with a million excuses and the same lousy service.

Of course behind all this is a dirty little secret well-known in New Orleans which is also the reason almost 30% of New Orleans police precinct members deserted during the Hurricane Katrina emergency. The police were afraid to try to enforce any kind of evacuations in the violent ghettos of a city that remains one of the most lawless in America. Anyone driving a school bus down a street in one of New Orleans's "projects" trying to enforce the mayor's evacuation order would be risking his life. Had the Mayor ordered police escorts, the desertion rate of the police would have been far higher than 30%. And that is the reason for the current argument between the Mayor and his own Police Commissioner, who still refuses to enforce his "mandatory evacuation" order.

The author rips Governor Blanco a well-deserved new one as well.

Krauthammer Points Fingers Using Two Hands

Charles Krauthammer weighs in with an examination of what went wrong that examines increasingly higher levels of authority -- all the way up to the role of the American people.

The American people. They have made it impossible for any politician to make any responsible energy policy over the past 30 years -- but that is a column for another day.

This is a good point, although I would not see eye to eye with every point of Krauthammer's idea of a "responsible energy policy", which, I believe he thinks should include higher fuel taxes. But I suspect that he would agree that we should be able to drill in places besides the Gulf of Mexico, and we should be able to build more refineries. In fact, the most "rational energy policy" would be for the government to quit interfering with that sector of the economy altogether.

And this might explain why Krauthammer doesn't go far enough with the blame at this point. As Robert Tracinski points out, this disaster was greatly exacerbated by the welfare state. Too many of us look to the government to solve our problems, and as long as we do, the government will make our lives harder to live on a daily basis -- which many of us seem to have grown used to -- and impossible in the face of certain catastrophes as Katrina has taught us.

Nice try on that last, but no cigar. Having said that, Krauthammer does, in ending his list with the American people, make a profound point: Ultimately, we are the government. If we are going to hold our officials accountable, we must hold ourselves accountable.

One part of that accountability is seeing to it that we elect competent officials. Another part of that accountability involves making sure that government is used only for its intended purpose: marshalling armed force for the protection of our individual rights. If we fail, there is no one else to blame when we suffer from unwanted intrusions of that force into our lives, be they disasters worsened the consequences of the welfare state (next link) or skyrocketing gas prices created by an artificial shortage of refining capacity. As Robert Tracinski points out, these tasks are related.

[T]his is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

David Brooks vs. Jesse Jackson: Show the Poor a "New Normal"

Yesterday, I noted that Jesse Jackson did not seem happy with the idea that poor blacks from New Orleans might get the chance to live elsewhere. ("It's a long way from where they have lived, where they were acculturated")

This article picks up on that point, and what it might mean to an entire generation of poor New Orleanian children not to grow up in the projects. While I don't agree that people should be forced by the government to participate in the program he outlines, he is correct that exposure to a non-dysfunctional culture can give poor children hope for a better future by showing them alternatives to ghetto culture.

Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

...

In those cultural zones, many people dropped out of high school, so it seemed normal to drop out of high school. Many teenage girls had babies, so it seemed normal to become a teenage mother. It was hard for men to get stable jobs, so it was not abnormal for them to commit crimes and hop from one relationship to another. Many people lacked marketable social skills, so it was hard for young people to learn these skills from parents, neighbors and peers.

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 rundown and dysfunctional as before.

That's why the second rule of rebuilding should be: Culturally Integrate.

...

(That's the kind of thing Houston is beginning to do right now.)

The most important point is the parenthetical one in that what Brooks wants can be had without government force. Here is more detail on what Brooks is talking about from another report.

Out of a pool of bad fortune came one bit of good luck: Houston has experienced such a building boom there is a glut of affordable housing in the area, with the amazing result that the number of people holed up in the Astrodome dropped from 15,000 to 3,000 over the span of only a few days. Some have said they will stay in Texas permanently. New Orleans' downsizing -- a trend in effect before the storm -- sent evacuees to cities and towns in nearly two dozen states. However its people are distributed, New Orleans, like the South, must rise again.

This is very good news, and this is why I hold Jesse Jackson in such low regard for opposing it. Let the poor "acculturate" to success. Please! Isn't the success of your people worth even the loss of New Orleans as a Democrat bastion? Reverend? Hello?

-- CAV