The Fallout from Hurricane Katrina
September 5th, 2005,For almost a week now I’ve been following the news coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its effect on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, including the grim aftermath faced by the survivors and refugees. For most of that week here, hundreds of miles north and in the center of the continent, near the opposite end of the Mississippi River, the weather has been calm and mild and sunny. It could not have been much better. The storm down in the Gulf could not have been much worse.
It’s generally only in hurricane season, or when a coastal earthquake hits, that living in the center of the continent seems better than living on the coast. For many reasons, people want to live near the oceans. They like the moderating influence of the ocean, which keeps things cooler in summer and warmer in winter as compared to areas inland. They like the opportunities for recreation that water provides. They like to live on the boundary between two very different environments—land and water—and they like the variety and interest that adds to life. They like the cultural interest of the port city, the entrep?t on the margin between the native country and foreign lands, a gateway to things beyond and entry point for the exotic.
However, as we all know very well right now, the benefits of ocean-side living have a price: vulnerability to catastrophic events such as hurricanes and tsunamis. The beautiful ocean vista, the pleasant beach, the exciting port—all can change suddenly as the ocean’s waters rise up and inundate the land and its ferocious winds lash the coast.
Despite the devastation caused by an unstable ocean, I understand why people would want to stay in a place like the Gulf Coast. If your family lived there for generations, if you loved the place, its people, its natural environment, its culture, if it gave you a reasonably comfortable life for decades, you’d stay too. That’s why I live here in the Upper Midwest, a region that has been called “a cold place at the end of the road.???
As someone who is interested in people’s attachment to place, and who feels that attachment himself, I understand the desire to go back and rebuild. Nature will return to those places destroyed by the storm, so why shouldn’t people?
Now there’s talk of political fallout from this hurricane and the ineffective early government response to it. No less a figure than David Brooks, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, said on the September 2 PBS NewsHour that this will be a turning point, a rallying cry for reform in a number of institutions. It follows, Brooks said, a whole series of missteps and failures by government and private authorities, from business scandals to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, that have shaken Americans’ faith in their leaders. He commented on something that had struck me as well: President Bush looked insensitive as he flew above the disaster—safe and snug on Air Force One—while people below stewed in conditions unfit for animals and days-old dead bodies floated in the streets of an American city. It was odd to hear Brooks, usually a Bush supporter, express anger about the president’s actions and the kind of national humiliation Americans are feeling about this disaster. It was odd too to hear a conservative express hope for a kind of progressive movement that will grant greater power and respect to the less powerful in our society—something that many of us have wished for years now. In the same NewsHour discussion Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant, a liberal, predicted greater national focus on the two different Americas made apparent by this disaster—the wealthy America and the poor America, the two Americas, Oliphant noted, discussed by John Edwards in his run for president.
While President Bush and other Republicans, the current leaders on the federal level, will receive their share of criticism in the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, Oliphant pointed out that Democrats played their own role in the human suffering playing out in New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast. Over the years leaders from both parties have done little to shore up the levees or to prevent the decimation of wetlands around New Orleans—wetlands that could have reduced the storm’s flooding. And then there is the lack of action on mitigating global warming, which is likely to make this kind of human suffering more common in the future. It will be the poor and powerless who will suffer most from rising sea levels, but many rich folks will suffer as well, unable to shield themselves from all of life’s miseries, least of all those created by a Mother Nature that has been made even more powerful by rising global temperatures caused by our own pollution.
It remains to be seen what the fallout from this hurricane will be. For now, however, we know that Americans have been reminded that not everyone owns a car that will take them out of harm’s way. Not everyone is healthy enough to walk to the corner and board a bus. Not everyone has the money to pick up and move out, especially at the end of the month before the paycheck arrives. Not everyone hears the message on the grapevine that leads from governmental authorities to private citizens.
Right now we can at least offer help to the storm’s victims. Here are two organizations that are accepting donations to support hurricane relief: the American Red Cross and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.