You’re On Your Own
Brad DeLong points to a heartbreaking, yet not surprising, New Orleans Times-Picayne article from July 24, 2005:
City, state and federal emergency officials are preparing to give the poorest of New Orleans’ poor a historically blunt message: In the event of a major hurricane, you’re on your own. In scripted appearances being recorded now, officials such as Mayor Ray Nagin, local Red Cross Executive Director Kay Wilkins and City Council President Oliver Thomas drive home the word that the city does not have the resources to move out of harm’s way an estimated 134,000 people without transportation.
You can read the entire article, but DeLong summarizes well:
They were going to make a DVD. A DVD saying, “you all are on your own.” They didn’t even care enough to make the DVD before the hurricane season began.
No. New Orleans did not have a functioning government as of the summer of 2005. This is a catastrophic failure of local governance–much worse than FEMA’s failures.
You would think that somebody–somewhere–would have called Washington and said, “You know, New Orleans doesn’t have its act together enough to have a hurricane evacuation plan.” And that somebody, somewhere–in Washington or in Baton Rouge–would have cared.
InstaPundit has more on how we must fix our emergency response capabilities and muses, “I wonder if our political classes possess the requisite maturity and self-discipline to take constructive action.”
Given the political games of the 9/11 Commission, I doubt it.
Lastly, don’t miss the latest from Mark Steyn: Proof that nothing changed after Sept. 11.
One thing that became clear two or three months after “the day that everything changed” is that nothing changed — that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner’s and Sam Donaldson’s play-farming activities. But, in either case, I’ll bet Louisiana’s kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual — and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans’ foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody’s else fault.
Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what’s waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That’s what they told us they were doing, and that’s what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who’d be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known — New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership — it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising — like, say, a biological attack.
Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America’s enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?
Exactly my point.