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Against Nature, There is No Appeal
By Jeff Fecke | August 28, 2006
It was one year ago this evening that I flipped on the computer and began idly surfing through news sites, and came across a notice that a Category 5 hurricane was bearing down on New Orleans.Having grown up near the exact center of North America, I have no personal experience with hurricanes. But I read enough to know what a Category 5 hurricane was–its destructive potential, and its ability to wreak havoc with the lives of millions. Still, as I flipped through the news, what jarred me was the National Weather Service bulletin:
WWUS74 KLIX 291122
NPWLIXURGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
619 AM CDT MON AUG 29 2005…EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA MOVING ACROSS LOWER PLAQUEMINES PARISH…
…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.
HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW POSSIBLY TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE. MANY WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT.
AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION. PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK.
POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.
THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED.
The National Weather Service generally issues a bland “stay indoors” during severe, tornado-spawning thunderstorms. They yawn at massive blizzards. Even hurricanes generally only stir them to note mandatory evacuation orders. By comparison, this was a jeremiad of near-Biblical proportions. The message could not be clearer: abandon all hope, all who enter here.
Throughout the night, I posted updates to the story, but mostly I just watched numbly, as Katrina spun toward shore, while the cable channels ran through their usual loop, discussing the same sliver of information a thousand times.
That night, I wrote:
There will be but one story today, tomorrow, and possibly over the next year. Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground says that the damage will be catastrophic, stating bluntly, “New Orleans will likely flood, causing immense destruction and heavy loss of life.” He puts the odds of levee failure at 70%Paul at Wizbang notes that those who have evacuated to the Superdome will have problems of their own. Also, he notes that it’s entirely possible that it could take ten months to drain out New Orleans–and that the best case scenario for draining it is ten weeks.
The Phog Blog notes bluntly, “In short, tomorrow could be one of the deadliest days in American History.”
Thankfully, people appear to have heeded the warnings and, for the most part, have gotten out of town. Barring a miraculous last-second turn, though, there will be near-apocolyptic damage throughout the Big Easy. The question is not whether New Orleans can escape devastation. The question is what the extent will be.
The day the hurricane roared ashore, here’s what the President of the United States was doing:
The afternoon of the 29th brought an eerie calm, an almost human echo of the hurricane’s eye. The reports trickled out that things seemed okay, that New Orleans may have just lucked out one more time. Mitch Berg even took the opportunity to rip me for my concern, stating:
It seems Hurricane Katrina may have swerved to miss New Orleans, sparing the nation a disaster of (weatherpundits assure us) epic proportion.
People want to know: Why?
The answer: after predicting in sequence that Wesley Clark, then Howard Dean couldn’t lose the Democrat nomination, then that there was “no way Kerry loses” the election, Jeff Fecke spent yesterday predicting New Orleans’ demise.
New Orleans: you owe Jeff bigtime.
I would give anything for my long streak of inaccurate predictions to have lasted just one more day.
But that streak didn’t; over the next day, the stories began to trickle out. The levees had failed. The city was filling up with water like the giant bathtub it resembled; the destruction of New Orleans had begun.
At the moment this news began to reach the country, here’s what your President was doing:
And then we began to hear just how bad it was in the shattered wreck of the city.
The people left in New Orleans were hungry. They were thirsty. They were in shock, and they were terrified. And those were the lucky ones–the unlucky ones were dead, or soon would be. The usual suspects decried the looting that was going on–but it soon became apparent that many of the looters were scavenging for food and dry clothing, not for gain. And it seemed, strangely, that all of the looters were black.
As the days rolled on, I realized–along with the rest of my fellow Americans–that this was but the beginning of the horror. It quickly became apparent that the Federal government was utterly powerless to address the problems in the city–and the President wasn’t going to be of any help. The right tried to blame the poor and disabled for not leaving New Orleans, trying desperately to deflect the criticism of the government that was all too justified.
And meanwhile, people could turn on their televisions and see that people were still hungry, and thirsty, and trapped in the Superdome and the Convention Center with nobody coming, nobody helping. Through incompetence, or diffidence, or stupidity, we failed those people who needed their fellow citizens not to fail.
The rest is history, of course–Brownie came in for justifiable criticism; Dubya’s credibility was permanently shattered; the right tried to point at Ray Nagin or Kathleen Blanco or “black culture” as the horrible culprit.
But leaving aside the politics, what I will remember from a year ago was that everybody in the country seemed to see this disaster coming save the government. And that we, the people failed our fellow citizens. Oh, we stepped up after the fact–we did everything we could to send money, take in citizens, do whatever we could. But we chose a group of incompetent buffoons to lead our nation. And that failure to choose our nation’s leadership wisely led directly to the human catastrophe that Katrina wrought.
What I wrote a year ago still holds true:
There has been much debate over whether this is “worse than 9/11.” It’s hard to compare, as the two are very different events. But I think, in some ways, for our country the aftermath of this disaster is, indeed, worse.
The attacks of September 11, 2001, were attacks that were carried out against us–attacks by a foreign terrorist organization that seemed hardly human at times. We absorbed the deaths of 3,000 citizens and were able to lash out at those who had struck at us. We toppled the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if only 50% of those governments had anything to do with the attack, well, it still felt good to go out and hit something. No matter that the one punch from the terrorists had drawn blood; we proved how strong we could be.
The impact of Hurricane Katrina, contrawise, has shown America our weakness. In the face of what was a horriffic natural disaster, we failed. We let hundreds, even thousands of people died while we played bureaucratic footsie. And now, in the aftermath of Katrina, the federal government seems, as per usual, more intent on fixing blame than getting things right.
Yes, the state and local governments had their failures. But in a disaster that spans three states and millions of people, it is the federal government that must ultimately step up to the plate. For almost a week, FEMA, Homeland Security, and the President of the United States failed to do their jobs. And because of that, people died.
Actions have consequences. And the actions of America in November of 2004 led directly to deaths in 2005. Let us hope that whomever leads us in the coming years–be they Democrat or Republican–let us hope that they have the ability to actually lead our country competently. It will be a nice change from the past six years.
Topics: Hurricane Katrina | 1 Comment »