Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

I had the misfortune of watching a little more of the Katrina coverage on television than I otherwise might have cared to. I woke up around 3:00 AM after having gone to bed at about 1:00 AM and didn’t sleep a wink thereafter. I tried to read myself back to sleep, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t bother and agitate me. Stress from various projects I’m working on has probably caught up with me, so I did what I always do in these sleepless situations; worry about deadlines, drive myself crazy, watch cable news and, if I’m lucky, NFL films on ESPN Classic.

Getting back to Katrina, I don’t really want to critique the coverage as I’m sure anybody with half a brain knows how silly it is to send blow dried debutantes out into a hurricane in their slickers, emblazoned with the corporate logo, to look brave. Whatever.

The thing that really bothers me, and I know bothers a lot of people, was the knowledge that some 100,000 people were not able to evacuate from a city which quite reasonably could have been sunk beneath a toxic brew of petrochemicals, sewage and corpses right now. Fortunately, today’s storm was not as bad for New Orleans as it could have been, though that’s little consolation to the dead, the wounded and the people who have lost every worldly possession.

The people left behind were those who do not own cars and could not afford to leave. They were provided with a football stadium located beneath sea-level which began to crumble mid-hurricane. Had catastrophic flooding occurred with the ensuing petrochemical water pollution, one struggles to imagine how these people could have been saved. Surely we cannot allow for anything like this to ever happen again. While the very worst did not happen today, a very realistic scenario would have involved the deaths of a large portion of an entire class of people in one American city.

For whatever reason, Americans continue to inhabit parts of our nation which are prone to catastrophic natural disaster, and will continue to do so. As we learned today, decent insurance policies with government backing simply isn’t sufficient. Will Bunch points out some areas where the Federal government could and should have done better to prevent catastrophe, but it needs to be pointed out that it is also the responsibility of municipal and state governments to create realistic plans to evacuate those people who cannot, for whatever reason, evacuate themselves. Anything less is inexcusable. Twenty thousand people don’t need to die in order for us, as a nation, to say never again.

Susie shares a classic CNN viewing moment when she recounts Soledad O’Brien questioning Sen. Mary Landrieu about why so many people remained in New Orleans after it was evacuated. Her exact words were “Are they just complacent?� A not so stunning display of what strikes me as upper class indifference towards and ignorance of people of more meager means. More likely, it was just an example crass stupidity uttered mid-blather by and middling broadcast talent. I should mention that she asked the question in the context of the discovery that the roof of the Superdome was being ripped off and collapsing in sections. The superdome was, and is still, housing over 20,000 people who had no way out of town.

Back to the sleepless night; sometime around 4:30 AM, ESPN Classic broadcast Superbowl 13 between the Cowboys and the Steelers in its entirety. One pleasant thing on a night I’d rather forget.

I don’t mean to seem callus by talking about sleeplessness and football at the begining and end of this post. I’m simply not gifted or experienced enough a writer to articulate the absolute horror that needs to be expressed over something that could have been so very much more awful. Natural disasters will continue unabated for as long as any of us will live, but the shameful planning for such disasters needs to come to an end starting today. Storing people in what strikes me as a concrete death trap located below sea level is not a solution; it’s careless disregard for human life and we can do better.

Update: Sadly, it looks as though I may have spoken too soon:

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2005 at 12:36 am and is filed under Blather, Media, Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.