While the death of the great Ted Kennedy has left many of us in mourning, and put the state of healthcare and many bipartisan efforts in jeopardy, there is another sad day coming up that needs to be remembered. Today, August 29th, 2009 is the 4 year anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 Hurricane that put New Orleans underwater and caused the death of over 1,800 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Ohio, Kentucky and Georgia and caused $89.6 billion in damages. The images of people stranded on rooftops, sleeping the Superdome and being washed away by torrents of debris and corpses is something that should be engrained in the minds of every American. The tragedy of New Orleans was not its natural element (Hurricanes happen on the Gulf Coast every year), but the failure on many levels of response, and the realization that years of political corruption in Louisiana had led to inadequate safety measures and ineffective levee systems.
Here are some brief points about the failures that ensued before Katrina, and their effects coupled with the failure of the Bush White House to quickly respond:
1. The Levee System was inadequate: Partly due to embezzlement and corruption in Louisiana politics and partly due to bad engineering, the Levees were built too shallow. The Army Corps of Engineers suggested a “T-Shape” form for the Levees and that they built on 72 ft support pylons. The Levee board, local to Louisiana prevailed in its cost cutting, and made the Levees in a different design (I Shape), with 24 ft support pylons. The levees were also designed by local construction firms, who won out bids from the local Levee boards. In other words, politics and corruption won over safety and prevention, and the Army Corps of Engineers could do nothing to ensure safe levee construction. The result was not only the cracking and complete destruction of the levees after both the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain flooded in, but the inundation of the supports of the Levees, which stood on a foundation of 24 ft, instead of a 72 ft recommended by the Corps of Engineers. The result of this was that some of the levees actually toppled forward from water inundated soil below them, and water seeping below the base.
The Solution: Build better levees, and reform Louisiana politics.
2. Oil Production on the Gulf Coast: Yup…all problems eventually point to sweet, crude. Oil on the Gulf Coast is a huge industry and offers a large supply of our domestic oil. There is no surprise that the first major spike in Gasoline prices at the pump was as a result of Hurricane Katrina and the closing and damaging of oil platforms on the gulf. But, how did oil production create a vulnerable environment and allow for Katrina to be so strong, when it hit landfall? First, Katrina was a powerful storm to begin with. But, that has nothing to do with oil production. But, in order to get the unbelievably large oil carrying tankers into the Gulf, the marshes, floodplains and natural barriers needed to be dredged. But, there is a reason they call them floodplains and barriers. These are nature’s self defense from itself. What I mean to say is: these formations are effective at dissipating the strength, and bearing the brunt of hurricanes, allowing them to slow before they hit landfall. But, without them, you have a clear path to destruction. This is probably why California has passed Zoning laws for areas coded “F” for protected floodplains. If levees on the West Coast near the San Joaquin valley fail, there goes nearly 20% of the nation’s produce. Solution: Put the marshes, floodplains and natural barriers back in and use smaller ships for oil transport.
3. Failure to Respond: The government, under President Bush, failed in both PR and adequate response to the flood. Bush’s ill-fated and ill-chosen head of FEMA, Michael Brown, became the early poster-child for failure, as his resume (picked because of his experience with Arabian Horses) lacked experience and his reaction to the disaster was slow and clumsy. A PR failure of Bush’s was also his “flyover” of the disaster in Air Force One. On the ground in New Orleans National guardsmen were instituting curfews, young men were being shot trying to commit robberies, fires were burning, people were dying, disease was rampant and the ultimate conclusion was that, somehow, the president felt it was necessary not to try to raise spirits as he did after September 11th. The image of Bush standing on the rubble of World Trade Towers vowing to hunt down the “evil doers” was a 4 year old ghost, and all that stood in his place was a lame flyover. Other failures included FEMA’s handling of emergency supplies and its inability to grasp the enormity of the tragedy. People were sleeping in the Superdome, using buckets for toilets and writing prayers and messages of help in their rooftops was FEMA was still trying to plan any kind of recovery action.
While these are the three main failures that allowed for Katrina to be so devastating, there are many more inadequacies that occurred in relation to both government action and local politics that highlighted the ultimate failure to respond.
Next, I want those who read this to try to understand the feeling one gets when they make a difference in someone’s life. But, mostly I want the readers to take away the stories I am about to relate as a motivation towards cherishing the life you have, the people who love you and all that you own. Because, in a single day, as these people experienced, it can be taken away, and that feeling of emptiness, not just from the loss of your livelihood, but from the belief that people have forgotten about you, can be devastating. But, once many of these residents lost everything, they realized how vulnerable life can be, and they began to appreciate any shred of hope, any effort of assistance and every open-mind who would listen to their story. While people may step back and criticize all types of policies, they will not understand the true impact until they have experienced it first-hand.
When I was in my sophomore year at UCLA, I decided to go on a Hillel Alternative Spring Break to New Orleans. Hillel, being the intricate and well-funded institution it is, subsidized most of the cost, and it became my responsibility to cover only $250. This was truly amazing. To be able to help residents of New Orleans and do it on a short expense was something unreal. But, I left for the airport at 3am with a “blank slate” of expectations. I was in Brazil when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, and I had doubted up until my trip to New Orleans one-and-a-half years later, the type of devastation that had taken place. It just wasn’t being reported. It wasn’t breaking news, so I had concluded that progress was being made. C’mon….this is America. Isn’t it?
I arrived by bus through the sweltering humidity to an AmeriCorps camp in quaint Kiln, Mississippi in March, 2007. I arrived with fellow Hillel participants from Kent State, Stanford, Harvard, UCSB, Santa Barbara City College and Delaware. I was very enthusiastic about the trip, because I had just started my minor in Urban and Regional Planning, and New Orleans represented a blank-slate for city planners. It could be, as Greenfield, KS was after a devastating tornado, a new, improved and much more efficient city.
The house I worked on for the majority of the trip was in Saint Bernard Parish, a middle class neighborhood which had seen about 15 ft of water. The first job was to take out all the drywall nails from the house, which had been fumigated and almost gutted. I took an entire 8 hour day with the help of our group to take out many of the drywall nails. Next, I was in charge of destroying all the fuse boxes. I took a hammer and a sledgehammer to every single fuse box in the house, even getting my face on the front cover the Harvard Crimson the following week. My last job at the house was the clear out the attic and the closets of all belongings left when the house was evacuated. This is where I began to realize that my job was not just cleaning out the house to be rebuilt, but it was to preserve the life and story of the family I was helping. As I dug through the closet and the attic, I found mementos and personal objects that told this families’ story. I found a Time Picayune from when we landed on the Moon, and from Kennedy’s assassination. I found a hunting trophy, an 8mm camera and a bunch of checks. I found a folded up American flag and I found a 1960s Porsche in the garage, still intact. I found pictures, diaries, money, wedding certificates, records, fine china, a music box, church clothes, running clothes, hunting clothes and a set of utensils. Most importantly, our group saved everything to be picked up by the family when they returned.
In order to allow us to fully comprehend the damage of Katrina, we took a bus tour through the upper and lower 9th ward, the poorest and hardest hit areas of the city. This is where the pictures of devastation came from in the days after Katrina, and these pictures remained wholly unchanged when I experienced them first-hand. There were houses, half destroyed, with pitched roofs spray painted with the appropriate “X” marking that they had been checked by National Guardsmen. The “X” always had a couple of symbols and numbers, one indicating the State of origin for the National Guard unit the amount of dead found. Where we worked, the number was always 0 or 1. As soon as you entered the lower 9th ward, the numbers rose significantly. I saw a house with “11” on it, meaning 11 people had died in that house. Most of these people had tried to huddle together for shelter and comfort, and their house had been destroyed. I saw a patch of green-space which looked like a park, which was amazing to me. Later I was informed that that area used to be apartments, and all that was left was the green-space and a set of concrete stairs. Images like this were not uncommon. In the days following the tour we were able to look through a house that had not been touched by recovery teams. We walked inside, with respirators on to avoid toxic mold. Furniture and debris lay all over the floor and most of the doors had been knocked off their hinges. There was a dark line just below the rooftop, where the water level had risen to: 10 ft or so. In the corner a case of eerie looking porcelain dolls and a cross lay intact on the wall. Everything else was upended by the flood waters. As I left the house, I looked across the street to see “HELP” written on the rooftop.
Next, I want to relate a couple stories of people we met in St Bernard Parish:
Johnny G - One of the first people we met there was a man we all called Johnny G. Johnny G was a former Navy SEAL, served his country, and decided to go back to New Orleans on a volunteer basis to help with assistance and cleanup. But, the job that he was given by the Navy was something that fit his qualifications as a Navy SEAL, and ended up being one of the worst jobs, in my opinion, anyone would have taken. I applaud, and always have shown reverence to those people who do the jobs that I cannot physically and/or mentally complete. He told us he received a call from the Navy right after Katrina hit landfall, asking to re-enlist temporarily and help out with the rescue and cleanup effort. He decided not to re-enlist, but to take up the job on a volunteer basis. When he got there, he was supplied with supplies that resembled a cross between a HAZMAT suit and a diver’s outfit. His job: He had to dive into the dirty, murky water that covered these homes and look for corpses. His only assistance was the diving suit, to prevent from coming into contact with any hazardous material, and a flashlight. Eventually, he said, they had to create a system for it, because without a system, the job would be way to taxing on the psyche. In his words…”I reached out for something soft.” Johnny G ended up being our coordinator for the house we worked on, and was our enthusiastic supporter throughout the whole trip, even teaching us how to eat crawfish properly.
Federal Judge – Down the street from the house we worked at, a Federal Judge from New Orleans was fixing up his house. He was incredibly delighted to see volunteers working on the houses in his neighborhood, and, one day, decided to relate to us his story after we had finished working. Like grandchildren collecting around their wise grandfather, we crowded around him in front of the house we were working on to listen. His house has been completely flooded up to the 2nd floor. We saw the watermark, and it was about 12-15 ft up. He was able to get many people in his neighborhood into his house for safety as the flood water rose. The power was out, and toilets didn’t work, so they had to use buckets. Eventually rescuers came to their aid and everyone was evacuated. Later, he had to fight the insurance company to even get a percentage of the money owed to him for damage done to his house. The problem during Katrina was that insurance companies decided that a lot of the damage was “wind damage” and was not covered under flood insurance. This was coupled with the fact that many people could not afford, or did not have flood insurance to begin with. But, he was able to get some money to fix his house, the rest which he had to pay for himself. He was nice enough to offer us drinks at his house, after we were done working. We were able to look through his house and see how it was being rebuilt. We thanked him by going to his house when he was at work and rebuilding his fence before he got home. Although it wasn’t completed, he was grateful and offered to helm a BBQ before we left.
A Mother and Her Son – After touring the untouched house, a woman came up to us and asked about what we were doing. When she heard we were a volunteer group rebuilding homes, she immediately began to heap on gratitude and compliments. She told us that her house was destroyed by the flood waters, and that she was living in a FEMA trailer. In order to supplement her income, she was collecting scrap metal from local trash piles and selling it to local utilities. She told us that it was something to keep her busy and it taught her son some responsibility, and got him out of trouble. At the end of her story, she broke down, trying to explain to us the importance of our work. I understood, in retrospect, that she might have lost everything, but in losing everything, she gained a respect for the life she had. The fact that we were giving up our time to help people like her, on a volunteer basis, was a kindness that she appreciated and took personally, which led to this outpouring of emotion.
The Former Electrician – When we were working at the house, a man drove by on one of the days and asked if he could take some of the metal parts and material from the scrap pile. We allowed him to do so, and we even told him we would separate the metal parts so that he could come by every day and pick from what he wanted. We also helped him load in an old air conditioning system to sell for spare parts. His story was that he was an electrician hired by FEMA to work in houses, stripping some of the wiring out. One day he was working in an attack and he came into contact with a corpse that had not been cleared. This was so emotionally devastating to him, that he immediately quit, and was collecting scrap metal for money. He told us that he didn’t have a good education, and wished that someone had told him that education was important. But, he vowed to us that his son, who was a couple years old, would be successful and go to college. He told us that the kid was a genius already.
The Stuck Car - On one of our working days, we heard of a woman down the street who needed help with her car. We sent some people over, and we were able to help her. She then inquired about what we were doing. We told her that we were a Jewish group working in New Orleans to help the local community while on our Spring Break. From what I heard, she got really excited. It turned out that she was a Palestinian, and that her father, who owned property in New Orleans, was a full believer in peace between Israel and the Palestinian authority. It was a inspirational coincidence.
I went to New Orleans a couple of weeks before the holiday of Passover. This had great meaning to me, as the purpose of my trip and the lessons of Passover are intertwined. The value of Passover is to instill the value of sympathy and empathy for those in need. The lesson is that, while you relax and dine during the Passover Seder, you should consider yourself as once Israelites under the yoke of Pharaoh in Egypt. And, like the Israelites, you should consider yourself lucky to have been freed by g-d with “an outstretched arm.” The point is to feel as if this devastation happened to you, as if you were there. This is why Hillel chose New Orleans. In order to understand the plight of those who lost everything in the hurricane, we had to experience it for ourselves, and too feel the same emotions and to see the destruction. After the trip was over, I felt a need to make sure that everyone I knew understood the destruction that I saw there. Like the Passover Seder reminds us, if we do not tell the story of the Exodus every year, or the stories of the survivors of the Holocaust, then it will be forgotten and lost in history. I feel the same way with Katrina. If they hadn’t challenged me, as I challenged my family during the Seder, to not forget what I saw and heard, it would have been lost to me, and it would have been lost to the world.
Now, we look back at New Orleans 4 years later, and I regret to write that it is being forgotten. The death and destruction that resulted from Katrina is only thought about once a year, and then is quickly lost. My message two-and-a-half years ago was that we have to remain firm in our mind that no one forget New Orleans, and we have to make it clear that everyone should know that New Orleans is not anywhere close to full recovery. But, this is lost. President Obama isn’t even visiting New Orleans on the 4th anniversary. It isn't America when we ignore or fail to help our fellow citizens hurt by this storm. When I stepped into New Orleans, I had stepped out of America, and into a situation that I never want to see. This is why I doubted where I was, and why, after describing the conditions, asked my family where they thought I was. But, I remain steadfast in my hope that America will realize that this fault in our judgment that produced such a devastating effect can never be thrown away, and that eventually New Orleans, with some help and ingenuity, will return to the great city it used to be. Until then, we still have a lot of work to do.
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