A year of tears in Louisana
ON THE MORNING of last Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina was churning northward over the Gulf of Mexico -- and started claiming victims even before it came ashore along the Louisiana-Mississippi line. A vast dome of water whipped up by the storm swept into populated areas east of New Orleans's historic core and along the Mississippi coast. In central New Orleans, though, the worst seemed to pass by midday, and as the winds died down there was no obvious reason to be alarmed.
Then, there was. The water kept rising. Gaps widened in levees that were far more fragile than the Army Corps of Engineers had made them out to be. And New Orleans, a place known for its music, its spicy food, and its graceful buildings, descended into pandemonium -- all because of the failure of a federal public works project. Handling the crisis was clearly beyond the capacity of a poor city in a poor state, and yet in those first awful days the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife did more than the Bush administration to come to New Orleans's relief.
Two weeks later, a chastened President Bush spoke from the city's Jackson Square and promised that ``we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities."
A year after Katrina, the storm's victims have yet to see Bush's promise fully realized. For a variety of reasons, federal aid has been slow to reach people who have huge mortgages on useless homes. The Corps of Engineers has yet to take responsibility for its role in the disaster and has missed its own deadlines for shoring up the city's damaged flood-protection system. Meanwhile, the city's recovery grinds along, and half the city's population has yet to return -- and may never.
Some of it went to cash assistance to hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Some of it was lost in the multiple layers of federal contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors. And some of it has been misdirected. Of the two states in Katrina's path, the damage was far worse in Louisiana. But Mississippi got more aid per victim, largely because of its stronger congressional delegation and the influence of its governor, longtime Republican bigwig Haley Barbour. These problems prove the need for reforms that ought to be common sense: better accounting, more efficient contracting, concentrating aid where the need is greatest.
In much of New Orleans and its environs, the scale of damage remains jaw-dropping. Granted, the parts of the city that tourists know remain very much intact. Indeed, many visitors enchanted by the city's gritty charm fear that the city will emerge as a tidier, smaller, Disneyized version of its old self. But the more immediate challenge is how to keep vast, less famous areas of the city from falling under the control of gangs, squatters, weeds, and stray animals.
Local officials also need to stop stringing residents along. New Orleans city government cannot afford to pick up trash, repave roads, and deploy police officers everywhere it used to, so officials need to decide how to ration services among a reduced population scattered across a devastated landscape. So far, city officials have not come up with a clear, realistic plan, so thousands of homeowners are in limbo. Meanwhile, the city's current practice of issuing building permits to almost anyone who asks will only complicate efforts to prepare the city for future storms.
The Bush administration shares responsibility for the slow process of rebuilding. It lost valuable time by dithering over -- and ultimately shooting down -- a proposal by US Representative Richard Baker, a Louisiana Republican, to buy out tens of thousands of homeowners, freeing them to relocate on higher ground. Federal and state officials later agreed to a relief plan whose terms could end up encouraging people, even in the lowest-lying areas, to rebuild their existing homes. That money is only starting to flow now.
More fundamentally, Katrina also revealed the banality, the utter emptiness, of the nation's present political debate. An administration that, as a matter of principle, doesn't believe in government has no particular stake in making it run well. When desperate people are begging for help on their rooftops, it helps to have a government that works.
But the opposition party's response to the crisis was disappointing as well. National Democrats were indignant when the president moved last year to waive the Davis-Bacon Act, a federal law that is beloved by labor unions and all but irrelevant to New Orleans's plight -- yet barely squawked when he killed the Baker plan.
Reflecting upon the Katrina crisis, some lawmakers have suggested obtusely that people just shouldn't live in New Orleans -- as if there were no economic reason for a major port city to be located near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
All cities (and their suburbs) are built in places that expose them to some form of risk. Other cities may end up, for one reason or another, in the straits New Orleans finds itself in now. Which raises these questions: How much do we care for other Americans? How much responsibility do we have for one another's well-being?
In New Orleans -- and in all the places where evacuees have taken shelter -- people are still waiting for answers.
