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Mishandling a man-made disaster
Praful Bidwai
15 September 2005
The colossal destruction and human misery wrought upon the Gulf Coast of the United States by Hurricane Katrina has shocked the world in ways that few natural disasters in the industrially developed countries have done. The great city of New Orleans, one of the truly interesting and unusual cities in the US—with which so much music, romance and mystique is associated—is so badly devastated that the job of removing, let alone counting, the dead may not be completed for weeks! The Big Easy, as New Orleans is fondly called, has never had a harder time. The city centre is deep under water and the stench of death hangs heavy all over, even near the Louisiana Superdome, where many victims sought refuge.
Only slightly less severely affected are other parts of southwestern and southern US, with the notable exception of Biloxi, Mississippi. Nobody yet knows how high the death-toll might be. But many believe it could well be 10,000—three times the numbers killed on September 2001. The economic loss is estimated at over $100 billion. Particularly grievous is the damage to oil rigs and petroleum refineries all along the Gulf Coast and to New Orleans harbour which handles a fourth of the US’s imports. It will be a long, long time before that part of the US recovers from the impact of the devastation.
It will take even longer for people to forget that the real calamity was not so much an act of nature (which of course was the trigger), as a man-made disaster, which was magnified by criminal inaction and callousness on the part of the Bush administration. Not only were emergency services not pressed into action in time; not only was evacuation delayed, causing hundreds of deaths; there was a complete breakdown of government, indeed of organised society. President George W. Bush first called the devastation a "temporary disruption" and refused to alter his holiday schedule for a full 48 hours. Vice-President Dick Cheney remained on vacation in Wyoming. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went shopping in Manhattan for shoes worth $7,000 while New Orleans was battered and flooded.
Shocking as the conduct of the political leadership was, the true tragedy does not lie there. Rather, it lies in a series of systemic failures: to heed warnings, take preventive and protective steps, and to implement adequate disaster management plans. This was compounded by official ineptitude and refusal to mobilise resources even when they were available. For instance, a US Navy hospital ship Bataan, equipped with six operation theatres, hundreds of beds and the ability to produce 44,000 litres of freshwater a day, was moored off the Gulf Coast—but had no patients for a week.
Much of what happened along the Gulf Coast could have been avoided. New Orleans has long been known to be vulnerable to hurricanes. More than 150 years ago, commented the Illustrated London News: "New Orleans has been built upon a site that only the madness of commercial lust could ever have tempted men to occupy". For over a century, the US army laid levees (protective structures like dykes) in the Mississippi River to prevent annual floods. The river deposited vast amounts of silt and freshwater, thus creating green wetlands which acted as a buffer that could absorb sea surges and protect the city.
Engineers had computer-modelled the likely effects of a hurricane and a sea surge. They drew up in 1998 a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050, which would have strengthened the levees and prevented large-scale destruction. However, says Mark Fischetti, one of the technical experts involved: the plan would have cost a high "$14 billion, so Louisiana turned to the federal government. But Congress had other priorities, Louisiana politicians had other priorities, and the magic moment of consensus was lost. Thus we ignored an inevitable problem..." Meanwhile, the flood control budget was cut by 80 percent, laying levees got delayed, and New Orleans became denuded of the protective wetlands that were its buffer. When Katrina struck, the devastation was total.
Yet, this scenario had been widely forecast and envisaged—in The Scientific American in 2001 by Fischetti, in the National Geographic in October 2004, and in the PBS-Nova channel’s Science Now programme in January this year. In fact, the National Geographic’s description uncannily but closely matches what happened: "Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in... As it reached 25 feet over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the floor later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment..."
There is one difference though. Officials now estimates that it could take up to six months to drain the flood waters out of New Orleans.
Apart from the indifference of the Administration, Congress and state politicians, what explains the lack of adequate preparations is President Bush’s policies which weakened the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to the point of destroying its effectiveness. Mr Bush appointed politicians, not professionals, to head it. He axed FEMA’s funding. The money was diverted to the Iraq war and to Homeland Security and transportation security agencies after September 11, thanks to Washington’s growing preoccupation with terrorist threats and the institution of harsh security checks at airports. Yet another reason was the lifting of a good deal of earth-moving and dredging equipment and special trucks to occupied Iraq to further US military plans.
The Katrina disaster once again underscores the truth of the proposition this Column has repeatedly advanced, and which it reiterated at the time of the Orissa cyclone and the tsunami last December: namely, that while the causes of natural disasters are not man-made, the damage they cause, whether social, physical or environmental, is socially determined. The worst-affected people are always the poor and underprivileged. They perish not because of the intrinsically deadlier nature of the calamity itself, but because they are socially and physically vulnerable. They are forced to live in congested, overcrowded and unsafe conditions in dangerous areas, and don’t possess cars in which to get away.
In New Orleans, the bulk of the victims, who were left without food, water and medicines for days on end, were Black and poor—who are not part of the Republican Party’s constituency. The disaster brought out the worst in American society, including cussedness, greed and violence.
There is a larger lesson here. The world is likely to witness many natural disasters, not least from hurricanes and maelstroms, whose intensity, say scientists, has been rising as a result of climate change. The world’s ability to save precious human lives and limit economic and social damage will critically depend on advance preparations and good disaster management, including transmission of early warnings to the public and timely availability of efficient emergency services.
Many people in India have adopted a smug and supercilious attitude towards the Hurricane Katrina disaster by gleefully pointing to the failures of US officialdom. Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh even claims that his government handled the July 26 floods in Maharashtra in a far more exemplary fashion. This is simply untrue. More than 1,000 lives were lost in the floods, whose effects were magnified by man-made factors like land reclamation and plastic-bag congestion. In the US, there was at least advance warning. In Maharashtra, there was none. This happens regularly with other "natural" disasters in India.
An important consequence of the Katrina disaster is that petroleum product prices have shot up even further. In the southern US, petrol has risen by 50 percent overnight. Experts quoted by The New York Times say this could be a replay of the fallout from the oil embargo of 1973, which delivered a massive price shock to the world. Thanks to the destruction of oil rigs, storage facilities and refineries along the Gulf Coast, there is now a supply shock on top of a demand shock.
The biggest cause of the unrelenting rise in global oil prices over the past two years—they have doubled since January 204—is the absence of spare refining capacity. The US has not built a single new refinery since 1976. Over the past 25 years, net US refinery capacity has fallen by 10 percent. In the rest of the world too, capacity has been stagnant. So oil prices are likely to spurt further.
Countries like India, which are dependent on imports for 70 percent of their oil consumption, and are profligately consuming more and more energy, will be particularly vulnerable. High oil prices could shave off 1 to 1.5 percent off India’s GDP growth and compound our economic problems, including unemployment. India is promoting unbridled automobilisation and civil aviation. We stand warned. Louisiana will haunt us long after Hurricane Katrina.
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