New Orleans a Year Later

After the Katrina disaster, I challenged a widely-distributed email critique of the people trapped in New Orleans at the Convention Center and the Superdome. Brisbane folk had been quite civil when this place flooded in 1974 and the writer found the behavior of New Orleans citizens, "minorities" in particular, to be shameful and a sign of the decline of Western civilization.

I argued that the situations were not comparable. Now it turns out that the horrifying reports of civil unrest among the flood victims were wrong. Despite the appalling conditions that existed there a little more than a year ago, only one violent death at those locations has been confirmed and it was a suicide. “People comported themselves with patience, with generosity toward those with even less, and with as much dignity as they could manage,” writes John Biguenet in an Aug. 20 New York Times web journal article.

Nearly everything we think we know about what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, he says, is probably wrong.

About 1,300 New Orleanians, about half white and half black, died from drowning, dehydration, and/or exposure within a week, but they were not victims of a natural disaster, he says. Other areas took the brunt of the storm and parts of New Orleans that would soon flood were high and dry after the storm had passed.

Katrina itself didn’t kill those people, Biguenet argues, citing the draft final report of the U. S. Corps of Engineers, in which the Corps admits: “foundation failures occurred prior to water levels reaching the design levels of protection, causing breaching and subsequent massive flooding and extensive losses.”

Only parts of New Orleans is below sea level. Biguenet and his wife own a house that sits a foot above sea level, but his neighborhood now floods uncharacteristically after rains. Why? The Corps of Engineers has, since the hurricane, plugged up a drainage canal, reducing drastically its ability to carry away water.

One thing most of us are probably right about? FEMA functioned terribly. The little horror story at the end of Biguenet’s report is well worth reading in the Aug. 20, 2006, New York Times.