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Hurricane Katrina
Who's Really to Blame by R.W. Bradford If insanity is
repeating a mistake and expecting different results, Americans' response to
Katrina is insane.
The most bizarre thing about Hurricane Katrina is the
public's reaction. Look what happened
| | R.W.
Bradford is editor and publisher of Liberty. |
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New Orleans was founded in 1718 on the bank of the Mississippi, about 100
miles from the river's mouth. The east bank is high at that point, so it seemed
relatively safe, but the very next year, New Orleans suffered its first flood.
During the next century and a half, it experienced the ups and downs typical of a
port city in a tropical hurricane zone: occasional floods, followed by
rebuilding. But like most cities in the New World, it suffered more from fire
than from flood. During this period it suffered even more from military invasion
and occupation than from fire and flood combined, and more still from tropical
disease. About a century and a quarter ago, federal, state, and local
governments began to take charge of safety matters. They drained swamps and built
and maintained levees, allowing the city's population to grow substantially. This
growth was not willy-nilly: the city had adopted tight zoning and land use
regulation. By the mid-20th century, state and local authorities, with the help
of huge amounts of money from the federal government, extended and improved the
flood management system, and New Orleans was touted as one of the safest and
healthiest cities in the world. So just how could Hurricane Katrina wreak
$200 billion in damage and kill hundreds — possibly thousands — of
human beings? How did it become, as we have heard over and over on television,
"The Worst Natural Disaster in U.S. History"? It happened because people
gave too much responsibility to government. It is no overstatement to say that
the Katrina disaster is purely the fault of the government, at local, state, and
federal levels. Nearly all the damage resulted from flooding in areas that
are below sea level. Homes and businesses were built in these preposterously
dangerous locations because government programs drained these areas and planners
decided to build there. These locations could have been made reasonably
safe by building levees high enough to protect against the storm surge from Class
4 hurricanes (hurricanes with winds over 130 mph). On average, between 10 and 18
Class 4 hurricanes occur each year in the Caribbean and the Gulf. It was obvious,
even to government officials, that this was a very dangerous situation. So
Congress appropriated money to build up the levees. And the local authorities
spent it on other projects. (Last year, for example, they spent $2 million
building a computerized musical fountain by the levee board's headquarters.) And
the homes were built at government direction in areas that even the government
realized would inevitably flood on a grand scale.
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| It is no overstatement to
say that the Katrina disaster is purely the fault of government, at the local,
state, and federal levels. |
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How did the perpetrators of this almost unfathomably vast disaster react to
it? Perhaps it should come as no surprise that government didn't do much
of anything until days after the inevitable floods happened, the hundreds (or
thousands) of people died, the billions of dollars worth of damage occurred. The
politicians responded at first by ignoring the whole mess, then by blaming each
other, and then by making grandstanding proposals to give government even more
resources and power to deal with the problem. In some ways, government suppressed
relief: for days, the governor of Louisiana refused to allow the Red Cross into
the stricken area. It was weeks before the Bush administration responded
more than perfunctorily, and then its response was . . . throw huge amounts of
money at the problem. Republicans in Washington say that they expect to spend
$200 billion to undo the damage. That amounts to $400,000 for every man, woman,
and child in New Orleans. Yes, I know: a lot of damage occurred elsewhere on the
Gulf Coast. But remember: a third of New Orleans wasn't flooded, most residents
of the Big Easy who were flooded had left the city before the flood, and many had
flood insurance. But what's most interesting about this whole sorry mess
is the reaction of the American people. Virtually nobody put any blame on the
government for the flooding, even though damage would have been almost trivial if
government had acted in anything like a prudent fashion during the century prior
to the flood. Instead, people — especially media and politicians
— blamed the government for failing to respond quickly enough and with
enough money. On one level, this makes a certain amount of sense: after all,
government did fail to provide any meaningful help, and even retarded private
efforts.
| A hurricane is no longer
perceived as an "act of God." It is now seen as an act of government.
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But think about it for a minute: why on earth should you expect the
perpetrator of such a disaster to provide timely and meaningful relief? Did the
survivors of Stalin, Mao, or Hitler expect those dictators to provide them relief
after their friends and family had been massacred? Of course, George Bush
is not Joseph Stalin: no one in America acted with malice of the sort perpetrated
by Stalin, Hitler, et al. His sins were sins of omission and simple incompetence.
George Bush didn't appoint Michael Brown to head the Federal Emergency Management
Administration because he wanted more people to die and more homes to be damaged.
No. It just seemed like the chances of a major disaster in his remaining time in
office were pretty remote, and there were political reasons to reward Brown with
a sinecure. The local authorities didn't squander their appropriated millions to
build the levees a few feet higher because they wanted people to die (and adding
a few feet to the levees was all that was needed to prevent the flood). No. They
figured that the chances of a major flood during the next few years were remote,
and that the snazzy computerized musical fountain at their headquarters was
something that could benefit them now. Dealing with the levee problem could
wait. But this is all the more reason not to expect government to offer
meaningful relief in a timely fashion, or to expect it to respond by any means
other than smothering an already afflicted area in tax dollars. ÊLike a
horse that is led from a burning barn, then heads back to the barn as soon as it
is turned loose, Americans are hard to fathom when they start thinking about
disasters. How can you explain the self-destructive behavior of the American
public? The explanation, I suspect, can be found in the displacement of
traditional other-worldly religion with the secular religion of state worship. A
hurricane is no longer perceived as an "act of God." It is now seen as an act of
government. That's why Bush's approval rating fell when Katrina hit. That's why
so many people believe, in the absence of evidence, that his refusal to sign the
Kyoto Accords, which would dramatically affect U.S. energy usage and have a
substantially unfavorable effect on our prosperity, somehow makes hurricanes more
frequent and worse. And that's why people expect government to solve the
problem of natural disasters. On earlier occasions, government was hardly
involved even when the disasters were much worse, such as the hurricane that
killed 10,000 residents of Galveston, Tex. in 1900, or the fire that destroyed
central Chicago in 1871, or the flood that descended on Johnstown, Penn., in
1889, or the earthquakes centered in New Madrid, Mo., in 1811 and 1812 — the
worst quakes ever recorded on this continent . . . but in this modern age of
progress and rationality, people's faith in the state is so strong that even the
manifest failure of government to respond to the breaching of levees has not
undermined it. What is needed, obviously, is a crisis of faith. But there
is little or no evidence of any such storm on the horizon.
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