Aprés le deluge
They were carried off before their time, their foundations washed away by a flood.
Job 22:16
The past three days, I have been avidly reading news accounts of the New Orleans catastrophe. It took awhile for me to start paying attention. I don’t think I took much notice of it before Tuesday. Wednesday, it really hit me what an absolute disaster this is. This morning, I am just stunned.
Storms are so much a cliché of news reporting. Typically, I scoff at the idiot rookie news reporter who stands in a gale to tell us that, yes it is raining, and yes the wind is blowing. Storms are what make news during slow news periods, at least that’s the way I look at it. Storms aren’t news I care about. I care about politics, the war. Storms come and go, and as long as my electricity stays on, I don’t pay attention.
Yet how can anyone ignore what has happened to New Orleans? The storm and the resulting flood have essentially wiped that city from the face of the earth. I don’t think even Hurricane Andrew wreaked this much devastation on a place. The only comparable disaster I can think of is the Galveston, Texas, hurricane and flood of 1900. I saw a History Channel documentary about that disaster not long ago, in fact. It has been mostly forgotten, but I’ve heard at least one reporter mention it in comparison to New Orleans.
Here are a few of the quotes I’ve culled from the Washington Post, which is just about the only newspaper I read, online or otherwise:
There are four levels of hell inside the refugee city of the Superdome, home to about 15,000 people since Sunday. On the artificial-turf field and in the lower-level seats where Montrel sat sweltering with her family, a form of civilization had taken hold — smelly, messy, dark and dank, but with a structure. Families with cots used their beds as boundaries for personal space and kept their areas orderly, a cooler on one corner, the toys on another, almost as if they had come for fireworks and stayed too long.
The bathrooms, clogged and overflowing since Monday, announced the second level of hell, the walkway ringing the entrance level. In the men’s, the urinal troughs were overflowing. In the women’s, the bowls were to the brim. A slime of excrement and urine made the walkway slick. “You don’t even go there anymore,” said Dee Ford, 37, who was pushed in a wading pool from her flooded house to the shelter. “You just go somewhere in a corner where you can. In the dark, you are going to step in poo anyway.”
And from the same story, I had to laugh at this. You know things are really, really bad when…
“This is mass chaos,” said Sgt. Jason Defess, 27, a National Guard military policeman who had been stationed on a ramp outside the Superdome since Monday. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather be in Iraq,” where he was deployed for 14 months, until January. “You got your constant danger, but I had something to protect myself. [And] three meals a day. Communications. A plan. Here, they had no plan.”
New Orleans may never fully recover. According to some, the refugees from the city may as well just move away because it will be at least six months to a year before the city is livable again.
Officials in Baton Rouge, La., yesterday painted a bleak picture of New Orleans’ immediate future. Its 485,000 inhabitants are refugees or soon-to-be refugees—ordered out of town because the town is unlivable.
Electric power is gone. Drinking water is gone. Sewage service is gone. Roads are destroyed. Tens of thousands of homes are buried in contaminated floodwaters. The dead—still uncounted—float in drowned neighborhoods or lie pinned beneath debris.
“I surmise that there are people in New Orleans who will not be able to get back to their homes for months, if not forever,” said Michael D. Brown, undersecretary of homeland security for emergency preparedness and response. “It will be a Herculean undertaking.”
On the subject of looting, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, thieves who take advantage of the situation to steal clothing, electronics, and whatever else they can carry, are pure trash in my opinion and I have no problem with the police dealing as harshly with them as they feel is warranted. That means shooting on sight, as far as I’m concerned.
On the other hand, there are people not looting, but stealing food and drinking water and flashlights because they are living in anarchy. There are no jobs, no system of exchange of money for goods and services, no order whatsoever. How are they supposed to survive? They have to resort to hunter-gatherer tactics, to some extent.
The question is whether the police and Army are capable of making the distinction between a looter and someone stealing food to feed himself and his family. Not being especially trustful of the law enforcement establishment, I’d be wary about leaving that up to them.
The Post has a good article, titled Carried Away, about the looting which tries to draw this distinction and build some degree of sympathy, not for looters, but for people stealing to survive. In one of the Fox News segments on the looting last night, there was video of people stealing from what appeared to be a grocery store. The reporter criticized a woman coming out with two packs of diapers, which she held up to shield her face. Sorry, but that too is survival theft. When you have a baby, clean diapers are as much a necessity as food. I don’t blame her. It’s not like she can use cloth diapers, because there is no clean water to wash them!
And yet, in another segment, I saw people carting away televisions. It looked like another man had cleared off a rack of men’s suits. A woman, grinning for the camera, was carrying several boxes of shoes. I get mad when I see things like that. What the hell do they think they’re going to do with a TV? There’s no electricity! The clothing is worthless. Probably none of these people have homes to return to, yet there they are, ripping off impractical and essentially useless items left and right. I would feel not an ounce of sympathy for them if the police shot them dead right there as they are leaving the store they’ve just looted.
I can’t understand people using a disaster of unimaginable magnitude as an opportunity to steal. One account I read compared New Orleans to Mogadishu in 1993, or Baghdad in 2003. Only problem is, we don’t have the lawlessness that comes with war to justify what are the most despicable acts: trying to profit from human misery. What we have in America are trashy people with a dysfunctional sense of right and wrong. Conservatives would grumble, probably in private, that these thieves are trashy poor people, but there probably isn’t a lot of evidence to back up that assertion. Socio-economic status kind of goes out the window when you have no house, no car, no money, no possessions, nothing to mark your place in society.
The people who stayed behind in New Orleans may be poor—I’ve read reports of people who were living paycheck to paycheck and simply could not afford to leave—and they have every right to steal food and other necessities of life. I have trouble even calling that stealing. No one ought to profit from other people’s misfortune, however.
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I don’t know if I should admit this, but will. I get pretty tired of hurricane coverage, normally.
What happened in New Orleans didn’t really strike me until Sunday night, when we were reading preview stories. I made a stupid comment about hurricane stories when someone rightly told me, have you read these stories? This is sad.
And then I read about the deluge expected to overtake New Orleans. The water, the toxic waste, the bodies floating away.
On Monday, when it was my turn to design the front page, it had become a bigger deal to me. The country was relieved to find that the damage was not catastrophic as feared. There was quite a lot of damage, but the entire city wasn’t under water. Yet.
Until the next day, the other shoe dropped.
I can’t imagine having no home to go back to. Not for a few days, but a few months, at best. There is nothing left. No law to speak of. That must truly be hell.
I went to New Orleans a couple of years ago, and it makes me sad to think that it will never be the same.
I also wonder if there’s a point to rebuilding. If this should be a modern Atlantis, and that we should recognize that building below sea level there is not a good idea.
When do you simply declare enough? I’d be sorely tempted to give up and start somewhere else.
And as someone who has to read a lot of news, I will probably get sick of the stories again in a few days. But I also learned to read more and talk less.
Btw… on the looting… I don’t know about shooting someone for looting. But I have been astonished by the stupidity of trying to steal things that you can’t eat, too. There’s no worth to those things in that place, right now. No electricity, no point.
I can’t say what I’d do in a similar situation, but the moral directive of not stealing is so strong in me that I probably wouldn’t even steal food. Not to save my life.
But then, I’m not there.
Comment by Mel B. — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 3:30 pm
It took me longer than you to start paying attention. I really didn’t get around to it until late Tuesday. Hurricane stories are such clichés, and the forecasts that predict utter ruin usually turn out to be exageratted.
I’d seriously consider abandoning New Orleans, if I were a [former] resident there. Apparently, some of those who have left are planning never to return. In one of the Post articles, a man who escaped to a town about ninety miles north—Alexandria, I think—said he was going out to look for a job today because he did not expect he will ever go back to N.O.
Really, if it’s going to be anywhere from a month to six months to a year before the city is livable, who would go back?
Comment by Matthew — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 3:41 pm
I hope they rebuild.
Comment by Tammy — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 4:46 pm
Rebuilding would be a sign of hope, strength. And it’d keep the mayor and the government in business. But more importantly, since the oil will still be down there (farther south), and since it’ll likely remain an important port of entry (as it were, sitting at the mouth of the Mississppi), it’ll surive. There’s no way someone won’t stick around to make the money that can be made from that location. What’ll be interesting to see is in what form the new city will take.
As for the looting… I know it’s not an excuse, and it’s pretty stupid to steal things you can’t use, but when you create and foster the kinds of deep economic divides that was new orleans, and a chance comes along to strike back… this is what can happen. The worse thing, though, than the stolen TVs and clothing will be the situations with the hospitals. If they can evacuate the hospitals there–and that’s a big if with the shape those places are in right now–they’ve been described as a “big pharmacy” for the gangs and drug users who haven’t had a fix for a few days. Now that’s where there will be some bloodshed. And that’s the tragedy of looting–loss of lives. Over stuff. Stuff that prob. won’t be usable or sellable or maybe even salvageable when the floodwaters recede, and certainly not useable now.
Comment by Heather — Thursday, 1 September 2005 @ 6:06 pm
Thanks,Matt, for this post.
I’ve been listening to NPR coverage since before the hurrican hit, and recall thinking and feeling in the pit of my stomach that moving people into the Superdome was a bad, bad idea. Course, where else could they go? But that it would be some kind of a solution if things went really bad? My first instinct was that they should get EVERYBODY out if they could, find a way to get those with no means out of the city before disaster struck, rather than shuffling all “those without means” that they could into a really big building and deal with them later.
This morning I found myself choking back tears while listening to news reports about surrounding hospitals and the convention center just blocks from where rescue operations are being staged. Stories of rescue operations stopping at hospitals because a sniper took a short at a National Guard unit (I think it was NG), of a ten-year-old being raped, of a woman waiting for rescue alongside the dead bodies of two old women, the New Orleans mayor basically saying the feds don’t have a fucking clue (and don’t care) about what’s happening, all of this is just too much, too hard to take in.
As for the looters? When I heard that the order was to shoot them on sight this morning, my gut churned. Like Matt, I don’t trust that they’ll draw distinctions between survival looting and looting TVs and such. It’s horrible, it’s wrong, it’s stupid and futile to steal TVS and whatever else, but in a way, I understand the impulse.
Nothing. These people have NOTHING left, and maybe by stealing whatever they see, they can feel, for a moment, that they at least have something, even if those of us on the outside can see that it’s really worthless. Scum of the earth? Maybe. Problem for New Orleans right now? Definitely. But given the devestation, desperation, and deprivation, such looting has its own logic.
Comment by Dawn — Friday, 2 September 2005 @ 11:42 am
While I know it’s harsh to talk about shooting looters, I think if harsher measures had been implemented to begin with, the crime might not have gotten so bad. People are armed now if they weren’t before, having looted gun and ammo stores.
On the other hand, if you put it into perspective, is it ever justified to shoot someone for what is essentially a property crime? You could argue it both ways: 1. It’s only property, it is not justified to kill someone for stealing (though who would blame a homeowner from shooting a burglar?); or 2. In a situation where order is tenuous, drastic measures are necessary to maintain control. I think New Orleans falls into the latter category. I just hope the police and military can distinguish between people looting for survival, and people looting as part of a campaign of mayhem. I trust the National Guard more than the police. The Guard has plenty of experience in distinguishing between friend and foe in Iraq.
Comment by Matthew — Friday, 2 September 2005 @ 12:49 pm