Category: Weather

Categories
Events of note Weather

Going forward two

When the mayor of New Orleans was talking about the poor people of the city who didn’t have the means to escape, and gave the number at 100,000, it didn’t dawn on me at the time that in a city of 500,000 this means one in every 5 people didn’t have the means to escape the city when they’re lives were threatened. That’s 1 in 5.

How could we have ignored the South, the cities, the country to the extent where 1 in 5 lives in such poverty they don’t even have the means to travel a few hundred miles outside of town to protect their very lives?


Tom Negrino of Backup Brain talks about choices and how the same people who “chose” not to evacuate from New Orleans are the same ones who “choose” not to have health insurance:

The 2004 Economic Report of the President, which laid out the policy basis for HSA’s, argues that Americans have too much health insurance, and steps must be taken to make it more expensive to obtain health care (which would “make the market more efficient”). The report also argues that many people do not have health insurance because they choose not to, rather than because they are poor […] In the past week, we’re heard the Bush administration use the “they chose not to” line in another situation: they said that poor people in New Orleans and Biloxi “chose” not to evacuate out of the path of Hurricane Katrina. In both cases, the implication is that if you choose not to do something, you bear all the responsibility for any adverse consequences. But in the real world, neither group of poor people have or had any real choices. Many of the dead in New Orleans did not have the financial resources to get out of town (no car, no plane, train, or bus fare, no money for hotels), and many of the people who will die because they can’t afford health insurance are facing just as much of a lack of choice about the matter.

In other words, rather than address the problems, our current Administration’s beliefs are that people are poor because they choose to be poor. As such, they are no longer the responsibility of the collective.

This would then explain the Administration’s emphasis on terrorist prevention over natural disaster prevention and response at a federal level: terrorists attack regardless of wealth; in fact terrorists attack primarily because of wealth, and as such the people do not ‘choose’ to be victims of terrorism and are thus worthy of federal help. It isn’t the responsibility of the collective whole to provide assistance to states, no matter how poor the states are, for something the states and the people knew were going to happen. If the states ‘choose’ not to budget for such emergencies, and the people ‘choose’ to live in such areas, this is their responsibilty. Even if people are taxed, and heavily, at the federal level for funding organizations to provide emergency assistance, the resources would be more efficiently spent protecting our country’s assets. What are this country’s assets? Those organizations and people who ‘choose’ not to be poor; even if many of these same organizations and people are reponsible, directly and indirectly, for much of the poverty.

In other words, Bush and his cabinet are social Darwinists, where only the most fit and capable, or those with good family connections, should survive. This might reassure those who are concerned about the influence of Christian faith and values in government at the federal level–there is no evidence that Bush and his Administration, or Congress for that matter, adhere to the belief that it is the duty of Christians to help those less fortunate than themselves.

Categories
Events of note Weather

Going forward

Sheila Lennon linked to a piece written by Anne Rice for the New York Times, Do you know what it means to lose New Orleans. She wrote:

Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy.
…
I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance.
…
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.


Rice remembers the New Orleans of history and most people’s imagination–a view that could not withstand this crises. One of the better writings I’ve seen in the last week was from a recent evacuee, Jordan Flaherty. Frank Paynter re-created the writing in his weblog. Flaherty wrote:

For those who have not lived in New Orleans, you have missed a incredible, glorious, vital, city. A place with a culture and energy unlike anywhere else in the world. A 70% African-American city where resistance to white supremecy has supported a generous, subversive and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues and hiphop, to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, Parades, Beads, Jazz Funerals, and red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and dance and sexuality and liberation unlike anywhere else in the world.
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It is also a city of exploitation and segregation and fear. The city of New Orleans has a population of just over 500,000 and was expecting 300 murders this year, most of them centered on just a few, overwhelmingly black, neighborhoods […] The city has a 40% illiteracy rate, and over 50% of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years. Louisiana spends on average $4,724 per child’s education and ranks 48th in the country for lowest teacher salaries. The equivalent of more than two classrooms of young people drop out of Louisiana schools every day and about 50,000 students are absent from school on any given day. Far too many young black men from New Orleans end up enslaved in Angola Prison, a former slave plantation where inmates still do manual farm labor, and over 90% of inmates eventually die in the prison. It is a city where industry has left, and most remaining jobs are are low-paying, transient, insecure jobs in the service economy.

Race has always been the undercurrent of Louisiana politics. This disaster is one that was constructed out of racism, neglect and incompetence. Hurricane Katrina was the inevitable spark igniting the gasoline of cruelty and corruption. From the neighborhoods left most at risk, to the treatment of the refugees to the the media portayal of the victims, this disaster is shaped by race
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While the rich escaped New Orleans, those with nowhere to go and no way to get there were left behind. Adding salt to the wound, the local and national media have spent the last week demonizing those left behind. As someone that loves New Orleans and the people in it, this is the part of this tragedy that hurts me the most, and it hurts me deeply.
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In the coming months, billions of dollars will likely flood into New Orleans. This money can either be spent to usher in a “New Deal” for the city, with public investment, creation of stable union jobs, new schools, cultural programs and housing restoration, or the city can be “rebuilt and revitalized” to a shell of its former self, with newer hotels, more casinos, and with chain stores and theme parks replacing the former neighborhoods, cultural centers and corner jazz clubs.
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Now that the money is flowing in, and the world’s eyes are focused on Katrina, its vital that progressive-minded people take this opportunity to fight for a rebuilding with justice. New Orleans is a special place, and we need to fight for its rebirth.

When I was a member of the Children of God too many years ago, one of the other members was a man, an Acadian, who’s secular name was William Williams. Whether this was his real name or not was a bit questionable, but oddly believable if you knew William. He was a stocky guy, taller than me, blond haired, and nose permanently flattened by being broke so many times.

William was about the most soft spoken man you could imagine, with a wonderful Cajun accent. He was kind, and caring, and very, very patient. When we had a moment to talk, without the Church elders standing over us, he told me of his history. Willliam used to roll drunks along Bourbon Street for a living. If you’re not familiar with the term, what this means is that he would follow a tourist, too drunk to have any sense, and would either wait until they fell over, or would hasten the inevitable. He would then rob the person, usually only his money, leaving the wallet, and take off.

Imagine my surprise: here was this man, soft spoken, intelligent, caring, and he would knock down and rob tourists. But the contradiction between the man and his actions fascinated me, and I think was one of the major reasons I have always been interested in the history of the South. Like William, the deep South is often a contradition: on the one hand, warm and friendly, gracious and beautiful; on the other, ruthless.

Now, William didn’t like rolling drunks. If life had been different, I think he would have been a great teacher. But he grew up poor, in the streets of a city that has lived for centuries in a state of barbarous gentility.

The historian wars with the humanitarian. To return New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf region into what they were before only “better”, will be to return it to a culture that has long been dependent on, and even encouraged, poverty. A colorful poverty, rich with heritage and art and history; but poverty nonetheless.

Categories
Climate Change History Weather

A will and a big water

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In 1927, the rain kept falling in the Mississippi delta. Folks would look at the sky anxiously, hoping for a break, but none came. Those who lived near the Mississippi, well they knew he was a cantankerous old bastard and could turn on they any old time. They’d watch the levees, those mounds of dirt and tough old swamp grass that was all that stood between them and the waters.

Most years, the levees held and the rich, wet lands yielded plentiful crops–usually cotton, though some land owners ran sugar cane. The folks that farmed the lands were black, but they didn’t own the lands, no sir. No they were sharecroppers, which back in those days was only about a drop of blood away from slavery.

Then early that year, a wall of water came down south, riding the Sip like a drunk-happy gambling boat captain. It started in Illinois, where those in charge, the Mississippi River Commission pointed to their work, their levees and said without a doubt they’d hold. Then right before Easter, the levees gave up their fight and started to fail, one after another.

“On that night that the levee broke, when daddy went out and he could see the water coming across the fields. And our house was about, I guess about eighteen inches off the ground. And he come back in the house, he says, “”I see the water coming across the field. It done filled up a big slew coming between our house and the levee,” and it’s level out there. So he come back in the house and stayed about twenty minutes. About 10: 00 that night, we were moving a few bed things up in the loft part of the house, and there’s where we was until the next morning. And we stayed in there, up there, two nights and three days. Finally a seaplane come along, and my daddy had done cut a hole where we could look out on the outside, and he was waving a white rag when that seaplane come by. And then about two hours after then, it was a gas boat going up there and taking us all to the levee. And we lived up there on the levee until the water went down.”

 

William Cobb On the Night when the Levee Broke

In Greenville, Mississippi over 13,000 blacks are stranded on the levee without food and water and little protection from the elements. When boats arrive to rescue those flooded out, only the whites are picked up, because the plantation owners in the area are worried that if the blacks are ferried out, they won’t return to farm the land.

Will Percy decides that the only honorable and decent course of action is to evacuate the refugees to safer ground down river and arranges for barges to pick up and transport the refugees. Many people are reluctant to abandon Greenville, despite the fact that their homes have been submerged. The planters, in particular, oppose Will’s plan, fearing that if the African American refugees leave, they will never return, and there will be no labor to work the crops. LeRoy (ed. note: Will Percy’s father), placing his business interests above his family’s tradition of aiding those less fortunate, betrays his son and secretly sides with the planters. Boats with room for all the refugees arrive, but only 33 white women and children are allowed to board. The African American refugees are left behind, trapped on the levee. Later, Will Percy will write that he was “astounded and horrified” by this turn of events.

To justify his relief committee’s failure to evacuate the refugees, Will Percy convinces the Red Cross to make Greenville a distribution center, with the African Americans providing the labor. Red Cross relief provisions arrive in Greenville, but the best provisions go to the whites in town. Only African Americans wearing tags around their necks marked “laborer” receive rations. National Guard is called in to patrol the refugee camps in Greenville. Word filters out of the camps that guardsmen are robbing, assaulting, raping and even murdering African Americans held on the levee.

From: PBS A Fatal Flood

The flood waters covered over over 27,000 square miles across several states, Mississippi and Arkansas being hardest hit. Over 240 are known to have died, but record keeping was poor in those times.

“Back up to a house . . . there was seven people on it. I presume it was wife . . . man, his wife, and five children. And I was heading over to this house. This was on my first hauling, the next day after the levee broke. And on the way getting to the house—this house was just moving along [in the river], you know—and all of a sudden it must of hit a stump or something. And the house flew all to pieces. And I searched the boards and things around there for ten minutes, and you know I never saw a soulÌs hand come up, not a soul.”

Henry Caillouet Seven All Together Went Down

The flood lasted two months, and the folks in New Orleans had actually dynamited a levee before the city–an act that proved unnecessary because broken levees elsewhere along the Sip had spilled enough water so the river wasn’t a threat to the city.

By the time it was over, 700,000 people had lost their homes, and a hundred thousand homes and businesses were destroyed. The costs of the flood topped 4 billion dollars by 1993 standard’s–a comparison brought to mind because in 1993, another great flood hit, but this time further north in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. I remember talking to a man in an old lighthouse on the hill overlooking Hannibal, Missouri about the day when the waters began to rise. He was a simple man who liked to talk with people, becoming an unofficial greeter to those visiting the lighthouse.

“You see there”, he pointed out at the far shore of the Mississippi. “The water came from that direction. It just kept rising and rising, and it came toward the town, like a great, slow moving wave.”

He then pointed at the bridge that spanned the River.

“There was another bridge here during the flood. I watched as people tried to get across the bridge, to get to their families and homes before they were cut off from the waters.” I remember him smiling, raising his red feedcap (of which he was very proud), to resettle back on his head. “I watched as they blowed it up to make way for the new bridge.”

When the floods washed out the approaches to the bridge, people had to commute from one side to the other of the river either by plane, or driving 200 miles away. Hannibal was underwater for 147 days before the flood began to recede; some towns were under even longer. Even St. Louis had flood waters lapping at the heels of the Arch, and flowing down the normally dry Des Peres river into the city and into the neighborhoods only a block or two from where I live now.

The 1993 flood displaced 74,000 people, and destroyed 45,000 buildings and homes. It’s cost was 7.5 billion.

Today, the most significant sign you see of the flood of 1927 is the number of blacks living in northern cities. After the flood, many left the delta area, either because they lost their homes, or because of their harsh treatment; most likely because of the harsh treatment. There is some irony in this mistreatment of blacks, and the fears on the part of the white landowners about losing their workers. I think if the blacks had been treated decently, many wouldn’t have left, thereby hastening the final curtain call for the old southern plantation culture.

And when the blacks left, they took with them part of the southern culture, manifested in the blues that followed every where they went: Chicago, Seattle, New York, and points beyond. Some would even say that the 1927 flood was the birth of the blues, such as this When the Levees Break, recorded by Kansas Joe, recorded in 1929.

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay

Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan
Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay

Now look here mama what am I to do
Now look here mama what am I to do
I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to

I works on the levee mama both night and day
I works on the levee mama both night and day
I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away

Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose

I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works on the levee, mama both night and day
I works so hard, to keep the water away

I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me
I’m goin’ back to my used to be

I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan
Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home.

The flood was also responsible, in part, for some of the success of the Civil Rights movement later in the 1960’s. Whites in the north, and even parts of the south, came face to face with the atrocities committed on blacks in the delta. And blacks found that they were no longer willing to be free in name only.

You also don’t see any of the damage from the 1993 flood, though again you see signs of it everywhere. At the restored Hodgson Mill, there was a pencil scratch half way up the second floor of the mill that marked the highest level of the flood. Most of the towns at risk along the Sip have also installed high floodgates, painted or not dependent on the town. The government also bought out flood-prone farms and made many into parks and conservation land.

When floods happen, people move, but when the waters recede some return, while others move in. Life goes on, because flooding, no matter how tragic the losses, is a part of life. It is a part of the delta, a legacy and a price for living by the river.

Right now, the delta is being hit again, but this time it isn’t Old Man River who is to blame. Lots of stories about this new flood, too; lots of cries of doom and destruction: Thousands are dead, exclaims the mayor, even while he has people on roofs listening in on radio;Katrina leaves a trail of death and destruction, says the papers, even while people desperately hope for a green cot in a dome in another city; The Mississippi coast is gone, says the governor, even as people pick through rubble and find a single shoe. The recovery will take years, says the President, even as the finger pointing and blaming has begun. Stories about looters and havoc and ruin and how nothing will be the same again.

The city is destroyed. Well, now, I take exception to that one. You can’t destroy a city unless you kill off every last one of the people who live in and love the city. You would also have to remove every reference to it in history, and all of its culture, and every last bit of influence it has ever had in the past, present, and we presume, future.

But I do not intend to give up easily. Why? Because I am absolutely convinced that New Orleanians will not allow their city to become a ghost town. And I intend to be part of the renewal that springs from this determination.
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The culture of New Orleans has long since factored disasters and general uncertainty into its economic and philosophical outlook. An early-19th-century cholera epidemic killed one out of five New Orleanians, the equivalent of 100,000 today. Even the gravediggers died, forcing people to pile bodies at the cemetery gates. The first owner of the Lombard Plantation was among those who succumbed. But his wife and family stayed on, and some of their descendants, both white and black, are still in New Orleans today, perhaps perched on their rooftop awaiting rescue or huddling gratefully with friends out in Lafayette or Breaux Bridge.

I expect they, too, will return, and that life in New Orleans will go on, with all its precariousness and sense of fragility and, yes, with all its relish for the moment. That relish, by the way, which arose from the constant awareness of precisely such disasters as we are experiencing today, accounts for much of what gives the people of that city their reckless abandon, their devil-may-care attitude, and their zest for life. Rebuilding after Katrina will be just the next in a long series of events in which that spirit has been manifested.

S. Frederick Starr in A Sad Day, too, for Architecture.

Here’s a prediction: come March, 2006, with our help, the towns along the coast will rebuild. A home will replace rubble, and a church will open its doors again. With our care, the bodies will be buried, and those who have suffered loss will be comforted. With our force, we will overcome those who grab gun and seek to cause fear (and in the process find that the ‘gangs’ become ‘groups’ and the groups are fewer than our lurid speculations imply). With our support, the casinos and businesses along the coast of Mississippi will be in full swing, and folks will be back at work. And with our hard work and sacrifice, the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans will be the best. Ever.

The city is destroyed. What foolish nonsense. You know, the people that wrote this, they really don’t know the South, and the people who live by big water.

Categories
Events of note Weather

Sentimental

I am not a sentimental person. Oh, I think I had traces in that direction at one time, but I’ve lost them over time. Weblogging has helped, because I’ve seen sentimentality practiced as an artform in weblogging. The more I see of it, the more I turn away from it. It’s like eating cotton candy–a little bit goes a long way.

No, though I hope I am caring and compassionate, I am not sentimental. This is why I was ecstatic when Yule Heibel started weblogging again, opening with a brilliant piece:

That’s what I found myself doing. As I combed through Flickr postings tagged “Hurricane Katrina,” or through newsarticles’ accompanying photostreams, I also realised how vile I was in my seeming eagerness to discover a truly sublime image that would be capable of eliciting just the right cold-blooded (”sang froid”) reaction of awe and satisfaction one associates with the sublime. But in the end, it was garbage that did it, it was the images of garbage that brought me back to a different frame for my senses.

The domestic in me cut the sublime down to size. Looking at a picture of garbage floating on garbage floating on detritus floating on pollution (sewage, oil, toxic chemicals), I started thinking — not about Endings (the good old teleological stand-by of the perhaps terminally academically deluded), but about Beginnings (the domestic, possibly thoroughly female point of departure). How do you begin cleaning up the mess?

A volunteer at the Astrodome is putting photographs online in her Flickr account of the refuges as they arrive. I know I should be feeling the overwhelming tragedy of the event, and anger at our government, but all I can think when I see them is how beautiful the people are, and how wonderful and personal are the photographs.

How do we begin to clean up the mess? Give me a shovel, hand me a hammer, point me. I don’t have time though for raised fists and helpless crying. Oh and for those who have made cracks about those conservative, bible thumping hicks in Texas, might want to check this out. Just ignore that “grace of God” sentence at the end, though…I don’t think the governor knew at the time how that would sound, considering the circumstances.

Categories
Weather

Human nature

This is my last post on Katrina. There’s never been another storm that has fascinated, as well as frustrated and angered and saddened me as much as this one has. This is a storm that was tracked to grow into monsterous size and hit on or near New Orleans almost three days before it hit. Yet, mandatory evacuations weren’t given until the day before, if that.

And it didn’t matter when the evacuations were given–not when people didn’t have the sense to even leave a beachside apartment house directly in the path of a Category 4 hurricane.

Richard Louv wrote an excellent editorial on human nature and disaster:

Forget nature; the real problem is human nature.

Most people living on the Gulf Coast simply prefer to take their chances. So do Californians who live on the slippery bluffs of Malibu.

And San Diegans? Even after the devastating 2003 firestorms that marched from Cuyamaca to Scripps Ranch and back again, we seem to prefer denial and deflection.

Instead of investing in the creation of new firefighting technologies – including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles that could spot and even fight fires – we look to old technology, but even avoid simple fees that would upgrade our old-fashioned, out-dated firefighting tools. When it comes to enforcing tougher fire-resistance building standards, we wiggle and dissemble like teenagers facing homework on a sunny weekend. We prefer our risks manageable, and our thinking small.

Instead of preparing for true dangers posed by natural forces, people prefer to obsess about the relatively smaller threats of terrorism (but refuse to pay adequately for prevention in that arena, as well).

Or, more often, we fixate on the smallest of societal risks. Less than a month before Katrina’s bad breath battered Florida, Broward County schools, in an effort to cut down on injuries and lawsuits, erected “Rules of the Playground” at 137 elementary schools. No more swings, teeter-totters or hand-pulled merry-go-rounds. And “no running,” the new signs said, even as Katrina approached.

Kids running. Now there’s a manageable threat.

I am fascinated by weather, in all its forms. It is the show that’s put on daily to remind us for all of our technology and engineering, we’re still not much more than puny, hairless, apes swinging a club at forces that can swat us down like so many pesky gnats.

And weather is so wonderfully ironic. The same high pressure system that has been the cause of so much of our drought this year, is the same system that’s pushing the effects of Katrina away from us, and toward the Ohio Valley. You can actually see the two fighting it out in this animated doppler image, snapped from Weather Underground. I wonder which will triumph?

 

But what’s past is past or soon past; now we have to think on those who need help. Just one last note that this storm has not played itself out, and more lives and homes and businesses will be swept away before she’s through. FEMA will be there to help, in the short and long term, but no one beats the Red Cross when it comes to giving a hand to folks who just found out their home and everything they own has been completely swept away. And since Amazon and other companies have decided that the current Red Cross efforts don’t rate an extra helping hand, it’s up to us to issue a gentle reminder that this organization is putting more money into providing help for this storm than was spent for the entire hurricane season in 2004–and we still have the rest of the season to go, not to mention the ice storms and blizzards in the winter, and the floods come spring.