Monthly Archives: August 2005

If I was a follower of weather blogs, the warnings posted on IrishTrojan.com would have been loud and clear. Brendan Loy, the “Irish Trojan” who writes the blog, is a hurricane enthusiast. On August 26th, 3 days ahead of the disaster, he wrote; “If I were in New Orleans, I’d seriously consider getting the hell out of Dodge right now, just in case.”

He wasn’t being alarmist, just making reasonable interpretations of what the weather maps were telling him. A day later he was convinced New Orleans was going to be hit and he was convinced it was going to be a disaster. Reading his postings is a sobering experience. He was shouting as loud as he could, but no-one was listening. So all he could do was chronicle the disaster. (You might not be able to find his web site, by the way. It has been flooded with traffic and went off air for a while).

I followed the undoing of New Orleans myself on the web – checking the news services every hour or so. There were rumors flying, as Katrina hit, that New Orleans would be inundated, but at first the news seemed good. Katrina’s full impact was further East, smashing and mangling Gulfport and Biloxi, rather than the Big Easy. Early headlines proclaimed that New Orleans had been spared.

Well, it had been spared one thing. It had been spared a 27 foot storm surge that would surely have turned it into a lake and killed maybe half of those who stayed put – say 100,000 people. But nevertheless the levees were breached. They must have been fatally damaged in the storm – but no-one reported the flooding until the following day, when water began to rise at the rate of an inch every 5 minutes. Then came news of two breaches in the levees that were as long as a city block. How was it possible that no-one knew of these earlier?

Within about a day, power failed and communications had all but closed down. The News services, with their well-equipped on-the-spot teams were the fastest and maybe the only sources of information. The emergency services were blind and deaf, and their spokesmen knew less of what was happening than news teams – and so they said things that they now regret.

In Katrina’s aftermath, Texas has acquired about a quarter of a million new residents. Mostly, they’re in Houston, but we have 5000 or so here in Austin, encamped in the convention center. The evacuees, as they are being called, are actually refugees. They are tired and hungry. They have little more than the clothes they’re wearing; no money, no proof of identity and no idea of where their future lies.

I doubt if many of them will go back to New Orleans. The Big Easy is a wasteland and there’s nothing to go back for. What little they had was destroyed in the flood. Their children are already going to new schools and the prospects of work are better for them in Texas.

For the poor blacks of New Orleans, this is a diaspora. But for them New Orleans was no “promised land” – it was just a dangerous poverty trap that got deadly. I doubt if they’ll remember it with fondness. They will not return.

New Orleans Postscript:

According to local officials in Houston, FEMA’s computer system kept crashing during the crisis. I couldn’t find any reports on the web that explained which systems or what the problems were. Since the rescue effort went awry in many other areas and in many ways, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the systems broke too. And I doubt if there will be much focus on this when the whole sorry mess is investigated.

As it happens, computer models developed by Louisiana State University had predicted in detail what would happen to New Orleans “if the big one hit” and the levees broke. They got it just about right: 200,000 or so people would be unwilling or unable to evacuate, thousands would die, people would be housed in the Superdome, aid workers would find it difficult to get in, etc. It was mostly accurate and mostly ignored.