A Paradise Built in Hell (37 page)

Looting is an inflammatory, inexact word that might best be excised from the English language. It pools together two very different activities. One might be called theft; the other requisitioning, the gathering of necessary goods in an emergency—think of Salvation Army volunteers and affluent professionals breaking into drugstores in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake to get medical supplies for the injured. Such requisitioning is an utterly appropriate response to extraordinary circumstances, a choice of survival and aid over the rules of everyday life. Almost no stores were open for business during the days after Katrina, and money was not relevant in many places; the only way to get essentials was to take them.

Peter Berkowitz, a lawyer who was bringing his son to enroll at Loy ola University, got stranded along with thousands of other tourists and visitors. He became part of a large group of nonlocals who camped by the Riverwalk Mall adjacent to the Convention Center that also became first a large-scale emergency shelter and then the source of endless fear-filled rumors. In a widely circulated letter to his mother, Berkowitz writes that his group witnessed policemen toting duffel bags breaking into the mall, “and that really opened up the mall for us. We gathered food, drinks, and explored the stores. Some other tourists appeared and joined us. We took chairs and tables out of the mall. The police had ‘opened up’ Footlocker and other stores, so there were shoes and clothes available for the taking. I wandered through looking for bedding and ways to set up camp. I took the cover off some kiosks to use as a bed. . . . We went in systematically all day long, taking out food and provisions.”

They, like tens of thousands of others, had no idea if and when relief would come. Media moved freely in and out of the city, but the promised evacuation was inexplicably slow, and many believed they had been abandoned either to die or to struggle to survive by new rules. Some seemed to have taken nonnecessary goods out of rage at the situation, some out of opportunism. It seems to be a small percentage who had time to think of things other than survival and aiding the more vulnerable. Survival required requisitioning. As the short-term emergency of the hurricane turned into the long week during which people were trapped in New Orleans, food, water, diapers, medicine, and more ran out and were replenished from stores. Left-wing media, people forwarding e-mail images, and eventually Soledad O’Brien on CNN pointed out that news photographs of African Americans gathering necessities were titled looting, while whites doing the same thing were “gathering supplies.” Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the “myths” of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children’s corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?

Since the answer is, apparently, quite a lot of people, including those who first determined the priorities and public face of the disaster, it’s worth saying that the few significant previous examples of large-scale theft during disasters had been in Florida and the Virgin Islands. Quarantelli wrote about them, pointing out that in the Virgin Islands example, extreme poverty and social inequality made theft a quick and readily available form of mitigation in the upside-down world of disaster. In a 1994 piece about looting for an encyclopedia of criminology, he wrote, “In some communities there are normally very high everyday rates of stealing and weak social sanctions against such behavior. If a major disaster were to impact such a locality, just continuation of normal patterns would result in high rates.” New Orleans had high crime rates already, and there was a lot of opportunistic theft in Katrina, though its scale remains unknown—was it a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand thieves? No one seems to have estimated this. Many trapped in the city believed they had been left to die, some believed that it was because they were black. There was some truth to those beliefs. Even television news commentators noted that an affluent white community would not have been left to suffer for so many days while the federal government dithered. The unfulfilled promises of evacuation and aid day after day turned Katrina into a social crisis that had something in common with civil wars and civil unrest, occasions when plundering is common. And that’s enough on looting. Except to say that in disasters people often stay behind to protect their property from looters, so that an uncommon phenomenon shapes a common fear that generates risky behavior.

Many of the people left behind in New Orleans were elderly, ill, or otherwise frail, mothers and young children or extended families who couldn’t bring themselves to split up for an evacuation or leave some members behind. Though much blame was heaped upon those who did not evacuate, many lacked the resources to do so: a car, or gas money, or a place to go. Many lived off monthly checks, and by late August their funds had run low or out. Thousands of tourists were stranded when their flights out of New Orleans were canceled. Some residents stayed behind to protect their property; others, including doctors and nurses at hospitals, stayed to take care of those who could not leave. A mandatory evacuation order was given late on the weekend before the hurricane arrived, but no resources to carry it out were provided.

By Wednesday, August 31, Katrina had evolved far beyond a natural disaster, or even a man-made physical disaster of levee collapse and urban flood. It was a sociopolitical catastrophe. The world watched as a largely impoverished, largely African American population suffered in the hot, filthy, ruinous city. Children cried, people begged for help, and a look of hopeless despair settled in on many faces. The most vulnerable, particularly the elderly, died unnecessarily, and their corpses were there live on-camera, outside the Convention Center and the Superdome, often with grief-stricken family around them. They had been truly abandoned, a huge crime and national shame. Abandoned or been trapped, but the way that New Orleans became a prison city will be told later. That some responded with rage, recklessness, and improvised attempts to aggrandize their resources is not surprising under the circumstances. Is social breakdown when thieves proliferate? Or when people are willing to kill those suspected of property crimes? Or when the most vulnerable are left to die? Or the most powerful prevent aid and evacuation?

All during those days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was turning away volunteer rescuers, buses, truckloads of supplies, offers of help from powerful entities ranging from a huge military ship with a floating hospital, drinking water, and other crucial supplies to Amtrak (whose trains could have at any moment, and eventually did, move masses more effectively than buses). Often the excuse was that it was not safe to enter New Orleans. The job of supplying buses was contracted out to a Bush administration supporter who didn’t actually deal with buses—his specialty was trucks, so he had to seek out and subcontract bus companies to dispatch to the disaster scene, an approach that created unbearable delay as well as unreasonable profit. Surely this cronyism is a form of looting, as were the contracts that paid exorbitant sums to major corporations for tasks like putting tarps on damaged roofs. FEMA had been folded into the new post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and the DHS had been so preoccupied with terrorists that it neglected all the other dangers facing the citizens it was supposed to serve.

The media itself did a better and a worse job than ever, rising to the occasion and falling apart in equal measure. For the media too shattered. There were on the one hand journalists in the devastated zone breaking out of their safe, bland roles to report with passion, with courage, with empathy, and soon with outrage and even fury at the layers of government that had failed to provide first evacuation, then rescue, then relief—water, food, medical care, even shade and sanitation, let alone transportation out of the hell New Orleans became. Among the journalists telling these stories were some of the biggest names in television journalism, as well as reporters for major newspapers. There were on the other hand endless editors and producers and more removed journalists and columnists eager to spread unsubstantiated stories about terrible crimes, about snipers, looters, pillagers, mass rapes, mass murders, hostages, about a sort of orgy of brutality. When the television stations and newspapers were repeating rumors, they were helping to create the profound social crisis Katrina became.

When Samuel Prince reported on what he had seen in explosion-torn Halifax, he saw generosity, courage, and need; when he quoted his journalist friend’s fabrications, he came up with ghouls robbing the dying and the dead. Most of the stories about poor black people becoming savage marauders—raping, sniping, murdering, terrorizing—were quietly withdrawn later that September and into early October, at least in the newspapers. But the damage had been done. Thanks at least in part to the inflammatory stories, the city had been turned into a vast prison in which victims were treated as menaces—the old tragedy of San Francisco all over again, ninety-nine years later. People took rumors as facts. And they took the fake facts as confirmation of ancient realities.

As Jed Horne, metro editor for New Orleans’s
Times-Picayune
put it, “Reporters, even from some of the big papers that for a decade had been exhaustively critiquing their own and their rivals’ work for signs of racial and gender insensitivity, proved shockingly comfortable reviving stereotypes that were both unflattering and, as it turned out, false. Rumors of gang rapes and wanton murder needed to be repeated only two or three times before reporters decided the rumors had been corroborated, and repeated them in print. . . . Of course it did not help the cause of reliable journalism that, for reasons of their own, the city’s mayor and his police chief were repeating some of these same rumors as fact.” The rumors made it into the television and print media.

Commentators began to wax philosophical. Far away in Britain, political columnist Timothy Garton Ash was confident that it all confirmed Hobbes: “Katrina’s big lesson is that the crust of civilisation on which we tread is always wafer thin. One tremor, and you’ve fallen through, scratching and gouging for your life like a wild dog. Remove the elementary staples of organised, civilised life—food, shelter, drinkable water, minimal personal security—and we go back within hours to a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of all against all. Some people, some of the time, behave with heroic solidarity; most people, most of the time, engage in a ruthless fight for individual and genetic survival. A few become temporary angels, most revert to being apes.” Ash had even revived the Victorian cliché about civilization as a thin veneer. It was as though a levee had broken and a huge flood of deadly stereotypes was pouring in on the already beleaguered people of New Orleans.

On September 3,
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd summed up the popular viewpoint that New Orleans was “a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels, and criminally negligent government planning.” By that time, there were supposed to be hundreds of murder victims’ corpses in the Superdome, stories of child rape were rampant, and armed gangs were allegedly “marauding” through the streets of the city. There were even rumors of cannibalism. People close to the situation believed many of these horrors, which magnified their fear and confusion. People far away believed them too, and the retractions came too quietly and too late.

The slander against an entire population was not readily erased. Many who believed the sensational front-page and lead-news-program stories of barbarism never noticed the retractions. Recently I met an English scholar who still believed the Ash and Dowd version, and I heard just the other day of a distinguished professor who was still reluctant to let go of the atrocity stories he had heard about the Convention Center from a New Orleans policeman who had abandoned his post. A policeman who didn’t, thirty-year-old Dumas Carter, recalled afterward that during that horrific week his boss was panicking about the hotel where his officers were based: “Now the captain is saying, ‘Okay, you all got to get out of the hotel. They’re going to riot and they’re going to burn the fucking hotel down. They’re going to start this big massive thing, they’re going to start killing people on Convention Center Boulevard, it’s going to be a big massacre.’ At this point it’s like four days into it, and we’re trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn’t flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot. I won’t say anything bad about my captain. My captain was making good decisions based on bad information.”

On one occasion, Carter had a man or men apparently fire at him and melt back into the crowd he estimated at twenty thousand in and around the Convention Center. But the gunslingers were a tiny fragment of the population there, which was mostly peaceful, exhausted, and altruistic, and he was not hit: “Then came the military helicopters. They’d fly over the crowd, then fly seven or eight blocks away and drop food and water from about forty or fifty feet—high enough to bust the boxes and send bottles of water all over the concrete. There was a group of people, Good Samaritans, who pilfered the Convention Center for handcarts and walked out to where the food and water was and brought it back to the people. And the people got together as a group and disseminated it amongst themselves, without any riots, any fights, anything. And then these people put together a box of food and water and brought it to us. We didn’t take it. We told them, don’t worry about us, give it to the kids and the old people. But these people were looking out for us at this point! And the people at the Convention Center were left high and fucking dry. They survived, they pulled together, they sang songs all night. I mean, they would come and ask us: ‘You’re looking tired, are you feeling okay? Those were the people I swore to protect.’ ” So much for Hobbes.