The Disaster Profiteers: How Natural Disasters Make the Rich Richer and the Poor Even Poorer (20 page)

You have to go a lot further back in history than 1992 to find a hurricane with a fatal effect similar to Katrina's. The first you find is in 1928, the Okeechobee hurricane, named for Lake Okeechobee in south Florida. Most reported deaths occurred when levees on the lake were breached, flooding extensive areas of the surrounding
farmland. It may be that as many as 2,500 people died (the original official figure was 1,836, remarkably close to the official figure for Hurricane Katrina), but the great majority were black migrant farmworkers, many from the Bahamas, whose numbers were not known before the storm. Hundreds were buried in unmarked mass graves. White people died too, but they were buried in the few caskets that were available. There never was and will never be an accurate count of the dead from the Lake Okeechobee hurricane.

To find a hurricane in the United States with a larger estimated death toll than Katrina's, you have to go back more than a century to the so-called Galveston Flood (actually a hurricane) of September 8, 1900.
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The death toll there exceeded that of the Lake Okeechobee hurricane and Hurricane Katrina combined by a substantial margin. The
Galveston News
published lists of confirmed dead in the days following the storm and on October 7 made a final tally of 4,263 deaths. The Morrison and Fourmy Company, which published general directories of business and private addresses in many Texas cities in the early 1900s, estimated that Galveston's population dropped by 8,124 but acknowledged that 2,000 or so people may have moved away, so their figure is not a death toll. The most common totals you will see on websites and other sources range from 5,000 to 8,000, the three zeroes a clear giveaway that the figures are not accurate. But even the lowest number, probably derived from the
Galveston News
figure and inflated for good measure, still considerably exceeds the Katrina number.

The reason the situation in New Orleans was so bad physically was not a forecaster's error. The storm track was fairly simple, a minor variation on many storm tracks seen before in the Gulf. Hundreds of storms have passed through the area, and that information is stored
and analyzed to assess the possible track of any new storm. Katrina was not a freak event. Forecasters were issuing warnings that New Orleans might be in the path of a major storm for many days before August 29. In fact, three days ahead of Katrina's landfall, the National Hurricane Center was issuing warnings based on projected tracks that were eerily close to Katrina's actual path.
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It was known that the Gulf of Mexico was unusually warm, so the buildup of hurricane strength was predicted quite well. The information provided to those in authority in the Gulf Coast was more than enough for them to make evacuation plans and protect the people of the region.

Katrina was first and most importantly an urban tragedy. The concentration of people, particularly in the poorer parts of New Orleans, convolved with the force of the storm surge to make Katrina an off-scale tragedy. In other, less urbanized parts of the Gulf Coast, damage was enormous as well, but the death tolls were much smaller. Katrina actually made landfall in Mississippi, in Pass Christian, yet the Mississippi death toll, though high at 238, was not so enormous as the New Orleans figures. Evacuation had been more timely, orderly, and successful in Mississippi. Based on that figure, you could conclude that if New Orleans had been evacuated as well as Mississippi had been, the total Katrina deaths might have been more like 500 to 600. That would keep the storm in the top rankings of hurricane mortality in the United States, and quite significant globally, but it would still be a fraction of what actually happened.

The levees were the central problem for New Orleans. Those that failed were
not
those built to control flooding by the Mississippi River. Those are the only levees visitors to New Orleans are likely to see, and those levees held firm during Katrina.

New Orleans is bordered to the north by Lake Pontchartrain and is protected from the lake waters by an extensive levee system. Those levees, like the Mississippi River levees, were not breached;
still, water did come over their tops as the storm moved inland and the winds changed direction, creating the lake equivalent of a storm surge that pushed south, the opposite direction from the main surge that drowned most of the city.

The levees that failed were those that constrained the waters of man-made shipping canals. The first to breach, and the one that proved the most deadly, was the Industrial Canal that connects Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River. River and lake levels differ, so entry to the Industrial Canal from the Mississippi is through the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Lock (more commonly, the Industrial Lock). The canal levees that failed were not designed to handle the storm surge that funneled toward New Orleans. They were built to contain the industrial waterways for shipping through the city, not to protect the city from storm surge.

Plans for a canal between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River were made in the late nineteenth century, and the right-of-way for the original connection gives Canal Street, in the center of New Orleans, its name. That right-of-way was never used, and when the Industrial Canal was built beginning in 1914, the chosen site thrust through the Ninth Ward. Today the Lower Ninth Ward lies to the east of the Industrial Canal and the ward's Bywater section lies to the west. Part of the canal was excavated through uninhabited swamplands, but in the Ninth Ward, houses and businesses and a century-old convent were demolished to make way for it.

The Industrial Canal was the first to serve commercial shipping and provide harbor facilities, including shipyards for vessel maintenance. It was also the first of the levees to be breached when Hurricane Katrina came ashore, flooding the Lower Ninth Ward.

The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway were built later and connected to Industrial Canal. They were to serve as shortcuts for ships to the Gulf of Mexico.
These canals, constructed to facilitate commerce, cut through what were then and still are today some of the poorest parts of New Orleans. Residents of these areas had little say in where the canals were located, nor did they derive very much benefit from them. At the time they were constructed in the mid-twentieth century, they probably looked very safe. But MRGO was breached in 20 places during Hurricane Katrina, flooding all of Saint Bernard's Parish and parts of Plaquemines Parish. It has subsequently been closed.

Farther to the west in the wealthier section of Lakeview, two more canals suffered levee breaches—the Seventeenth Avenue Canal and the London Avenue Canal. (There is a third canal, the Orleans Avenue Canal, that was not breached.) Both canals head around the middle of the city and exit into Lake Pontchartrain. They are drainage canals used to pump water from the city during heavy (and not so heavy) rainfall. Without them and the many miles of underground drainage systems, New Orleans would flood under even fairly moderate rain. During Katrina, the pumps failed and the pumping stations were flooded. Much of New Orleans is today in a depression, often called the New Orleans Bowl, having subsided to that lower level over the last three centuries. When the French founded New Orleans in 1718, they chose the site because it was strategically located in a defensive position on a sharp bend in the river. It was also a good location for trade and at that time was on high ground above the river. Today the city is mostly below sea level except in a few places, near to the river and the lake.

The canal system in New Orleans is hardly a marvel of modern engineering, but, at the same time, it is hardly ancient. When the shipping canals were built, understanding of hurricane risk was not very sophisticated. Early plans for the Industrial Canal were drawn up about the time of the Galveston hurricane in 1900, when those most knowledgeable about weather systems believed that Galveston
could not possibly flood to a depth greater than four feet.
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That is what the best science of the day indicated.

Those who designed and built the Industrial Canal system in New Orleans didn't have much more knowledge. The now commonly accepted concept of a weather front was not accepted in the United States at that time. (Only after World War II was the concept widely accepted.) Meteorology in the United States was behind developments in Europe. Most people believed, or convinced themselves, that events like the Galveston hurricane were freaks of Nature and unlikely to recur, at least in the lifetime of anyone who was then alive. Katrina, however, was not a freak event. It was a fairly ordinary hurricane, not among the strongest. Many similar hurricanes had passed through the Gulf. In 2005, there was a vast store of meteorological experience of hurricanes much like Katrina.

When the canals were built, quite a bit was known about rivers and river flood control. The river levees were built with good historic information to go on as well as considerable experience with levee engineering. Floods that raise the river level high happen regularly; hurricanes, in contrast, don't occur as often. For that reason, those who designed and constructed the canal levees paid little attention to the possibility of a major hurricane.

All that changed in 1965 with Hurricane Betsy. The storm had a peculiar track and made several tight loops before making landfall in Florida and New Orleans. Unlike Katrina, Betsy posed a very difficult forecasting challenge. The death toll was only 76,
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even though Betsy was the same strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale as Katrina and it followed a similar path entering New Orleans. Betsy caused extensive flooding in New Orleans from breaches in MRGO and the Industrial Canal and because the pumping system failed, just as happened in Katrina. Betsy was a wake-up call that made clear the fact that the levees needed substantial improvement. The hurricane gave
rise to the 1965 Flood Control Act and the Army Corps of Engineers' Greater New Orleans Hurricane Protection project, which was intended to protect the city against the most likely severe storm that would hit the area. Unfortunately, that objective was not fulfilled.

In one of the most closed governed places on Earth and in one of the most openly governed places, leaders behaved so similarly it is astonishing. Neither Myanmar's top general nor the US commander in chief took command. Each seemed dumbfounded, transfixed, or callously uncaring. Or maybe they were in denial.

Denial is a common reaction to fear. Eliot Aronson, the great behavioral psychologist, analyzes denial in a paper titled “Fear, Denial, and Sensible Actions in the Face of Disaster.”
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He argues, through a set of experiments, that if you scare people but give them no way to deal with the fears that you have induced, denial and inaction will most likely follow. People are not scared into action; they are scared into
inaction.

Aronson says that people need a concrete, doable, and effective strategy so they know there is a way to deal with what frightens them. The fear of lung cancer can be dealt with by giving up smoking—concrete, doable, and effective—but it may not be so easy for people who have a serious dependence.

President Bush has said, in effect, that he was surprised by the extent of the disaster in New Orleans.
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He might also have been frightened. He was almost instantly derided for his claim that no one could have anticipated that the levees would break, because he had paid no attention at all to clear warnings. Or maybe the messages just didn't register and he
was
genuinely surprised, even though he ought not to have been.

Most of us living outside of New Orleans were surprised. We had no idea a storm of that size could do so much damage. Who but a few
people in New Orleans knew that the levees were in such bad shape? If regular citizens of New Orleans
did
know, what concrete, doable, and effective actions could they have taken? Denial set in, and when the levees broke, people
were
surprised.

Surprise can be deadly. Keren Fraiman from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Austin Long from Columbia University, and Caitlin Talmadge from George Washington University, all scholars who research security issues, discussed in the
Washington Post
how Iraqi forces collapsed after a surprise attack by soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an attack that should have come as no surprise.
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The authors say that surprise attacks can panic even the best-trained forces and lead to chaos and collapse. Two ingredients for surprise are key, they suggest: poor intelligence and the politicization and corruption of security forces.

Change a few words and you have a description of how Nargis and Katrina were handled. Neither should have been a surprise, but they both were. Michael Brown claims in his book that he told President Bush that “we have lost the city,” sounding for all the world like a general reporting a war situation to headquarters.
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President Bush either didn't listen or didn't want to believe.

Scientists, like me, who are advocates of strong greenhouse gas reduction, are sometimes guilty of this too. We can't resist describing the effects of climate change in anything less than apocalyptic terms. We cast images, inspired by science fiction movies, of cities ablaze and panic in the streets, as massive waves roll through the avenues of Washington and the boulevards of Paris, over statues and monuments in familiar parks, sweeping buildings away in their path, tsunami-like.

And then we don't give people the concrete, doable, and effective strategies they need to deal with the problem of climate change. We tell them that the problem is vast, and so it is, and it requires
coordinated actions by global governments to do anything about it—and they are so very clearly not coordinating their actions. Climate change is made to seem beyond any individual's capacity to solve. So to feel like we have done something, we screw curly light bulbs into our lamps and recycle everything we possibly can. These actions are concrete and doable, but they are wholly ineffective. These actions mostly make us feel better and pay more for lightbulbs.