Everything you know about Hurricane Katrina is wrong.

posted at 5:19 pm on August 28, 2009 by Laura
[ Media ]    printer-friendly

It’s that time of year again.  Time for everyone to trot out their preferred narrative about Hurricane Katrina.  Bush hates black people!  Democrats screwed everything up!  It was the most powerful storm evar!  People were too stupid to evacuate!  Racist cops refused to let black people cross the bridge to evacuate!  Those jackasses re-elected Chocolateville Ray Nagin!  We’ve given zillions of dollars to rebuild a city in a bowl!  Mississippi pulled itself up by its bootstraps, why can’t you people?  A recent favorite of mine from Daily Kos is “We Let the Republicans Kill a Major U.S. City.”

Some of those statements have a grain of truth.  Our Democratic leadership did screw a lot of things up, Katrina was at one time a very powerful storm, about 10% of the New Orleans metro area was unable or unwilling to evacuate, the bridge was blocked, Nagin was re-elected, parts of New Orleans (though not all or even most) are below sea level, and the federal response is not what most people think it was.  If you have read Wizbang’s Hurricane Katrina archives, mostly by my fellow New Orleanian Paul, then you’re pretty well informed on the facts.  If you haven’t read them, I encourage you to do so.  He consistently provided far more accurate and comprehensive coverage than the press, which had more important aims than disseminating mere facts.

Nagin, for all his faults, made every effort to encourage people to get themselves to safety.  He was on every station begging people to leave, long before the order (New Orleans first ever mandatory evacuation) was made official.  We had surprisingly little time to do so.  The storm hit on Monday, August 29th.  Look at how the tracks shifted from Florida to Mississippi/Louisiana over the course of Friday, August 26th to Saturday.  Most people had no reason to expect to evacuate until they woke up Saturday morning.  Overall, the metro area mobilized quickly, and the evacuation was a huge success.  Yes, I’m well aware of the Superdome and Convention Center fiascos.  I know people who were there.  But don’t downplay the fact that a million people bugged out of a city with only three major evacuation routes in less than 48 hours.  That’s a success by any reasonable standard.

Should Nagin have followed the official evacuation plan, including using school buses to get people out?  Of course.  I’m not saying the Democratic leadership of the city and state didn’t screw up royally.  They did, at every level.  Another case in point was the disgraceful Aaron Broussard, who broke down on Meet the Press after personally causing over $3 billion in damage to Jefferson Parish with his decision to send the pump operators hundreds of miles away instead of housing them with other essential personnel.  Then you’ve got Governor Kathleen Blanco, who waffled and blameshifted and whose “Road Home” program was a bureaucratic nightmare.  But re-electing Nagin was the right decision.  As Ed Morrissey pointed out in 2006, Nagin was the reform candidate.  His opponent in the runoff was Mitch Landrieu, Senator Mary’s little brother, son of former New Orleans mayor Moon Landrieu.  During the campaign, Mitch promised to bring the infamously corrupt former mayor Marc Morial, son of former New Orleans mayor Dutch Morial, into his administration.  Of the two, Nagin – a businessman and relative newcomer to politics – was the better choice in spite of his illegal Katrina gun grab and numerous other poor decisions.

Katrina actually weakened considerably before she hit.  Wind strength was way down, and while the storm surge was still powerful, New Orleans would have survived nicely had the levees not been “built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data“, as the Corps of Engineers admitted when they finally took responsibility for the flooding after nearly a year of obfuscation and lies.   They were aided and abetted by Congress which willfully hid evidence from the public until the furor died down.  And the Corps has evidently learned nothing, because even after Katrina they installed defective pumps and were caught using paper to fill flood wall joints.

As to federal money spent rebuilding New Orleans… aside from the fact that we’ve been pouring money into the federal coffers since the Eisenhower administration, receiving no offshore royalties for drilling while other states got 50%… and that 10,000 miles of navigation canals used to support the petroleum industry and benefit the entire country have weakened our natural wetlands protection against storms… and that 62% of the public relies on goods which pass through our port, which is as far upstream as it can be and still be a deep-water port, as well as the busiest and fourth-largest in the world, and the largest in the US…   we’re the second largest fishery in the country… and remember those gasoline price spikes after Katrina when our refineries were shut down?  Aside from those reasons why New Orleans should continue to exist, federal taxpayers have spent a lot less than you might think toward the rebuilding.

Second, the $110 billion that New Orleans supposedly got was a total sham.

Actually the $110 billion went to emergency response and administration for three storms, Hurricanes Rita, Wilma and Katrina across five states, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The allocation includes almost $30 billion for FEMA’s response and Department of Defense expenses including the restoration of federal facilities. And almost $20 billion was flood insurance payouts to citizens collecting on their own private insurance claims.

Reason had an excellent article explaining the different effects Katrina had on Mississippi and Louisiana:

Mississippi suffered hurricane damage. In many areas, Katrina’s storm surge penetrated a mile inland, to the raised CSX railroad tracks, which act as a levee and broke much of the surge’s power, and washed away virtually everything in its path. Further inland, homes and businesses were flooded and damaged by 140-mph winds. The destruction was significant – but St. Bernard Parish and the New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward suffered more.

Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes in Louisiana were, by contrast, not victims of a traditional hurricane, but of poor government and central planning, which allowed massive but preventable flooding. In these areas, levees, floodwalls, and engineering projects designed to keep flooding out failed, and instead kept water in. For periods ranging from days to weeks, entire neighborhoods sat underwater, while antiquated city pumps slowly inched down the flooding. Mississippi was hit by a moderately sized hurricane, while Louisiana suffered from a flood of biblical proportions.

Most of us are not rent-seeking, freeloading, entitled jackasses.  Most of us evacuated.  Most of us came back and got out our chainsaws and started cleaning up without waiting for a government bailout.  We took in people who had lost their homes, we helped our neighbors, and just generally got on with the rebuilding.  In spite of the insane Kossack allegations that Republicans “killed” New Orleans, the city is getting back on her feet and in some ways is much better than before the storm.

Since Katrina it seems like the left plays up the “victims of the heartless GOP” narrative and the right plays up the “idiots got what they deserve for building there and electing Democrats” narrative.  So far this year the AP (serial Katrina liars) and Mother Jones are the worst offenders.  Narratives are convenient, but the truth isn’t so simple.

Crossposted here, Katrina archives here, Wizbang Katrina archives here.

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