Log In

Comments (3)

By Vivian Greentree

Catastrophic. Natural Disaster. Devastating. These are some of the adjectives that are being used to describe Katrina, the hurricane that descended onto the Louisiana coast with all the fury only mother nature can harness.

Horrific. Tardy. Appalling. These are now some of the adjectives that are being used to describe both the preventative and relief efforts in conjunction with what is being billed as the worst natural disaster of this lifetime.

In a tragedy of such magnitude, the first response must always be to help the living. Immediate relief and attention are still needed for the survivors. However, given the tremendous loss of life, we must analyze the situation to glean from it whatever learning lessons we can. We must do this to ensure we will be better prepared next time.

The wetlands that line the Louisiana border to the Gulf have always provided some degree of protection from water surges. In the early 1990's a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans because every two miles of wetland between Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a water surge by half a foot. However, the Bush administration favored a policy of turning over the wetlands to developers, making it impossible for either the Army Corps of Engineers or the Environmental Protection Agency to protect them unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce. One question to be put to both the developers and the President could be, "Do you think perhaps more could have been done to maintain the wetlands and preserve their defensive nature?"

Fast forward to 2001 when FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. Still, the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to help pay for the Iraq war. New Orleans' local paper, the Times-Picayune has reported since the hurricane, "No one can say they didn't see it coming…Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

Even last year when the U.S Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a hurricane such as Katrina the administration ordered the research not be undertaken, again citing budgetary restraints. I assume, to focus on tax cuts and private sector growth.

And one has to question the success of our homeland security initiative when there are still, five days after the hurricane, over 1,000 people that need to be rescued from the tops of buildings. There are still people dying in the streets and decomposing there because there is no one to bury them. The news channels are on 24-hour loops of footage showing lootings and dazed survivors begging for help.

Texas Governor Perry has opened our borders to help, but why didn't Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco immediately declare a state of national emergency and mobilize their National Guard? What took so long? And, when interviewed by Anderson Cooper, Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu thanked the President for offering platitudes of compassion while her citizens, the ones that survived, are living in waste and starving. What good is it being a world superpower if we cannot help our own people in their most dire time of need? Where is the leadership? The Energy Department has received over 5,000 complaints of gas price-gouging since Monday. I haven't heard anything about that from any officials - federal or local.

The President was quoted on Friday morning as saying, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we're having to deal with it and will." That doesn't sound like leadership to me, especially since his own FEMA issued that exact same warning.

Great leaders emerge during times of great crisis. I have yet to see such a leader surface from the aftereffects of Katrina. No political leaders to be sure. But there has to be someone, somewhere, who can give hope and help to those who lives have been shattered by Katrina.